Why do bad politicians keep getting re-elected?

by Britt Storkson

Why do undesirable politicians keep getting re-elected?  Several reasons can be cited for this.  It could be summed up with the three “I”s:  Ignorance, Invincibility and Incestuousness.

Ignorance:  Often the voters don’t have a way to evaluate candidates for public office.  The incumbent, no matter how unfit he or she is, has a big advantage because governments purchase media advertising and, to keep this revenue stream going, the media is going to side with the incumbent almost every time.  That means reporting little or nothing about any challengers and certainly nothing positive about them.

Invincibility:  Incumbent politicians have a huge advantage on many levels with the most important advantage being campaign contributions.  Since the incumbent is able to “steer” tax money to this or that group or individual for maximum benefit to that incumbent.  It’s easy to get people to vote for you if you give them money for doing so.  Challengers for public office attract little if anything in the way of campaign contributions.  Challengers also do not enjoy the direct media access and news coverage that an incumbent does.

Incestuousness:  Incumbent politicians are almost always “in bed” with those they are supposed to regulate and oversee.  Often tax money that a politician votes for to fund government agencies is “fed back” to that politician to make sure that certain things happen to benefit the campaign contributor…Or to insure that nothing benefiting the campaign contributor goes away.  It’s not much different than the politician writing checks from the State Treasury to him or herself.  It’s also using our money to work against us.

This phenomenon has grown to perverse extremes.  With the current State of our State (and our Nation) one can get almost anything they want from government if the give enough money to enough politicians.  We even have politicians supporting things like secret trials, governments and monopoly utilities maintaining extensive dossiers on persons not suspected of committing crimes and governments and monopoly utilities giving tax money to terrorist groups and criminal organizations.

When our politicians are for sale so are our freedom and liberty.