Bloodless Coup

The Incredibly Stupid Star-Bulletin Endorsement of Ed Case

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin has chosen to endorse Congressman Ed Case, who is challenging 16-year veteran senator Daniel Akaka in the Democratic primary. The primary will be held a week from Tuesday, and whoever wins it will no doubt be formally elected to the Senate in November. I disagree with this endorsement. Case strikes me as the sort of Democrat who backs DLC positions when the DLC is wrong (on Iraq, the Bankruptcy bill, things like that). The sort of politician who gives centrists a bad name. But it's not the fact that the paper is endorsing Case that really annoys me - it's that they are endorsing him, in part, for an amazingly stupid reason - seniority.

Now that's not the only reason of course. They go on to praise the DLC, and say they agree with Case on all issues of consequence. But over half of their argument is spent on the seniority issue - which is completely absurd. Does seniority matter? Sure, to a degree. But this isn't the 1950's when old Southern bulls jealously guarded their power and maintained control through the committee system. The Senate has changed. But sadly it appears that the editors of this newspaper haven't read anything about how the Senate actually works since ... well, maybe when they read text books in the 1950's. Today the Senate is different, and how long you've been there is not the determinant of your effectiveness. George Mitchell, Tom Daschle and Bill Frist all won the position of Majority Leader even though none had been in the Senate for a decade when they took power. People like Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham are viewed as among the most effective senators working today, though they are only in their second and first terms respectively. The notion that you should vote for someone today because they might have a little power in Washington 20 years from now (the paper dismisses Akaka's 16 years of seniority as "modest" though he could chair a committee next year if the Democrats take control of the Senate) is damn silly - and not only because it would seem to lock the newspaper into endorsing every incumbent senator in almost every instance (the one exception apparently being when both senators are veterans, and you want to open up one seat so that you can build future seniority ... but hey, if it's seniority that matters, do you really want to put someone out to pasture when they've finally attained plenty of it?). If they want to endorse Case for his politics, that's fine. But this "seniority" argument is built on false assumptions, and their use of it is inane.