Politicians Are Political

Younger readers may not remember George Nethercutt, the Washington lawyer who defeated House Speaker Tom Foley in the 1994 Republican congressional wave. Nethercutt ran a campaign that loudly trumpeted his approval of terms limits and vowed to serve a maximum of six years before returning home. As is so often the case when naive idealists achieve office, Nethercutt at some point learned that term limits were a terrible idea, for him at least, and successfully ran twice more for the seat he had promised to relinquish after three terms, which you can chalk up as a victory for hypocrisy or stupidity, depending on how you view the world. Will the same sort of thing happen to all our new young renegades? Spoiler: yes.