Reason: Are you going to run for a higher office if Sen. John McCain gives up his seat?
Salmon: No. I’m not running for Senate. I’m not interested in coming back here. The only other job I might run for would be governor of Arizona. I believe that position can really make a difference. But right now, I am ready to go back and make an honest living.
Free Duck
Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.)
Republican Mark Sanford ran for Congress in 1994 because he wanted to do something about the deficit, the debt, and Social Security. The GOP establishment wasn’t happy–he was a developer, not a longtime pol who’d attended all the right dinners and functions–and they did their best to defeat him in the primary. They sent the likes of Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney, and Jack Kemp to South Carolina’s 1st District to campaign against him. "I was like, ‘Why are you people here? I don’t know who you are,’" recalls Sanford.
Once in office, Sanford was among the early advocates of privatizing at least part of Social Security. He also wants to free Americans to trade with Cuba. And he’s famously cheap –a valuable and rare character trait in a politician. Domestically, this led him to oppose pork barrel spending, even in his own district. Internationally, it led him to pay a Cuban family $35 a night to put him up during a 1999 visit rather than stay at a hotel. On a personal level, it leads him to sleep on a futon on his D.C. office floor, rather than rent an apartment. At least he won’t have to break a lease when he leaves town.
Reason: Talk about the tradeoffs congressmen must make to be effective and how term limits may affect these tradeoffs.
Mark Sanford: The rarest of all commodities in Washington is independence. Some people told me, "You know, Mark, you are a lame duck before you’ve even started." I’d respond, "You’re wrong. I’m a free duck, and there’s a big difference." What you want is the freedom to go down with Tom Coburn last year and offer hundreds of amendments to the agriculture bill just to gum up the works. Now everyone in your own conference hates you. But you don’t care, because it’s what you think is right.
Reason: Would you have been a different congressman without the limits or would you have done the same things?
Sanford: Very different. You can see why in the agriculture bill: Last time around, Congress restored the mohair and wool subsidies that we had taken out in the Freedom to Farm Act a few years back. That happened because the people who passed the Freedom to Farm Act went native. Term limits force you to maintain that perspective of back home because you are up here for a while and then you are going back there. It’s an anchor that keeps you attached to that other perspective.
Reason: You once said that being a congressman wasn’t that hard, that it should take six months to grasp the basics. Do you still believe this?
Sanford: In the 9 a.m. Republican conference meeting today, a certain unnamed Californian stands up and says, "This is real simple. It’s shirts versus skins. We’re shirts, they’re skins." It’s all the very elementary stuff on trading marbles. Any kid who has a set of marbles in the back yard or Pokémon cards or baseball cards and learns how to trade them knows everything you need to know about Congress.
Reason: Why does the trading always seem to go one way then? People seem to trade more for more, which leads to the growth of government every year. Why don’t you ever make a new program contingent on killing an old one?
Sanford: That is the structural problem of democracy: diffuse costs and concentrated benefits. I’ll have 100 visits in a week in the office. Ninety-nine of those visits people will say, "Mark, we really appreciate what you are doing on the deficit and debt and trying to reduce government spending. Keep it up. But we are here to talk to you about this one program and why it is very important." Who’s going to take a trip to Washington to save 2 cents on the price of sugar because of the sugar subsidy?
Reason: You talk about concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. But you once testified in favor of anti-dumping action on steel, saying, "Imports now comprise over 30 percent of U.S. consumption. Georgetown Steel, in my district, had been forced to reduce prices substantially to meet import competition, and suffered financial losses." Isn’t this a classic example of concentrated costs, which is the flip side of concentrated benefits? These imports may be bad for that company in your district but they’re good for consumers.
Sanford: It wasn’t an inconsistency. There was a steel bill that had anti-dumping provisions and would have provided a bailout to steel mills. I voted against it because I didn’t think a bailout for steel made any sense.
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