Why Politicians Don't Think Long Term

One reader raised an interesting question: why voters tend to worry more about long-term issues, such as climate change, as opposed to their elected representatives. I think about this issue a lot, since I cover the environment, and Americans talk to me all the time about global warming yet there's little chance of Congress acting on this before the upcoming election. I have one explanation for this: lawmakers are elected every two or six years (depending on the chamber) and the president is elected every four years. (Hence, senators tend to think about issues with a longer time horizon than House members, but it's still a limited view of things.) This often encourages politicians to focus on short-term political gains rather than a longer policy horizon. When you talk about massive sea level rise, for example, you're contemplating something that will take several hundred years to occur, though the actions we take in the next few decades may determine how quickly the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will melt. It's hard to get House members to focus on an issue when they won't reap the rewards (or blame) for their actions on it. I'm seeing Al Gore tomorrow night at a screening of the new documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," which features his Cassandra-like lecture on global warming, and plan to ask him about this topic-if I find out anything new I'll let you know.

And one word on the electoral college-I'm not an expert in that area, though I know a lot of voters are frustrated with the current system for electing our president. I would guess nothing's going to happen on that front until both Democrats and Republicans think they're losing out under the current regime-at this point more Democrats think that than Republicans.