Twitter's Too Much for the Senate

If you have an interest in American politics, you're pretty much required to read George Packer's piece on the disfunction of the U.S. Senate. Packer's deep narrative has a way of making real the procedures and customs and emotions that add up to create a place that's well, not altogether optimized for the practice of collaborative democracy.

But running through Packer's piece is the notion that the modern media environment contributes to the problem, developing a culture of "Tweeting pygmies" who are more engaged with the always-on online world than they are with their increasingly radicalized colleagues or the shrinking local press. Packer:

The senators, who like to complain about the trivializing effect of the “24/7 media,” provide no end of fodder for it. The news of the day was what Udall called a “dust-up” between Scott Brown, the freshman Massachusetts Republican, and a staffer for Jim DeMint, the arch-conservative from South Carolina; the staffer had Tweeted that Brown was voting too often with the Democrats, leading Brown to confront DeMint on the Senate floor over this supposed breach of protocol. Bloggers carry so much influence that many senators have a young press aide dedicated to the care and feeding of online media. News about, by, and for a tiny kingdom of political obsessives dominates the attention of senators and staff, while stories that might affect their constituents go unreported because their home-state papers can no longer afford to have bureaus in Washington. Dodd, who came to the Senate in 1981 and will leave next January, told me, “I used to have eleven Connecticut newspaper reporters who covered me on a daily basis. I don’t have one today, and haven’t had one in a number of years. Instead, D.C. publications only see me through the prism of conflict.” Lamar Alexander described the effect as “this instant radicalizing of positions to the left and the right.”

If that sounds overstated, consider that Jonathan Alter reported on one Senate staffer saying of the 2009 health care reform battle, "This whole thing could have been done by Thanksgiving if we had been willing to make FireDogLake very angry."

Though, then again, the FDL reference might be off point. It's not the pull of the conservative or liberal base that's at work, necessarily. It's, at a more primal level, the constant chirping of the new media environment. Politics on that level is a stimulus-response game. Elected officials seem more primed to thrive on that transaction than even normal people are. Even the most high-minded of senators and representatives have to keep a little brain space open for the idea that people are soon enough going to go down to the voting place and judge whether or not they're worthy. It's a short leap towards getting unhealthily dependent on feedback that you're getting on Twitter, or on blogs, or through Google Alerts. Keeping a sense of proportion -- it might, indeed, be more important in the scope of history that I forge a legislative deal with my colleague across the aisle than that Blog X supports me in today's news cycle -- is no doubt extraordinarily difficult, especially when you're absolutely glued to your BlackBerry. Many of us who live tethered to the web probably experience some similar. But we can still hope that those qualified to serve as United States Senators would be up to the task.