Many Americans believe that politicians are unprincipled and self-interested. Politicians, they assume, always try to maximize their chances of being reelected or promoted to higher office. That theory doesn’t make too much sense psychologically. Politics is a hard job, and there are easier ways to become rich and secure. I think that politicians are often pretty substantive. Their goals may be opposed to mine, or they may be too parochial. (Coming out of local communities, they sometimes just want to get stuff built and funded in their home towns.) They definitely want credit for what they achieve–or even what they touch. But it’s not fair to say they only want to be re-elected.

That’s why it’s unfortunate when a major politician acts blatantly opportunistically; it reduces respect for representative democracy to below what it deserves.

For instance, in explaining his shift to the Democratic Party, Senator Specter spoke briefly about “principle”; he claimed that his views were now more closely aligned with the Democrats than with the Republicans. But later in the same speech, he sounded like a professional athlete whose goal was to win and who had switched to a stronger team so that he’d have better odds. He said, “In the course of the last several months … I have traveled the state and surveyed the sentiments of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania and public opinion polls, observed other public opinion polls and have found that the prospects for winning a Republican primary are bleak.”

It seemed that nothing could be more nakedly self-interested; but then came the Senator’s interview with The New York Times Magazine:

Q. With your departure from the Republican Party, there are no more Jewish Republicans in the Senate. Do you care about that?

A. I sure do. There’s still time for the Minnesota courts to do justice and declare Norm Coleman the winner.

The evocation of “justice” made the Senator sound briefly principled, but he soon took it back, saying, “In the swirl of moving from one caucus to another, I have to get used to my new teammates. … I’m ordinarily pretty correct in what I say. I’ve made a career of being precise. I conclusively misspoke.”

I suppose one could give Specter credit for candor, but I think his motives are worse than average, and these glimpses into his soul hardly do him credit.

CIRCLE was founded in 2001 because of widespread concern that civic engagement was in decline, and a feeling that youth were the heart of the problem. Although everyone defined “civic engagement” as more than voting, the voting trend was a common symbol of the issue. The graph below shows turnout for young and older adults between 1972, when the voting age was lowered to 18, and 2000, just before CIRCLE was launched. Older adults’ turnout stayed pretty steady, but under-30s were in steady decline. A straight line would track the actual youth trend pretty closely and would decline by almost one point per year, or 3.58 points per election cycle. (If you discard 1992 as an outlier, the r-squared is .89.) We seemed to have a generational problem.

But 1972 could be considered an anomaly. Young people had just won the right to vote, with much hoopla. There was still a draft and the Vietnam War was deeply unpopular. So we might discard 1972 as a baseline year. Besides, we now have data from 2004 and 2008. This is how the trend looks if we chose to run it from 1976-2008.

Ipso presto, the youth voting decline has vanished! No straight line can track the youth trend very well, but the best-fit line hardly declines at all (one tenth of a point per year). It now looks as if the norm is a steady youth turnout rate of around 48%, and the late 1990s represented an unusually low period that could be attributed, perhaps, to the specific campaigns and politicians of that era.

Well, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. We shouldn’t be allowed to make a problem appear or disappear by changing the parameters of a graph. But I would venture that declines and other changes over time are not nearly as striking as stability. We don’t seem to be able to get more than half of young people to vote. Just about half of young people attend college, and education and political activity correlate–not perfectly, but strongly. College attendance hasn’t risen; and within families, socioeconomic status tends to replicate itself. To me, the central issue is neither decline nor growth, but deep and persistent inequality.

(Another problem–harder to quantify but described in Harry Boyte’s editorial from yesterday–is a lack of civic opportunities other than voting.)