Why Do Senators Running for President Get Paid?

Dear Stumped:

I'd like to know if both senators running for president still receive their full congressional salary while they're not working. Last time I looked, my job did not pay me if I was not actually on the job.

TP Tatko

Dear TP:

Not working?! What do you mean? Running for president is a grueling task. And isn't it part of a senator's job description?

OK, that's a bit cheeky. The serious answer to your question is yes, Barack Obama and John McCain are still drawing their senatorial salaries of $169,660.

I don't agree with your premise that this is unseemly or improper. The people of Arizona and Illinois hired John McCain and Barack Obama to represent them in the Senate, and presumably these senators have communicated to their constituents what they are doing, and why. If the people of those states don't feel they are well represented by these presidential candidates, they can refuse to re-elect them. But all other things being equal, most Americans probably would like to see their home-state senator vie for the White House.

The Senate has become such a mega-millionaire club, plenty of its members hardly need their salary to make ends meet. We shouldn't further encourage this trend in national politics by forcing congressional aspirants to the presidency to forego their salaries. Call me old-fashioned, but I'd like to think you should still be able to run for president without being independently wealthy.

Dear Stumped,

Why is the media making so much out of John Edwards's adulterous affair, while completely ignoring the fact that not only did John McCain have an adulterous affair during his first marriage, but he's the one now running for president, even with his adulterous history?



Mary L. Grabski

Dear Mary:

I don't think you can accuse the media of "making so much" out of Edwards's affair. On the contrary, there is a great deal of second-guessing these days about the lengths to which mainstream media outlets went out of their way not to report a story that was lighting up the tabs and the blogosphere.

We obsess excessively about our politicians' sex lives, but voters have the right to assess candidates using whatever benchmarks are important to them. As I wrote recently, McCain's personal past, and what it says about the man, is something we each have to reach our own conclusions about.

The media is hardly burying McCain's past, as you suggest. But as a matter of news judgment, there is a difference between McCain's dubious transition from his first wife to his second, more than 30 years ago before he entered politics, and Edwards's behavior in 2006, when he was taking a breather between presidential runs.

The fact that Edwards's friend Rielle Hunter was given a well-paying job on the campaign (to film videos that even the campaign's manager is calling frivolous) and was subsequently packed off to a $3 million home in Santa Barbara, courtesy of an Edwards donor, further raises the story's newsworthy quotient. There remain a lot of threads for reporters (and law enforcement agencies, to the extent campaign funds may have been spent improperly for personal reasons) to explore.

Dear Stumped:



Since the War on Drugs is an obvious failure, and the Mexican drug lords are battling it out on the border, wouldn't it be wise to invade Mexico now, as a continuation of the Bush policy of pre-emptive war?



John Hartman

Dear John:

Your note brings to mind an old Mexican joke that was popular in the early 1970's. The Mexican army's top general rushes in to see President Luis Echeverria, the butt of many jokes questioning his intelligence, and says: "Mr. President, I have figured out how we solve all our nation's problems. Let's attack the United States. They will have to invade and annex us. What could be better than becoming part of the U.S.?" The president looks at his general for a minute, thinking it over, then asks: "But what if we win?" Ha... Get it? El presidente was so out to lunch he thought his army could prevail against the Americans.



I don't know if you are being tongue-in-cheek or not. This sort of tonal uncertainty is one of the problems with e-mail. It's gotten me in lots of trouble, which is why I often find myself throwing in a smiley face or other cues to emphasize when I am being less than serious.

Maybe whoever wrote the memo to Georgia's president the other day, suggesting the Georgian Republic take on Russian troops in South Ossetia, should have added a smiley face. As in: "Hey, I know, why don't we take on the Russian army? :)" Without the smiley face to clue him in, Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili pulled an Echeverria in what many analysts are charitably calling a "miscalculation."

Speaking of that conflict, the West is reaping what it sowed, to some extent, with our ungracious Cold War victory. The rush to incorporate former Warsaw Pact members into NATO -- and now former Soviet Republics themselves -- was a rather vindictive response to the Soviets' peaceful withdrawal from Eastern Europe, and a betrayal of the implicit deal struck at the time of German reunification.

If Vladimir Putin is capitalizing on an aggrieved nationalism and Russia's sense of having being stabbed in the back, we can only blame ourselves for making it possible. And if Georgia is deluded into thinking we would get involved in such a conflict, we can blame ourselves for that, too.

As an aside (ok, yet another one), while criticism of lobbyists in this campaign is overblown, there is something unsettling about reading that McCain's views of this conflict are being shaped by a foreign policy adviser who made money lobbying for the idiotic (there is no other word, sorry) proposition that Georgia should join NATO.

By Andres Martinez | August 12, 2008; 12:00 AM ET

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