Missing Work to Run for President

Imagine that you walk into your local grocery store one evening and notice a senator from your state bagging groceries. Puzzled, you approach the senator and say to him, "I think it's great that you have come back home to experience the working conditions of the common man firsthand, but weren't you elected so as to serve your state in Washington?" With a twinkle in his eye, the senator responds, "I can do both!" and returns to his work. The senator's industriousness and perhaps even his intentions are admirable, but you cannot help but wonder if he can REALLY do both.

Most of the candidates from the major parties who have declared their candidacy for the presidency have other jobs to do: they are mainly senators and representatives, but there's also one governor (Bill Richardson). While I do want Americans to have an abundant choice of candidates to support, I wonder if it is fair to the people who elected senators like Hillary Clinton and Sam Brownback or representatives like Dennis Kucinich or Tom Tancredo or a governor like Bill Richardson to have their elected servants focus their time and energy on winning another office instead of fulfilling the duties of the offices to which they were already elected. If these candidates who already hold office are so neglectful of the office they already hold, can they really be expected to perform better as president? Of course, all this is assuming that a presidential campaign is so demanding that it is impossible to do it on a part-time basis. To test this notion out, I thought it would be interesting to look at the missed votes numbers for those members of Congress who are also running for office. GovTrack makes it easy to track candidates' missed votes, and I'm going to make it a little easier for my readers to track the candidates with the help of a little table:

Presidential Candidates 2007 Congressional Voting Records
Democrats	Republicans
Joe Biden	Sam Brownback
Hillary Clinton	Duncan Hunter
Christopher Dodd	John McCain
Dennis Kucinich	Ron Paul
Barack Obama	Tom Tancredo

I'm afraid not too much can be read into this data as it is, however. These senators and representatives might well have missed votes for reasons that have nothing to do with their presidential campaigns, for instance. Also: it's not even election year yet! While Hillary Clinton's Congressional attendance rate for the year is amazing right now, it might look very different in 2008...much more like John McCain's, perhaps. I'll be keeping an eye on this data in the future and may well blog about it again later on in the campaign.