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He will think twice, and then a third time, about any vote that will jeopardize his seat; profiles in courage are rare enough, but a fullface confrontation with danger is what a skilled politician is most skilled at avoiding. Incumbency is also beautiful in the eyes of the giver. As Common Cause points out, the decisive factor in raising campaign contributions is not whether the candidate is a Republican or Democrat, but whether he is an "in" or an "out." Incumbents get three times as much. No wonder Congressmen are willing to reform presidential campaign financing but not their own.
What helps the Boston Navy Yard or Grand Rapids or General Motors may not equally help the nation, but every successful Congressman is a master of specific service. He steers himself to a committee assignment (agriculture, military affairs) where he can best serve the dominant interests of his district, and if he sits there long enough he can become one of those committee barons whom the rest of the nation may deplore but cannot unseat.
In a nation so big that, in European terms, its politics are not those of a country but of a continent, most politicians become knowledgeable in the competing pressures of society, and learn to mediate among them (that is their real specialty). Ella Grasso, the new Governor of Connecticut, says that working in an earlier campaign for Senator Abe Ribicoff taught her "the importance, the integrity of compromise." In Washington, living among interests whose agents are sleepless and persistent (lobbyists for unions, industries, veterans, teachers, doctors), a Congressman rarely hears the voice of the ordinary, unorganized voter—until that voter decides to become angry with him. Often when a Congressman casts his best, most disinterested votes, he does so in defiance of specific interests and to an indifferent silence from everyone else.
A new Congressman may have arrived after a successful career elsewhere, but he must still undergo a humbling apprenticeship. Anxious to make his mark among his jostling peers, he will have ingested Sam Rayburn's advice that to get along, go along; perhaps he has also learned from John Nance Garner that "you can't know everything well. Learn one subject thoroughly." In a place where talk is cheap and oratory poor, his fellow legislators will judge him by whether he has "done his homework" well—and that phrase accurately registers the tedium involved. Going along, getting along, he becomes part of the system; a student of fallibility and a scholar of compromise; a man who nonetheless tries to be guided by, and to act upon, his own convictions as much as he can; in short, a politician. He may still be an honorable man, but is no longer an innocent one.