Tough Love

Utah Legislators Get No Respect

By Tracy Medley, 2-12-07

Utah legislators can’t get no respect, in the immortal words of comedian Rodney Dangerfield. In an interesting piece written for the Deseret Morning News Rep. Frank Pignanelli and former policy deputy for Gov. Mike Leavitt LeVarr Webb make the case that working in the legislature can be a tough and often thankless job.

The gentlemen argue that the media focus too much on the negative, leaving Utahns with the false impression that their governing body is a pack of quarrelling teenagers incapable of compromise or innovation. Pignanelli writes, “Reporters do cover beefy issues such as the budget and tax policies, but the public remember best the interesting items – controversial “message” bills, closed caucuses and goodies from lobbyists. Legislative leaders retain experienced PR individuals whose talents are not completely utilized. The Legislature simply has no strategy for proactive public relations.”

One must concede that the legislature rarely comes out looking splendid in the press, but is it simply a matter of inept PR and media obsession with schandefreude? Maybe – maybe not. Customer (i.e. voter) satisfaction is down when it comes to Utah’s lawmakers; according to the D-News the legislature’s approval numbers are somewhere around 15 to 20 points lower than the governor’s, but is that dissatisfaction all in the constituent’s mind? Is it really just that voters don’t get it?

The challenge, of course as Webb points out in the piece is that the legislative body is made of 104 individuals, each vying for their own agenda and dealing with their personal ego trips; add to that a crew of cohorts unwilling to criticize their legislative brothers and sisters in public, provided, of course that brother or sister subscribes to the same political party persuasion. Perhaps this is the crux of the true problem when it comes to the public understanding and appreciating its legislators. What if instead of circling the wagons, lawmakers actually held their cohorts accountable for wasteful “message” legislation? Showing strong indication that legislators are more concerned with the wise appropriation of taxpayer’s dollars than with bruising their colleague’s ego might be a start in mending voter-legislator relations.

The thesis here resembles President Bush’s oft expressed refrain that his job is “hard work” and any dissatisfaction on the part of the voter rests largely in the their own inability to grasp that fact. But, that thinking is flawed for several reasons, the most obvious of which being that voters clearly do understand the “hard work” concept but perhaps inappropriately think that their elected lawmakers understand what they’re signing up for when they run for public office.

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