Professor Paul Brace`s article of Dec. 7, ”Term Limits: No cure-all for Illinois,” might have impressed most of his fressman class in Political Science 101, but it was a lead balloon for this old-timer who has voted in (or ignored) scores of elections.
He stated that restriction of terms of office would ”restrict the popular will.” However, when election turnouts seldom reach 60 percent are the results really an expression of ”popular will” or popular boredom? In my village of Skokie the chance of defeating incumbents is so slight that there was no opposition in any of the elective offices in 1988 and less than 15 percent of the electorate voted.
Overall, whether in federal, state or local elections, incumbents are defeated less than two percent of the time. Do you really believe that incumbents are more representative of the ”popular will” than their challengers by a ratio of 49 to 1? It should be obvious that this disparity is due to incumbents` great edge in name recognition, campaign chest and mailing perks.
The evaluation of the merit of ”term limits” is a subjective one, in which the professor and I are entitled to honest disagreement. The only way to prove it out is to try term limits, and if the results are worse than our existing system, we can end the experiment.
However, I would add one small, but important, proviso to any term-limit law which would grant permission for ex-incumbents to run again for their former office after a hiatus of four years.
Wouldn`t it be marvelous for the American public if two or more contestants for public office slugged it out from relatively even levels of name recognition, money and experience in office?
