The folks over at Bloomberg Businessweek invited four retiring members of Congress to Johnny’s Half Shell Monday night to air out their grievances about the jobs they’re about to vacate. Boy, it wasn’t pretty.
In their exit interview Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., and Rep. Geoff Davis, R-Ky., all railed against Capitol Hill’s poisonous partisan environment, also taking occasional jabs at the media. “You are always defined through the MSNBC and the Fox News prism,” said Snowe. And, on the American public: “I think the people have gotten dumber,” stated Ackerman.
Besides facing a tough election, Conrad explained why he was throwing in the towel. “Last year I had a senior colleague come to me and he said, ‘Your problem Conrad, is that you’re too solutions-oriented,’ and I thought, wow, it is time for me to leave,” Conrad testified. While Ackerman remembered his beginnings. “I came here as a pacifist, I came here and disagreed with Ronald Reagan, the first president I served with, but I didn’t want him to fail,” Ackerman said. “This pacifist would [end] up voting for war twice under the guidance of two Republican presidents … because we only had one president at a time and if he failed my country failed, and that’s not acceptable.” (At this point in the evening, some audience members confessed to tearing up).
Trying to lighten the mood, moderator Josh Tyrangiel tried asking them what they liked about Washington. “I think that the ultimate good thing about Washington is that it has the ability to attract the hardest working people in the country from each of the 50 pieces in the big jigsaw puzzle and each of the 435 smaller pieces of the jigsaw puzzle,” Ackerman said. But even that turned negative. “I think the problem is that when you have some of the brightest, most hard working people in the country — they become a–holes.”