Why would anyone run for Congress these days?
When Rep. Bill Young -- who passed away last week -- announced earlier this month that he planned to retire, national Republicans wasted little time before calling Jack Latvala about running for the seat in Florida's competitive 13th District.
A longtime state senator who represents more than two-thirds of the U.S. House district in Clearwater, Latvala had the look of a sure-fire front-runner who could hold the seat for the Republican Party.
But Latvala didn't return the recruiters' phone call.
"I make an impact on things in Tallahassee on a daily basis," he told RealClearPolitics. "I couldn't make much of an impact in Washington."
Bill Cole, a Republican state senator from West Virginia, is another state-level rising star who has said "thanks, but no thanks" to a shot at the big time in Washington. He recently received an in-person pitch to consider running for Congress against vulnerable Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall in the state's 3rd District. Members of the National Republican Campaign Committee showed up at his capitol office in Charleston and gave him the "rock star" treatment, he says, promising that the seat would be the Republicans' top target in the entire country.
But Cole wasn't interested, citing family concerns. He will instead chair the campaign of another state senator, Evan Jenkins, who recently switched parties to run against Rahall.
"I felt I could be a bigger fish in a smaller pond, and truly make a difference in Charleston," he told RCP.
Latvala cited other reasons for passing on the opportunity to succeed Young, who died Oct. 18 at age 82: the national Republican Party's poor standing in public opinion polls and his own lack of interest in being just one of 435 representatives in the House.
He also offered a more basic explanation for staying put in Florida: "I don't think I'd have fun in Washington. I know it might be politically incorrect to say that they're beyond help up there, but it certainly doesn't look encouraging."
It's not just top Republican recruits who are turning down their national campaign committees' overtures to run for Congress. In the aftermath of the government shutdown and with a year to go until the 2014 midterms, high-level officials from both parties have voiced private -- and, at times, public -- concern that the quality of prospective candidates is dwindling.
National Democrats argue that the current political climate is better for their recruiting efforts -- especially in House races -- since the GOP's poll numbers are particularly abysmal and people are tired of divided government. But they, too, aren't immune from highly sought-after recruits saying they'd rather do just about anything else than serve in one of the nation's least respected institutions.
While the job may remain prestigious to a certain extent, being a member of Congress is far from the best way to become an admired figure in one's community. Arizona Sen. John McCain likes to joke that the only people in support of Congress these days are blood relatives and paid staffers, and polls show that he's not far off the mark: In the latest RealClearPolitics polling average, just 9.2 percent of survey respondents approve of Congress, while 84.2 percent disapprove.
Perhaps as striking, an ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Tuesday showed Americans' support of their own U.S. representative to be underwater (43 percent approval to 47 percent disapproval) for the first time on record.
Asked in a brief interview why anyone with other attractive options would want to join his legislative body, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman joked, "It's a bad time to ask" before settling on the oft-repeated refrain that doing so presents "an opportunity to serve."
Former Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, who chaired the NRCC from 1998 to 2002, said appealing to that sense of service helps persuade some candidates to hop off the fence, but not always.
Davis recalled his efforts to convince Rhode Island attorney Jeffrey Pine to run. He took him to several dinners and even to the Major League All-Star Game at Fenway Park, and tried to sway him with polling that showed him beating the incumbent. "Finally, he said, 'I have a good marriage and a pretty good life,'" and declined.
Taylor Griffin has had a pretty good life, as well. After completing high-level stints as an aide to George W. Bush, a Treasury Department official, and crisis manager for the McCain/Palin campaign in Alaska, business was booming at Hamilton Place Strategies -- the Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm that Griffin co-founded three years ago.
An earnest and affable bachelor who lacks the forced charisma and wheeler-dealer persona common among his ilk, Griffin, 38, was set to enter his prime in the upper echelons of the lucrative political consulting business. Then one day, someone suggested that he consider trying to join a group less popular among Americans than colonoscopies, cockroaches, root canals, and even the much-maligned rock band Nickelback: the U.S. Congress.
More comfortable pulling the levers of power behind the scenes than standing in the spotlight, Griffin needed neither an ego boost nor an opportunity to hobnob with the Beltway elite, with whom he was already well acquainted. He was also well aware of how intractable Washington politics has become, and how little one of 435 members of one half of one branch of government could expect to accomplish.
Nonetheless, Griffin sold his stake in the business and filed his candidacy earlier this month to challenge incumbent Republican Rep. Walter Jones in North Carolina's 3rd District, where he had grown up. Though he describes his time on the campaign trail thus far in glowing terms, it is clear that Griffin has not completely shaken his mixed feelings about this life decision.
"Electoral politics is a brutal, soul-sucking experience for a candidate," he said in an interview with RCP in between campaign stops across the coastal district. "But what it came down to was the question of whether or not I had a particular set of skills that could do something to help what I love most in the world, which is my home."
The sentiment is a noble-minded one, but with partisan gridlock as intractable as at any time in recent U.S. political history and the public's regard for the legislative branch of government hovering in margin-of-error territory, the question remains: Why would Griffin -- or anyone else, for that matter -- want to put themselves through this?
There's at least one easy answer that comes to mind.
"Politicians are rarely normal people," said Chris Chocola, the director of the conservative Club for Growth (and a former congressman himself) who is involved in recruiting conservative candidates to challenge incumbent Republicans. "I don't try to talk them out of running, but I ask this question: So you think you can go fix Washington when there's thousands of people who haven't been able to? What makes you think you're different?"
It may always have been the case that only someone with one or two screws loose would subject themselves to running, and then potentially serving, in Congress. But for many, the upside of running is now harder to decipher than ever.
When Griffin was first approached about it, his first reaction was to try to come up with a reason to say no. In his previous jobs, he saw firsthand the compelling reasons why other qualified people had declined the opportunity.
"As Washington has grown ever more useless, the crop of candidates motivated by public service has really dwindled," Griffin said. "And as serious people exit, intellectually empty attention-seekers are rushing in to take their place. And the people that are working hard in their communities -- that are community leaders who want to make a difference -- are often put off by that."
In the end, however, Griffin's own excuses for not running fell of one by one, as he came to believe in the inherent truth behind an old cliché: "You can't complain about how dysfunctional Washington is if you are refusing to participate in fixing it."
That logic might convince some well-qualified candidates into taking the plunge, but it is not enough to persuade others.
When Sen. Max Baucus announced in April that he would not seek a seventh term next year, national and state Democrats put the hard sell on former Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer to run for the seat and keep it from becoming a top midterm pickup opportunity for Republicans.
Schweitzer, who was term-limited from seeking another four years as governor, was widely expected to take up the charge. In July, however, he announced his intention to stay put in Montana. Schweitzer's reasons might be summed up by the chorus of a country song he's programmed on his cellphone in lieu of a ring tone: "God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy."
Schweitzer is quite happy, for the time being, to remain in the hinterlands, as far as possible from the "crazy" people who willingly take up residence on Capitol Hill.
"The problem was I really held Congress in pretty low regard for most of the time that I was governor because I watched how things worked back there," he said. "I would ask members of Congress to do a modicum of something really good that didn't cost any money. And unless they could get full credit for it and raise money off of it, they weren't interested in doing it."
Schweitzer recalled conversations he had with some of the current members of Congress who urged him to consider the good things he could do in Washington.
"Many of them were calling me and telling me to run, but then they would have to be honest with me and say, 'I kind of hate it here,'" he recalled. "It's toxic right now, and it appears it's going to be toxic for a while. And I just didn't need it."
Schweitzer hasn't ruled out pursuing a job in the nation's capital entirely. Asked whether he is considering a run for president in 2016, the charismatic rancher responded by comparing Montanans to the people of Iowa and New Hampshire and questioning the conventional wisdom that Hillary Clinton is the pre-anointed Democratic nominee -- deliberately designed references intended to confirm he is indeed thinking about it.
Schweitzer echoed others who were interviewed for this story in observing that members of Congress often arrive in Washington with the best of intentions but then go on to base their success and failure on how many times they can get re-elected, rather than the accomplishments they achieve on behalf of their constituents.
"People from outside of government who haven't served before and would consider running for Congress or the Senate, they look at it and say, 'Why would I want to get that smell on me?'" Schweitzer said. "And those of us who have actually served -- for example, I was governor -- we could actually get things done here. We got our opportunity to change the world. And I, like a lot of other people, don't view Washington, D.C., as a place to change the world anymore. In the future maybe, but not right now."
Not everyone is quite so cynical. Former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Doug Thornell emphasized that most potential candidates who seriously consider the idea of running remain convinced that they can, in fact, make a lasting difference in Washington. And in this cycle, many Democrats are drawn in by an opportunity to take back the House, even if doing so is an uphill climb.
Even so, "certainly aspects of what's going on in Washington right now might discourage you," he said, adding that even victorious candidates face a soul-crushing reality almost as soon as they enter office.
"There's the euphoria of winning," he said. "Then it's like . . . you are met with a splash of cold water when you're reminded almost immediately you have to raise about $250,000 a quarter, need to be doing a ton of call time, doing this and that in the district, and dealing with attacks from opponents."
Still, whether they admit it or not, the political bug is a powerful intoxicant for many prospective candidates.
Arizona Republican Matt Salmon served in Congress from 1995 to 2001 before resigning his seat and narrowly losing to Janet Napolitano in the 2002 Arizona gubernatorial race. After holding several positions in business and state-level politics, Salmon got the itch to return to Congress 10 years later. He ran for and won his 5th District seat last year, attributing his return to a commonly referenced concern for future generations.
"The truth is, when I left Congress, in my wildest dreams I never thought I'd be back here, but along the way I became a grandfather," Salmon explains. "I came back out of fear. This is a tough job, being away from your family, and everything that you really love."
For those who remain committed to improving the state of affairs in the nation's capital, the fundamental way out of the current condition remains a straightforward one: grab the reins yourself.
It's a thought that occurred to Taylor Griffin more than once this summer as he was putting 10,000 miles on his car crisscrossing eastern North Carolina and seeking guidance about whether to jump into the fray.
"The people with the capacity to do the job have to get involved, if we're ever going to right the ship," he said.