they were going in both directions at the same time. what we're seeing recently as that's not happening. the seats which is are almost all going in one direction, and that increases the chance of course of a switch in party control. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @

have fewer people than the state of california. those 20 states, and i won't mention any states that might be here right now, but those 20 states elect 40 united states senators and there is a republican tilt to the small states. of those 20 states actually 12 have consistently voted for republican presidential candidates in the last three presidential elections. only five have consistently voted for democratic candidates. right now that republicans held our bias is not evident, is not very clear because democrats happen to hold actually 11 of the 24 seats from those 12 states. that is not going to last. i think it is highly unlikely to last. and in fact, if you look at table 9, you can see that the democrats are facing a high risk

of seat loss in the next several elections because they are highly exposed, meaning that they are now-- bearer 11 democratic senators in all three of the most recent presidential elections versus only three, three republican senators in states like that. and that includes scott around, who is now one of those three. and there are 11 other democratic senators who have voted republican in two of the last three so 22 of the 59 democratic senators are sitting in states that are really republican leaning states based on the their recent presidential voting history. so what are the consequences from the senate of all of this? first of all i would argue polarization within the electorate reinforces polarization within the senate. the reason the senators are finding it so hard to get together and to cross party lines in the conflict is so it's intent is not because they don't like each other. it is because they are actually

representing the people who elected them and you can see this very clearly on the issue of health care reform which has been so much in the news lately. figure 5 shows the distribution of opinion of democratic and republican senate voters on the issue of health care reform. this is from a question in the 2008 american national election study that asked people about whether they would support or oppose a plan to have actually single-payer health care system, which is quite a bit beyond which was just past that you can see there is a very sharp party divide on this, that the democrats are clustered on the left and republicans are clustered on the right. there are relatively few voters in the middle, so this was before this debate even began, so it is hardly surprising we are seeing the democrats and republicans in the senate and in the house are having such a hard time agreeing. second i think there is a growing intensity of partisan conflict. we can expect-- this contributes

to this polarization of the electorate contributes to the conflict which undermines traditional senate norms and procedures. in essence i think in some ways the senate is becoming more like the house of representatives, but of course with these rules that obstruct or make it much more difficult for the majority to work its will in the institution. so the big question going forward or one of the big questions about the senate is going to be whether the special rules and procedures that the senate has operated under for so long can survive, in an institution that was so divided and with polarization so great. we are already seeing i think increasing signs of pressure on these rules and procedures and particularly on the filibuster rule. for example with the use of the reconciliation procedure on health care by the democrats in the senate and i think we are going to see more and more of

this and perhaps even efforts to modify or get rid of the filibuster altogether at some point. because, you know we are in a much more partisan era now, and it just doesn't come it doesn't fit with that, with this new political environment. so i will stop with that and take questions. >> thank you. burd. >> i am going to, i am looking at congressional careers that, from 1960 to 2010 and of course for the current senate it is hard to tell. scott brown may be here for a few months, mike d. here 30 years from now. we really don't know. but there has been one constant over the last 50 years.

and that has been robert bird-- burd who is still there. it would seem to me there is some real continuity, but i think o change in the congressional career and particularly the senate career. again it is appropriate i follow eric as the 50s for a baseline for the type of career that evolve from that particular era, and elections as a major part of the context of change. and really, you can really go to the election of 1958 with the big swing of democratic senators. new senators, more liberal senators, ones who arguably expected to participate a little earlier in the process.

at the beginning of change in the large-scale change in the u.s. senate. and that class of 1958, their entrance reverberated for years to come or go still, generally speaking, studying political careers has not paid off a a lot. it turns out the background of the legislature does not make that much difference in how they operate. it is hard to link a relationship to outcomes in various careers. they change fairly slowly. it is difficult to get a handle on careers as an important element of the senate. and yet if you look at the senate today and look at the senate 50 years ago, the types of careers to change and i think there are important elements of the institution. so how careers unfold can tell

us some things. largely because careers are about choices, the choice to seek election in the first place, who runs for the senate, what is the pool of candidates for the senate, the people who will do this, take this on. pathways within the senate. what happens once you get there, and as eric pointed out, we have i think the committee pathway in the 50s was extended apprenticeships were pretty clearly the party leadership for skilled people like taft and johnson wasn't extended at all. different career path and we have seen the value of partisan positions and committee positions changed over the years. and, exit, leaving the senate.

sometimes it is an enforced decision, enforced by the electorate, and unwelcome exit, sometimes surprising to the senator, but more often it is a choice. you choose to retire, perhaps to go on to something else, perhaps as they say spend more time with the family. [laughter] and, perhaps to avoid respect to defeat. chris dodd right now is a prominent center, important senator in health care, financial services, but also one that is extraordinarily full marable and has decided i think under pressure to retire. so, we may learn something about our senators and about the institution of the senate and

how careers are structured, how individual members choose. for example, i think the cost of running for the senate, first in dollars but also in psychic expense in this polarized electorate. the same kinds of people run for the senate in the 1950s as run today. you have got to be pretty ambitious. we are hardwired to do some of this stuff, but we also may find that senators have come either they are wealthy, jon corzine, willing to expend an extreme amount of money to get elected, or they have access to funds. that is crucial to running for the senate. it strikes me that it helps to be partisan, and it helps to

have a very thick skin. other kinds of candidates may be less inclined to run in this environment and less inclined to serve with highly charged partisan elements to both running for the senate and serving in the senate. you have to be used to personal attacks, willing to take on personal attacks but sometimes from your colleagues even but often certainly from your opponents, often personal ones. it is not fun. i think time after time the legislature tells us this is not fun. so these costs may really change the kind of people who seek to enter the process. and indeed we find, and i have some papers as well, the entry patterns do differ some. we have more professional

politicians coming into the senate, fewer people from the private sector and particularly people from legislative backgrounds. one common observation is the senate has become more like the house. when recent has is because more house members constitute the senate these days. they have learned, they have been socialized in the house, a more partisan body, but surprising number of current senators come from state legislatures as well, so they come from a legislative context, and they are used to it as opposed to coming safe from the private sector and not being so, such a part of the political process that they have developed a thick skin. i am not really going to talk much about internal development careers at all.

it is an interesting and important subject. certainly the career pattern is wider than it used to be. people get involved more quickly. there are more incentives to get involved and there are more staff. you get involved in the process more quickly. but i want to, given limited time, i really wanted to focus on leaving the senate, which to me is highly interesting and understudied question in terms of political careers. the first thing we would note on this is, in the class-- the senators who served 1959 to 1960, 50 years ago, a substantial number of them left the senate prom. [laughter] they died.

so their careers ended with their death. and a straightforward notion is fewer senators are dying in office. considerably fewer senators are dying in office. not only that, people who do leave office are living longer. their life expectancy has risen substantially for someone who would say 65, from the 50s to 2010. so, more people are surviving the senate, and living longer afterwards. this gets us back to bob dole. because in many ways, he is the poster boy for a new kind, what i would argue possibly a new

kind of post-senate career. first of all he has made a lot of money. i don't think-- bob dole has made far more money than he would have ever possibly imagined. here is the a guy who lived frugally, lifetime public servant, and certainly was not seen as a big spender. had a good congressional pension, and then resigned as presidential candidate and starts appearing in television commercials. [laughter] down boy. pepsi i think it was. [laughter] or maybe something you drink with pepsi. secondly, he becomes this highly sought after partner in

prestigious law firms, a rainmaker of of the first-quarter. so he is rewarded tremendously at the end of his senate career. i don't think he calculated that particularly at all. here is a guy who wanted to be a good senate leader, desperately wanted to be president but there he was in 1996. secondly, bob dole has embarked upon any number of good works. has been a presidential envoy, has worked with bill clinton in europe, raise tens of millions of dollars for the world war ii memorial. and he continues to do that. a year ago, my interns and i were talking to dole in his office and he came in and bad

knees, bad hips, and didn't look good coming in. he sat down and the light went on and for an hour and 15 minutes, we were talking about everything, but he kept coming back time and time again to health care because he and tom daschle had just put together a big health care proposal, not unlike the one we are passing. it was interesting because students would ask him a question about x, y or c and he would answer but then he would bring it up to the health care. highly engaged, highly interested and begin a model for what you can do after congress. finally, where we are sitting literally is an indication of what you can do. out of 76 members of the 101st

congress, the 1989/1990 congress had a broad sense of career, there are still quite a number serving but 76 have left the senate. out of those 76, 15 have educational institutions, centers of one sort or another named after them and not just symbolically. you have the mitchell center at liberty university, the calm center. trent lott has a center, the dole center. fritz hollings interestingly enough as a center on conduct ding useful dialogue. i am not sure you can even understand for it. [laughter]

but in a certain sense their careers have been institutionalized after they have gone, so again, something to look at after the senate. so it seems to me that longevity has come opportunity. you can do well, you can make norma-- more money. you can do good and honestly you can have fun. for bob dole doing that health care was fun. george mitchell has worked hard but i think he has had a lot of fun at it as well. many of these individuals stay with politics. but without the pressure of going to bed at 3a clock in the morning, getting up at 9:00 in the morning to continue the photo rama of the last 24 hours.

so, the senate may be the accolade of most of the senators political careers but it is certainly not be in. and also it raises questions about choosing to stay or choosing to leave. if in this congress we have been talking about, service becomes too burdensome, if running for election, not just two years now as they would do it in the 1950s, four years governing and two years on the campaign trail. today, you are dialing for dollars almost like a house number. at the moment you win an election, the next cycle is beginning. it is a six-year cycle but you are also talking sometimes about tens of millions of dollars. the choice to leave, because you can see this post senate career and more attractive terms. you are not giving up-- and you

are not-- giving up a lot of grief made well be a question of senators like evan bayh both think through. obviously being a senator remains powerful. but the costs are great, so i think as in some other elements of politics, we might go back to hirshhorn's notion of the choice of exit, voice or loyalty and i think it is there. certainly the voice of the individual legislator is certainly there. many are vociferous. loyalty is a crucial part of the senate and party loyalty, but i think that there are costs to loyalty. there are costs to too many voices and exit-- you always have people retire but they may see retirement in a different light. it is a common refrain for senators or congressman when

they retire to say, it is not fun any more. we all kind of chuckle at that, but everyone says that. but that doesn't make it untrue and particularly for particular periods. 1996, you have a raft of really distinguish senators retiring. dale bumpers, alan stenson, bill bradley, paul simon among others. dole was a part of that group but resigned in somewhat different circumstances. and i think that you can look back and get a pretty good lives after the senate. simpson back on the stage in his late 70s for the deficit commission. and there is a final irony here. to go back to the careers in the 50s, they were framed by these norms that eric talked about. and, the notion of the interclub

with much of it revolving around reciprocity in one form or another, trading apprenticeship for influence later, being able to-- being willing to work hard so you will see the fruits of that labor. i was trying to think about, if you could be a maverick today, the way william proxmire was in the 1950s, what would be a maverick? if you don't have very strong norms, how can you differ from the norms? and in many ways, the senate we will talk more about tomorrow in greater detail but the one that alan sets up this is highly polarized partisan center. the final irony may be that a person who tries to work across party lines, lindsey graham for example, who really has systematically on various issues, not all issues to be

sure, but systematically on a variety of issues hassad out partners and try to work across party lines or go he is often vilified when he tries to do this by not so much his fellow republicans in the senate, but certainly ideological conservatives on the outside. and lindsey graham, he is a rino , republican in name only. he is ambitious, but he also is ambitious to get things done. and so in a sense, the very person who would have been the potential strong member of the inner club in the 1950s is now seen as a great exception, and i think that tells us a lot about the differences in serving today and 50 years ago.

>> maybe we should briefly thank every one. [applause] i think a theme today and tomorrow is certainly change. i think eric did a good job telling us where we started as to where we are today and anyone that follows the senate today sees there are mass differences. but that change is slow and as each speaker today in the speaker tomorrow talks about a particular area of change i think it will become clear that the changes in a related. any of the individual changes we talk about through elections or different motivations and career paths of senators, the way that changes can't be viewed along. we have to look at the norms and how those changes dramatically as well, and none of this can be isolated completely. we have to think of everything together.

with that in mind, i just had a few questions for all of you who are trying to help maybe interrelate each of the discussions you have and all of you alluded to this already. but, some questions in that vein. so, for burdett, current senators know how well dole has done after his career. as a current senator, how does my view of norms and behaviors in the chamber change when i am looking at a future? what do i do differently? do i still specialize? do i over specialize? is this part of the puzzle of why we see members working less together? is there a thought of the future that changes their behaviors? and similarly, eric spoke a lot about mavericks, thinking of what it means to be a maverick in today's legislature and senate. how does the electorate play

into this? the norms alone certainly aren't stopping the behaviors from changing over time, so how does the electorate and what they would like to see and what they demand from their constituents change? and then alan, the flip side of that question, how do changing you changing norms affect the electorate? do you see the present fight over health care or is there going to be a backlash from the public over the procedure they view as being unfair or overly acrimonious or will anyone remember? that is a broad question trying to tie together what we have all done today here. >> i will start. i think, people looking at not just bob dole certainly, but tom daschle and you were talking

about leadership but they are showing other more rank-and-file members, dan coates for example who have done just fine over time, who have been able to serve as ambassador, come back and a good number of ambassadors have come out of the ranks of retired senators. interesting lives, often meaningful and have made a lot of money. the first question, how does it affect the thought of just not running again? i can still do things that i'm interested in, have an impact. maybe not quite as much but have a lot better of life in a variety of ways. the other question you asked is pretty interesting. i think it may have focused on a little more the house than the senate. if you look at registered lobbyist for example.

very few acts senators are registered lobbyists as i see it right now. those data are not complete, but any more of them are like dole, daschle, who will make phonecalls but will not be part of the lobbying process. what strikes me is that they often, someone like daschle who is highly interested in health care when he was in the senate is involved in health care after the senate, and you might start thinking, although again i think it is of little more common for house members who do specialize more still, but i do in the senate will lead me to x job. billy tauzin from louisiana is the poster boy for this, because -- there are a number of others but i think a little more in the house. in the senate i think because you are more generalist and more connected in a vty