A reader disagrees with Kevin Mahnken:
With all due respect, our form of government is a “representative democracy,” meaning that those who run the government “represent” us. I don’t believe you can represent the people if you do not know the people and you cannot know the people if you don’t live with those people. Our government was not set up to vote on various policies or ideologies, it was set up to “represent” the will of the people. There are too many people out there who just want to be professional politicians and don’t care about where they are, they just want the power of being elected. This stinks and does a disservice to our form of government.
Another disagrees:
I was interested to read Mahnken’s belief that carpetbagging is a good thing. The reality is, Clinton and now Scott Brown are examples of politicians moving into areas with similar character and make-up to a place they’re actually from. In Hillary’s case, New York was a cosmopolitan place full of movers and shakers like DC had been for the previous 8 years, and Kennedy likewise was moving from one Eastern Seaboard state to another. Brown seems to be going a little further, but he’s still in New England. Not a radical departure.
Another:
I applaud Mahnken for defending, in principle, the idea of carpetbagging. I agree that sometimes the truly best person for the job may be the candidate who happens to be from somewhere else, geographically speaking. I think where the Scott Brown example is more problematic is that he isn’t just a candidate who happens to be from another place; he is a defeated candidate from another place. Many New Hampshire voters are probably more reluctant to vote for him because he was a failed candidate in Massachusetts, not simply because he’s from Massachusetts.
(Photo: Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate from Illinois Barack Obama and his Republican rival Alan Keyes prepare to debate on October 26, 2004. By Scott Olson/Getty Images. From Wikipedia: On August 8, 2004 – with 86 days to go before the general election – the Illinois Republican Party drafted Keyes to run against Obama for the U.S. Senate, after the Republican nominee, Jack Ryan, withdrew due to a sex scandal, and other potential draftees (most notably former Illinois governor Jim Edgar and former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka) declined to run. The Washington Post called Keyes a “carpetbagger” since he “had never lived in Illinois.” When asked to answer charges of carpetbagging in the context of his earlier criticism of Hillary Clinton, he called her campaign “pure and planned selfish ambition”, but stated that in his case he felt a moral obligation to run after being asked to by the Illinois Republican Party. “You are doing what you believe to be required by your respect for God’s will, and I think that that’s what I’m doing in Illinois”.)
The Dish 