IN case you missed it, our nation’s officeholders, current and former, have been working overtime to make us proud. Ted Cruz threw a histrionic hissy fit in front of Arab Christians. Sarah Palin went to a birthday party where her family reportedly got into a brawl. Mark Sanford emitted a self-pitying aria of romantic angst. Debbie Wasserman Schultz compared some Republicans to wife beaters.
I’ve long had an interest in politics; not because I harbor any desire to run for office- I don’t- but because of the train wreck nature of today’s political culture. Anyone with political ambitions must reconcile themselves to the proposition that the press will outdo themselves culling through virtually every aspect of their lives. What began with Gary Hart has now become de rigger- political writers giving themselves license to parse every bit of a candidates life regardless of any relevance to whatever position is being sought. If a candidate stole a piece of candy from the corner store when they were a wee lad, that’s now concerned fair game that should somehow inform our understanding of a person. Worse, it may be used as ammunition to be used in the effort to personally destroy a person’s political prospects. Good people don’t get elected because good people refuse to subject themselves to a constant drumbeat of personal attacks.
The problem with this “set ‘em up to knock ‘em down” mindset is that anyone who’s led any sort of life at all has things in their past they’re not be proud of…but shouldn’t disqualify them from public service. Even the ones who claim to be as pure as the drive snow aren’t. They’re just as likely to be fuelsdd by greed, corruption, avarice, perversion, hypocrisy, and/or hyper-religiosity as anyone else…they’re just able to put enough lipstick on the pig to make themselves look virtuous. Who would want to subject themselves to that sort of scrutiny? As Frank Bruni explains, that leaves us with the vain and the desperate- people for whom only the loving embrace of the camera matters. Any indignities endured along the way is merely the price of admission to the carnival. This explains how we get people like Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Mark Sanford- moral and ethical midgets who shouldn’t be allowed to manage a Dairy Queen, much less hold down a space in our political consciousness. If what you crave is attention, odds are that you’re going to believe there’s no such thing as bad publicity. If people are talking about you, you’ve won.
And then we wonder why so many sociopaths occupy seats in Congress….
When “opposition research” is code for “let’s find ways to personally destroy our opponent,” campaigns devolve into a soul-killing process. Modern politics has been reduced to a game of “GOTCHA!!”…and what person with a functional sense of self-worth is going to be willing to subject themselves to that?
We deserve better than Cruz, Palin, and so many of the megalomaniacal personalities on Capitol Hill, but those are the people willing to subject themselves to the indignities of a political campaign. When the ends justifies the means, what we end up with is borderline personalities in positions of power.
It’s no great mystery why nothing gets done in Congress these days.
