It is not my intention to be rude. This blog is about a subject that is inherently going to be offensive to people who are active in politics. I apologize in advance because I know that some small percentage of people who are active in politics are honest, decent and responsible human beings. They are a small percentage based on my lifetime experience I have worked in politics directly for nearly a decade in legislatures, in campaigns and an elective office.
I decided to leave active politics before I was 33, when I begin to realize that virtually everyone in the political arena was boring. To me, those who actually ran for office were ‘mentally distinct’. I am trying to be polite when I use the phrase ‘mentally distinct’. People who I knew who ran for office or who were elected invariably were self centered and egotistical.
I’ll try again to remind you that this does not reply to all people who are active in politics. Just most people.
People go into politics first because they love the attention. Secondly because they have thick skins and do not believe that anything negative said about themselves can be accurate.
I have often conducted public surveys where the political body representing the population was completely out of step with the population. The reason is that the kind of attention getting self centered person who is active in politics only responds to the pressures of other people like themselves. A different and biased subset of the general population.
That is why I have believed for a long time that a random sample of the population is necessary to serve in elective legislative positions in order for the public to be represented.