The Tom I’m referring to was Tom Hayden who died last week. His great contribution was to have married Jane Fonda famous as Barbarella and Hanoi Jane.
I met Hayden once in the Green room before some TV show we were both on. He was a really unpleasant looking guy. Our conversation was superficial.
Tom was your ordinary mindless Lefty with no saving grace that I ever heard of.
Which is my jumping off point to talk about politicians in general. I’ve known many. I was a legislative analyst in Sacramento in the early 1960’s. I ran many political campaigns, over several decades, created a group called Research in Politics and was close to a number of office holders.
With few exceptions I would say that all were of average intelligence or slightly below. None had any curiosity or a good sense of humor. None were really caring or warm people. All were self-selected egomaniacs. An observation which explains why I was the first person to come up with the idea of a randomly selected legislature. Ordinary people are very different from politicians.
The exceptions to my ‘average intelligence or below’, were Bill Bagley a long-ago Assemblyman from Marin County, Jerry Brown and Huey Newton.
I also knew and liked Richard Nixon but he was not an exception.