Chapter 1

In Defense of Politicians

When I was a young reporter covering city hall for the Evening News in Monroe, Michigan, the publisher suggested one day that I should write an occasional editorial on local issues. Fired with the self-righteous certitude of youth, I leaped at the chance. I would straighten out those hacks on the city commission whose meetings I was obliged to cover every Monday night.

But the publisher, a wise man named JS Gray, cautioned me to be patient. "Don't nip at their heels," he said. "We get about what we deserve"-meaning that the quality of the city government reflected the seriousness with which the voters of Monroe considered their decisions when choosing commissioners. We had the proprietor of a small dry-goods store, a salesman in a haberdashery, the operator of a service station, and a couple of young lawyers on the hustle. They were all nice enough people, but we didn't have the municipal equivalent of Robert Taft or Sam Rayburn. So, by JS Gray's reckoning, we shouldn't expect too much.

He was right. Today, after fifty years of exposure to thousands of politicians, I am convinced that we get about what we deserve at all levels of government, up to and including the White House. These days, because so many Americans-almost half-don't bother to vote even in presidential elections, they deserve choices like the one they were offered in 2000, between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Because so few Americans understand the political process or bother to follow it with even a modicum of attention, we elect presidents as empty as George H. W. Bush or as self-absorbed as Bill Clinton-only to be followed by a choice between a Republican obviously over his head and a Democrat too unsure of his own persona to be convincing.

As a group, it turns out, politicians are just like everyone else in our society-a few men and women of high quality, many of different levels of mediocrity, and, finally, a few knaves and poltroons. There are members of Congress who would be overpaid at ten thousand dollars a year and others who would be underpaid at a half million. Nor are presidents of the United States men of some extra dimension, a phrase favored by Richard M. Nixon, other than perhaps the tenacious ambition required to win the office. On the contrary, our presidents are, perhaps too often, very ordinary people.

It is also clear, however, that politicians, whatever their failings, are better people than they are depicted to be in much of the news media and reputed to be in the popular wisdom.

They are men and women who have the nerve to put themselves out there for a popular verdict on their performance and potential delivered in the most public way. Spend an election night with a candidate and you cannot help but be impressed by how wrenching the process can be even for one who is winning. Sure, I'm getting 60 percent of the vote, the candidate mutters to himself, but what about that ot