The Mind of a Politician
The First Goal . . . Here's how it works. You might imagine that people decide to run for public office because they have ideas about how to make our country, our city, or our community a better place. They wish to become public servants. Well, yes, some do. At least at first. But lots merely envision themselves in seats of glory and power. Their goal is merely to be elected. And then re-elected.
. . . Becomes the Only Goal. But even for the high-minded, the need to be elected must come first. It is a consuming and demanding task. It overwhelms the brains of all but the most strong-minded. It has a way of elbowing everything else into a corner.
Politicians quickly discover that the way to get elected is not to convince voters that they are someone who can get things done and the things they will get done are the things the voters want done. They know that if they say that they will do something, while there are those who will want it done, there are others who want desperately to keep it from ever happening. So politicians hate taking stands on anything more specific than God, motherhood, and the American flag.
How To Get Votes. Two things really do work to get votes. The second best is to convince the voters that you are just a fabulously wonderful person (without getting too awfully specific about it). The very best is to convince them that your opponent is the flaming, ravenous, blood-lusted spawn of Beelzebub.
So far, none of this is new. It has been going on since the birth of our republic. But for most of our history it has been mitigated by other forces that helped to educate the public and force the candidates to think, and sometimes even talk, about the issues. The most important of these forces was the press.
The Real Villain. Technology, as we all now know, has changed everything. The real villain, however, is a relatively old technology: television. Specifically, television advertising. Political ads on TV have become the principle source of political information for the majority of the public. Read that last sentence again. The major media no longer research and discuss the issues. Instead, they respond to the ads. The ads come first. Of course the ads are not designed to inform the public, except to the extent that the information is damaging to the opponent. They tend to range from the misleading to the blatantly false. They are predominantly negative, often nasty.
These ads are very expensive. Politicians cannot hope to win unless they spend huge amounts of money buying them; thus, they cannot win without raising enormous amounts of money. They spend more time raising money than doing anything else.
Which of course is why they are beholden to the special interests, not to the public. They beg money from the special interests in order indirectly to buy the votes of the public.
The result is that issues are for sale. Whenever the interests of the moneybags are at odds with those of the public, the moneybags win.
Banking regulations are written to allow banks to direct streams of cash into their own pockets, in effect robbing all of us. Daylight Savings Time is extended just past Halloween, forcing school children to wait for their buses in the morning darkness. Why? So that candy makers can have more lighted hours on Halloween evening to unload even more unhealthy garbage onto our already obese offspring.
Those are just two of thousands of examples. Our government has become totally corrupt.
Solutions? There are two main lines of attack offered to correct the problem. One is to change the source of the funding of political campaigns, making the people the funders rather than leaving the funding to a very small group of rich individuals and corporations. The other is to eliminate much of the need for enormous campaign spending by taking our elections off of the money market and putting them back on the idea market. Either one will be extremely difficult, but if nothing is done, the destruction of our republic will be complete and permanent.