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In opinion polls of public esteem, politicians usually join journalists and used-car salesmen near the bottom, somewhere below IRS field auditors, bill collectors and friendly strangers who hang out near elementary schools.
Many theories have been proposed to explain this, but they an neglect the obvious: Politicians don't think much of themselves.
Suppose you saw a physician, and he said, I'm not a
doctor. I do this just because I want to serve the
community,
or I'm not like the others, the ones
that are good at diagnosis and therapeutics and those other
slick tricks. But you want me because I'm trying to be the
best doctor I can be.
Or you called around for someone to unclog your drain:
Well, yes, I might be able to fix your pipes, but first,
I want you to see these pictures of me with my family,
because I know that's very important to you in this age
when traditional values are under attack by the Brie and
Chablis elitists.
You want to know why there are so many leaky pipes
and clogged drains in America? We've had plumbers working
on our pipes, that's why. Our nation's strength has been
sapped by the outdated `plumbing as usual' attitude. I
shall take a dynamic, fresh, bold, innovative approach,
because I'm not a plumber.
If you had more than a spoonful brains, you'd keep trying until you found a doctor or plunbber who thought enough of himself and his chosen profession to be proud of himself and what he could do.
But when candidates perform, they're busy asserting that they lack the attributes that successful politicians possess -- charm, rhetoric, tact, diplomacy, smoothness, etc. They deny that they're politicians at all.
I see elections the same way I saw hiring interviews when I owned a newspaper. There were certain things that I didn't have the talent, time or inclination to do -- keep books, sit through sewer board meetings, address papers at 3 a.m. Yet those onerous tasks bad to be done, so I hired people to take care of them.
There are many other things I don't have the time or inclination to bother with. It would take weeks for me to figure out how Chaffee County might best subsidize a private developer who wants to install a ski area in Lake County. So I vote, and thereby hire county commissioners to handle that job.
You probably don't even know how to complain that convicts are being coddled, while at the sasne time insisting that a sculpture is so ugly tbat even prisoners shouldn't have to look at it. So you hire a state legislature for such difficult chores.
I know tbat I'm not capable of deciding tbat $36 billion is a fair subsidy for the airline industry, while $680 million is too much for Amtrak. But Bill Armstrong can make such decisions; we've hired him for the job. So it goes, on up to the White House, where we've employed someone for the tough job of finding a Chief Justice who could, as an attorney, sign legal documents without reading them first. We bire politicians to do things we don't feel likes doing. At the least, we ought to be able to hire skillful politicians who aren't ashamed of what they do.
But only once have I seen such an opportunity. In 1976, Bill Chenoweth, son of the late Congressman J. Edgar Cbenoweth and then a Grand County commissioner, ran for the State Senate.
A superb orator, Chenoweth put something like this in
every speech: Yes, I am a politician. I like polltics. I
know how things work on Capitol Hill because I've been
there before. If you want somebody to represent you in
court, you hire the best and most experienced lawyer you
can find. We need someone to represent us in Denver in a
tough political arena, so we should get the best and most
experienced politician available -- me.
Unfortunately for the cause of common sense in political campaigns, he lost -- in the primary, to a man who said he wasn't a pollUcian.
Ever since Bill Chenoweth ended up on the Moffat Tunnel Commission instead of in the State Senate, no politician anywhere has dared to admit that be was, in fact, a politician. So every day, we're bombarded with ads from people who want jobs. And each one says he should get the job because he's not qualified to do it.
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