Every once in a while I get the crazy idea it would be fun to be a political consultant — until the political season starts and I see the frenzy on the faces of the candidates and their helpers.
I’m sure I will never work as a hired gun, but here are a few free rules of the road I’ve picked up over the years.
- If you sign up to run for a political office that means you are a politician. If you put signs out and ask people to vote for you that means you are a politician, which means you are opening yourself for criticism, complaints and lots of crankiness.
I can’t tell you how many times I have heard a candidate or someone in office tell me he is not a politician, but just a regular guy trying to serve the world.
That’s nice, but you are also a politician and you take the good with the bad.
I remember sitting in a meeting listening to a politician state how much she disliked politics and politicians.
Apparently, God appointed her to office. Not the first to hold that belief.
- If you have a green gremlin hiding in your closet do not believe for even one second your opponent will not find out. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve whacked my forehead with my hand and wondered what this candidate was thinking signing up to run for public office.
The working term here is public. That means if you have a little green guy in the closet, somebody knows and it will get out. It always does. Maybe it won’t make the paper, but a whisper campaign can be as nasty or even worse than what hits the print.
At least in print you have an opportunity to defend yourself. A whisper campaign is dangerous and sometimes deadly.
If I were a campaign manger, I would sit my candidate down and tell them to make a choice between kissing the gremlin or kissing the babies. You can’t do both if you want to be a public servant. Eventually, the gremlin will bite and you will bleed.
As John Huston said to Jack Nicholson in the 1974 movie Chinatown, “It’s really not worth it, Mr. Gittes.”
- Being an elected servant is often not a lot of fun. The pay is rotten and the treatment can be downright unfair. It takes a special twist to a personality to do the job and the country and our communities desperately need all of them we can find.
Discovering the right person is a hard job for voters. The good news is the vast majority of folks I have covered in office are very committed with an abiding desire to serve their community.
Most have no interest in higher office and sometimes that is too bad. A few of the folks I’ve covered would make very good candidates on the national level, but the pain threshold for that type of career has to be very high.
In many ways that is a bonus for our city councils, local boards and the state Legislature.
The idea is to promote citizen politicians. They do the job for a while, then go home and make fun of everyone else.
It is called the American way and it works.
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