{"id":18094,"date":"2011-09-16T18:34:42","date_gmt":"2011-09-17T01:34:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spiken.wpengine.com\/news\/the-right-stuff-for-politics-editorial\/"},"modified":"2016-10-23T15:30:34","modified_gmt":"2016-10-23T22:30:34","slug":"the-right-stuff-for-politics-editorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/opinion\/the-right-stuff-for-politics-editorial\/","title":{"rendered":"The right stuff for politics | Editorial"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><p>Every once in a while I get the crazy idea it would be fun to be a political consultant \u2014 until the political season starts and I see the frenzy on the faces of the candidates and their helpers.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p>I\u2019m sure I will never work as a hired gun, but here are a few free rules of the road I\u2019ve picked up over the years.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">I can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">That\u2019s nice, but you are also a politician and you take the good with the bad.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">I remember sitting in a meeting listening to a politician state how much she disliked politics and politicians.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">Apparently, God appointed her to office. Not the first to hold that belief.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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\u2019t tell you how many times I\u2019ve whacked my forehead with my hand and wondered what this candidate was thinking signing up to run for public office.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">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\u2019t make the paper, but a whisper campaign can be as nasty or even worse than what hits the print.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">At least in print you have an opportunity to defend yourself. A whisper campaign is dangerous and sometimes deadly.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">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\u2019t do both if you want to be a public servant. Eventually, the gremlin will bite and you will bleed.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">As John Huston said to Jack Nicholson in the 1974 movie Chinatown, \u201cIt\u2019s really not worth it, Mr. Gittes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">Most have no interest in higher office and sometimes that is too bad. A few of the folks I\u2019ve covered would make very good candidates on the national level, but the pain threshold for that type of career has to be very high.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">In many ways that is a bonus for our city councils, local boards and the state Legislature.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">The idea is to promote citizen politicians. They do the job for a while, then go home and make fun of everyone else.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><p style=\"padding-left: 30px\">It is called the American way and it works.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Every once in a while I get the crazy idea it would be fun to be a political consultant \u2014 until the political season starts and I see the frenzy on the faces of the candidates and their helpers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":215,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-18094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18094"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/215"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18094"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=18094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}