"None of the Above" is not a valid choice

There are 2 aspects to a politician in his role as politician, his character and his politics. Maybe this can be generalized to all identity issues and interpersonal relationships but I'm not here to write a PhD thesis, just get a slice of toast and then maybe a cookie.

Character -- not morality or anything as narrow as that. The overall character that is created for the world to meet. One politician is the down-home guy, the other is the suffering immigrant while another is the comforting grandmother. Politicians adopt a persona, be it outsider to war hero, and their public image is ever indebted to that façade. Behaviors are dictated by whether they would underscore or undermine that character. When is it necessary to break that image and how is it done? Is the goal a new image, a rebranding? Or an evolution or growth in character? Why here, why now?

Politics -- these are the beliefs and behaviors within the bounds of issue-specific interactions. Votes cast, language used, bills sponsored, rallies attended. By observing the public political behavior each side can decide where the politician stands and therefore, how he or she is probably going to vote or act in the future, barring any intervening events. While actions often reflect actual beliefs, sometimes the politician has to act against his own belief in order to make some gain (personal or public) which is deemed worth the sacrifice. Knowing the personal beliefs and character help understand motivation.

When we vote, are we voting for the character? Everyone loves Joe the Plumber but might not know that Joe supported the use of Comic Sans in government documents. But his record and actual positions don't matter if we are voting for personality. And if we try to vote on the politics, and even if we remotely trust that the politician's agenda actually has "the good of America" as its number one motivation, we still then have to confront a candidate with whom we agree on some things but not on others. So we close our noses and choose the one with whom we disagree the least, or on the less important issues. We aren't voting on a policy but on a public figure. We say "who cares if the unions are on strike, the other countries respect us" when the domestic issue relates to us less and a dashing smile is the answer to the world audience. Other times we say "I can't believe he supports that" because this politician has done a personal set of calculations and decided that for some hidden reason, voting against form is a chess move in a marathon game o' chess.

What does this all mean? It means there isn't enough "open" for our eyes to open for us to see the various levels of hidden machinations that make for a (relatively successful) political system. We shouldn't be so aware of how the sausage is made because even if we had the nerve say we don't like sausage now, we would find out that there is nothing remotely as good, or that we are willing to struggle to have to learn and/or get used to on the menu so if we have sausage we have nothing.

It means that this is another sphere in which we are sheep, limited by the farmer as to what we can see, hear, taste and know and that our job is to continue to be sheep but with our eyes open, knowing we are sheep so we can start to ask the difficult questions which come not from rejecting a system but from paying attention while it works, so closely that you can begin to see its inner workings. So we don't abandon society, or resign ourselves to silent frustration. We vote. We write letters. We hope to raise our personal agendas to a higher priority for the politician.

Apologies to all the politicians, past, present and future who follow this blog (as I'm sure so many do) but the exact personality traits that helped you get to where you are make it impossible for the system to truly soar. A movie star can't be shy. A football player can't be a pacifist. If he were, he wouldn't have risen to the highest level in his sport.