I have a confession to make: I am not a politician, even if I do play one on the Internet. Oh, I’m running for office all right, but I’m not a politician. I’m just this guy. Politicians seek power, you see. I seek change.
One of the changes I seek is the light in which we view our political ‘leaders’. For one, it is high time that we, and they, stop viewing them as leaders. They aren’t our leaders, they are our representatives. They are morally flawed, like the rest of us. They sometimes make mistakes, like the rest of us. And they sometimes have horribly bad ideas, like the rest of us. We should hold public officials accountable, to be sure, but we should not expect them to transcend their humanity. Culturally, we have adopted such a debilitating cynicism when it comes to those seeking political office that many of us feel we have to hold our noses and vote for the least of the evils. And that’s of the 60 or so percent of we eligible voters who actually take the time to cast a ballot. The rest, disenfranchised for a wide variety of reasons, simply hold their noses and turn off the news. There must surely be a better way.
We have to stop regarding our elected leaders (as they have to stop regarding themselves) as wielders of power. Instead, they should be conduits for communication for constituents and communities. We all expect politicians to come knocking on our doors during campaign season and then not to hear from them again until the next writ is dropped. We know they aren’t going to come round asking what we think when there are no votes on the line. We expect that. We accept that. But we shouldn’t.
Democracy is a beautiful thing – the worst form of government, as Winston Churchill famously said, except for all the rest. But democracy isn’t the simple casting of a vote once every few years for the person you think is going to least screw up your life. Democracy is day to day civic engagement, and our elected representatives should have an obligation to see that their constituents are engaged like that. They should be knocking on our doors between elections. They should be using online communication tools to solicit our input. They should be phoning and writing and using smoke signals if necessary. Anything to reach the people they work for. They should be asking us what we think even when they aren’t asking us to vote for them. They are not our leaders, but our representatives, and it’s time we expected them to act like it.
No, I am not a politician. I’m just a guy who’s running for office because he doesn’t like the way the office looks. Plus I think you’d make a great boss.
Tangents 