@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard I’ve never met any politicians face-to-face. I make it a point not to. I’ve seen enough of them from close enough (and far enough away) to realize that they are generally exactly what anyone wants them to be: chameleons and actors, changing colors and roles like you can change a shirt. They can be alternately “truly nice” and “wicked tough” as required, or at least appear so. And the business is a hard one, I admit, which I would not want to get involved with. I don’t have the stomach to gladhand and beg for money and fawn and pretend respect for people (that is, the general voting public) whose intelligence I consider to be beneath my own… as these people do every day. Because I can’t be that dishonest and appear to be that ‘nice’ all the time. Sometimes I can be one, and sometimes the other, but trying to do both at once would strain me too much.
When you meet them at their fundraisers and their public appearances and parades and go to their Washington offices to beg them for favors which they should not even be in a position to bestow or to their local offices to tell them what great guys they are and how good they are for the District then they are all as nice as can be. But they’re involved in an awful business, and it rubs off on them.
“If nominated, I would shoot the asshole who nominated me. If elected, I would only serve under guard and protest and while chained to my desk,” could be my other motto. I won’t vote for anyone who wants the office; it’s that simple.