^{Chapman’s News & Ideas} Thank You, Candidates

We pause before the election returns come in to thank the candidates of both parties (and independents) who ran this year. Because of you, the voters had choices. The process is grueling and candidates are often twisted around by consultants and managers to be something in a campaign that they are not in real life; it’s humiliating. Imagine for example that you were one of the Democrats who declined to say whether they had voted for Obama. That was consultants using them a puppets.

Matt Miller, who lost a Democratic primary race for Congress in California earlier this year, writes for Politico Magazine an unusual and fully credible account of what it is like these days to be a candidate. Candidates in both parties could relate to what he describes.

People say such candidates are ambitious. Well, thank goodness for that. Otherwise, they might not have the stomach and the stamina to try to get to the “top of the greasy pole,” as Disraeli termed political office.

Our country has many points in its favor, many reasons for patriotism. But the one that probably get the least attention is our representative and democratic form of government that keeps winners from becoming tyrants and losers from becoming revolutionaries (or prisoners). Credit many of your freedoms to political freedom, unseemly and uncomfortable as it often is.