Historically, politicians have been admired. Americans trusted presidents to run the country—they trusted that the people in the House and the Senate knew what they were doing. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. People today complain that the candidates for president get worse and worse each election year. Why is that? And are they really getting worse?
I like to believe the answer is no. Of course, there are certainly exceptions to this answer (i.e. the fact that we have a candidate with a spoken agenda to build a wall along the Mexican border and also ban Muslims). But for the most part, I don’t think candidates and other politicians are getting worse. We’re simply viewing them from a different perspective.
Before the media played as big of a role as it does today, Americans often considered politicians to be almost greater than human. They had to be smart enough to understand how to run a country, which meant they certainly couldn’t be just like you and me. We think of ourselves trying to run a country, and we cringe. We think of the coworker we don’t like very much trying to run a country, and we get into a fit of nervous laughter—the kind of laughter that fades out when you realize how truly disastrous it would be. But with the emergence of the media, we’ve begun to recognize that politicians are more like ourselves than we ever imagined.
In the first half of our country’s existence, politicians traveled all over to give speeches, often catering the speech to each state. Besides word of mouth, people would have no idea that a politician said something completely different to another state in order to claim more votes. Clearly, this is no longer a possibility since every speech is recorded and broadcast for everyone to see. Rather than trying to please one audience of people at a time, politicians are now trying to please the entire nation all at once. It’s no surprise that this change has garnered more widespread discontentment, especially since the problems and lifestyles of people in Minnesota are different than the problems and lifestyles of people in, say, Florida. Politicians used to be able to please a large percentage of the country, but now it seems nearly impossible to please anyone.
We can thank 24-hour news coverage for that. It’s not uncommon for a large portion of that time to be filled with two people of questionable intelligence bickering about what’s wrong with certain candidates. Even if it’s just background noise while you’re making dinner, that kind of negativity will seep into your mind and have an effect on how you view politics and politicians. The other portion of news coverage, besides the sliver that contains actual news, seems to be filled with gossipy segments about the personal lives of candidates—literally any speck of dirt that can be used against them. Imagine being one of today’s politicians! There is no room for past, present or future error, which seems pretty ridiculous considering life is full of mistakes. That speeding ticket you got when you were 18 years old? Yeah, that will get leaked and someone will hate you for it (even if that person has gotten one, too).
Admittedly, people have been finding and spilling dirt on politicians for a long time. The difference is that the dirt used to involve politics. It involved a person doing a poor job as a senator or a governor, or for example, voting for something endorsed by another party. But now we are able to find out more and more about a politician’s personal life, and we attack them for anything we see as wrong or inappropriate.
Take the scandal involving Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. Cheating is bad. It was a pretty sleazy thing for them to do. But what really bothers me is the hypocrisy that resulted. Many of the men who introduced and supported the effort to impeach Clinton were cheaters themselves. According to Forbes Magazine, “Newt Gingrich cheated on his first wife with the woman who would become his second, and then cheated on her with the woman who became his third wife.” He was leading the impeachment effort while doing the same exact thing. Cheating is bad, but it’s not illegal, and you probably shouldn’t be fired from your job because of it. The cheating scandal doesn’t make Bill Clinton a bad president. A bad husband? Yep. A man with questionable values? Of course! But it doesn’t have anything to do with the way he led the country. Without media, this scandal would not have been made so public.
The media has become the mean girl in high school—the one who has to put everyone down to feel more important and successful. Admittedly, there are some current politicians who are absolutely terrible, and do terrible things. (This is less to do with the politics themselves, and more to do with us—the people supporting and encouraging the terrible politicians. But that’s a topic for another day.) When we look back on the presidents who have been widely admired—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—we forget that they also had personal lives. They weren’t perfect. Just like every other person on this earth is not perfect. Granted, there are some people who are better suited than others for a position like President of the United States. But if we keep expecting candidates to be perfect people sent from some higher power, we will never truly admire or respect another politician. And I think that’s really sad.
