You'd Have to Be Crazy to Want to Run for Office

Here’s the state of politics today: In Connecticut, we have a guy who lied about serving in Vietnam running against a woman who used to run the WWE. America has, in short, a total dearth of “convincing or even plausible candidates,” and it’s easy to figure out why, writes Christopher Hitchens in Slate. “Consider: What normal person would consider risking their career and their family in order to undergo the incessant barrage of intrusive questioning about every aspect of their lives?”

And that’s just the start. There’s also “the constant pettifogging and chatter of Facebook and Twitter,” and “the treadmill of fundraising and unending tyranny of the opinion polls.” There’s the pressures of populism. “How many times can you stand in front of an audience and state: ‘I will put the people of X first’?” Politicians love this line, yet it serves only as “a confession that to you, all politics is yokel.” Thanks to all this, young, talented and intelligent people may be politically active, but “the great honor of serving their country in the legislature is only offered to them at a price that is now way too steep.” (More Election 2010 stories.)