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For Game Change, a non-fictional account of the 2008 US Presidential race, the two political reporters conducted hundreds of interviews and had unusually close access to the campaigns.  They perculate some pretty interesting political morsels. For example, on p.43, the authors write that Hillary Clinton considered Bill’s administration to have been ”a tactical and operational disaster.”  ouch! The book’s overall theme calls attention to the magnitude of the difference between the actual candidates and the images of them that they portrayed through the media.  In reading about what the candidates are like in person, I am particularly struck by their foul mouths and what this intimates concerning their characters.  That we, the voters, are not privy to the candidates’ real personalities, characters and values is of great concern to me because we are basing our decisions at least in part on fabricated image.  In short, we are situated too far removed to pull the lever to discover who is behind the curtain.  The public image can differ radically from the actual person. When Hillary was a US senator from NY, she portrayed herself as bipartisan and self-effacing in the Senate when in fact she was anything but (if the authors are correct).  On the evening of her win in New Hampshire, Hillary remarked privately, “I get really tough when people fuck with me” (p. 190).  Although her public persona comes off as rather stiff, I can’t imagine her using such language on a regular basis.  Referring to Obama to her aides after one of the debates, she said “What an asshole” (p. 145).  We would never know this from how chummy she would be with him as his Secretary of State.  Images can be deceiving.  As still another example, consider John Edwards, who said to Brumberger, one of his aides:  “Why didn’t you come to me like a fucking man and tell me to stop fucking her?” (p. 134).  On the republican side, McCain is “still prone to outbursts of profanity,” but we would never know it (p. 274).  On his first visit  to his campaign headquarters, for instance, he remarked, “Waht the fuck are all these people doing here? … I am not fucking authorizing these fucking hires. Who are these fucking Bush people? Where is the fucking money?” (p. 278).  It’s almost pathological with him, though the guy was a POW and therefore deserves a pass.  Still, it is remarkable how different his real personality is from his public one.  In public, he said, “I’m very happy with the campaign” (p. 285).  It is no wonder we don’t know who our politicans are.  My reaction from all the subterranean crassness is that I’m thankful that I’m not in the political arena with them; they don’t seem like the sort of folk that I would want to associate with. Evidently, they hire like-minded staff.  Harold Ickes of Hillary’s campaign, for example, says of Barak Obama after the Rev. Wright fiasco, “This guy has been sitting in the church for twenty fucking years. If you really want to take him down, let’s take him fucking down” (p. 238).  Quite a different articulation of politics and religion than we the public are used to.  I submit that Ickes’ association of church and “fucking” is revealing as to the man’s character. It is no wonder the real personalities are masked for you and me. There are implications for how our system of government is structured and for its electoral processes.  Even though we the voters can’t be blamed for going on fake images if that is all that is available to us, we are to blame for elongating the election season and expanding popular election in larger and larger electoral districts in which there is more distance between the average voter and the candidates.  The harder we make it to get elected, the more fighting-oriented the remaining applicants will be.  Is fighting prowess really the supervening quality in good governing?  Ironically, we would perhaps get better governance were it easier to get into office.   On the matter of the number of electors per candidate, the delegates in the Constitutional Convention warned that in very large electoral districts the people would not know their candidates as well. We could demand more of our intra-state representatives and less of those in the US Government; we have a better chance of person-to-person contact with the former than the latter, and the latter are too good at playing the image game…too fucking good.

See related article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35836844/ns/business-careers/