You wouldn’t know it from watching the tabloid-ready circus that passes for a debate these days, but politics is serious business.

Politicians lie, cheat, and frequently contradict themselves — all in the name of winning. Don’t listen to your mother; any politician will tell you that it is whether you win or lose, and — sorry to say — it doesn’t matter how you play the game.

You know those kids in school, the really annoying ones who whine to the professor after class because they’re quite sure their Lacanian analysis of Harry Potter deserved a solid A, not an A-minus? There’s a name for them: grade grubbers.

Presidential candidates are just like those Type A students — only it’s votes that they’re after, not grades. And — to get those votes — they will do anything from color coding their lecture notes to sleeping with the professor.

But — just as with grade grubbers — you begin to wonder whether vote grubbers can even remember why they wanted to win in the first place.

Students sometimes lose sight of the fact that they want to get A’s so they can, for example, grow up to be a doctor; politicians must have moments where they wonder how they got caught up in this rat race anyway.

If the media distract them, their friends disappoint them, and the public would rather fixate on The Next-gate, what else can they do? Win. Only win.

In 1969, an almost unrecognizably positive and hopeful Hillary Rodham ended her commencement speech at Wellesley with a classmate’s poem — words which any student or politician would be wise to heed:

My entrance into the world of so-called “social problems”
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.
The hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.

In other words: it’s how you play the game.

Tags: Elections, grade grubbers, vote grubber

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.