Why They Really Run

By Michael Kinsley

There are presidential candidates for virtually every taste, yet citizens find the menu inadequate. They tell pollsters they are discontented with the selection and generally sick of politics and politicians. In part, they are just being polite. The notion that people hate politics and that politicians are all phonies is so ingrained that to tell a pollster that, yeah, politicians are O.K. and the system is not so bad would almost be a violation of democratic etiquette.

Yet voters are also right to feel that something is phony about democratic politics and that it's getting worse. Even a candidate who agrees with you on all important issues and always has--no dreaded flip-flops--is forced by the conventions of politics to be disingenuous about at least one core issue: why he or she is running.

Ladies and gentlemen, they are running because they are ambitious. No, really, they are. You probably suspected as much. And yet you would abandon any candidate who dared to admit this, or at least they all believe that you would. We all are told at our high school graduations to be ambitious, then for the rest of our lives it becomes a shameful secret. Ambition can take many forms. Four decades ago, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, created a sensation with a book called Making It that revealed how even intellectuals are ambitious. But the purest form of ambition is political ambition, because it represents a desire to rule over other people.

When you hear the presidential candidates carrying on about democracy and freedom, do you ever wonder what they would be saying if they had been born into societies with different values? What if Mitt Romney had come to adulthood in Nazi Germany? What if Hillary Clinton had gone to Moscow State University and married a promising young apparatchik? What if Barack Obama had been born in Kenya, like his father, where even now people are slaughtering one another over a crooked election? Which of them would be the courageous dissidents, risking their lives for the values they talk about freely--in every sense--on the campaign trail? And which would be playing the universal human power game under the local rules, whatever they happened to be?

Without naming names, I believe that most of them would be playing the game. What motivates most politicians, especially those running for President, is closer to your classic will-to-power than to a deep desire to reform the health-care system. Alpha males are alpha males (and alpha females, ditto): it's true among apes, and it's true among humans. This doesn't make them bad people. It makes them people. It also doesn't make democracy a farce; there will always be more than enough alpha types to go around, and our right to choose among them still gives us plenty of leverage about the kind of society we live in. But because ambition can never be naked in a political campaign, it must be clothed in deceit. And that does make a farce of a lot of what goes on in our democracy.

Voters sense correctly that politics is an act. As a political campaign gets more and more professionalized, it becomes more and more of an act. This is one area in which the media and the voters really diverge. Political correspondents respect the professionalism of a well-run campaign and are quickly bored by complaints of artifice. Voters, meanwhile, still take offense and long for sincerity. This explains the cult of Harry Truman, which usually breaks out around October of election years. Among the current candidates, it explains John McCain, whose behavior as a prisoner of war brings him about as close as anyone can be to proving which side he would be on in a different kind of society.

These days, in our therapeutic culture, an ambitious politician can neutralize almost any human weakness or hunger and even turn it into a plus, as part of his or her life story. Sin and redemption have nearly become requirements for presidential candidates. Our current President has practically admitted to having been an alcoholic. It's not clear how many marriages add up to a serious disqualification, but thanks to Rudy Giuliani, we know that the number is more than three. The one sin for which redemption and forgiveness are not available is ambition. And yet it's the one sin we know they are all guilty of.