By Christine Rosen
Thursday, September 17, 2026
What are the characteristics of a good politician?
Judging by the caliber of many current aspirants for public office, it’s a
question we rarely bother to ask anymore, preferring instead to shrug and say, Who
cares so long as the politician can win elections?
We ought to care, or so argued Stimson Bullitt in To
Be a Politician, a quirky, forgotten book first published during the
Eisenhower administration and reprinted in 1977, in the aftermath of Watergate.
The son of a wealthy, well-connected Seattle family, Bullitt lunched with
Franklin D. Roosevelt at Hyde Park as a teenager, earned a Purple Heart in
World War II, and made two failed bids for Congress in the 1950s, running as a
Democrat, before settling into a successful career as a lawyer. In other words,
Bullitt was no everyman.
And yet, in his introduction to the 1977 edition of the
book, sociologist David Riesman described Bullitt as “a salty man, without
false heartiness; a brave man, without false heroics; a thoughtful man, without
pretensions,” and these qualities are evident in Bullitt’s writing. It was,
perhaps, Bullitt’s own two failed attempts to win election to Congress that
prompted him to study what made for a winning public servant, although his book
is thankfully neither a how-to manual nor a dry political science analysis. He
wrote,
My intention is
not to encourage those who consider entering politics either to go in or to
stay out. It is to offer them comprehension with which to make their choice, .
. . to give the reader better understanding of this vocation so that when he
measures a politician’s character and record of performance, he may apply
standards that not only fit what is and what can be done, but also are a guide
for what a politician ought to do and be.
Although Bullitt was writing in the 1950s, his book
offers insights that remain valuable for Americans who are deciding the fate of
candidates in the upcoming midterm elections. Bullitt was ahead of his time in
understanding the transformation of politics from a question of character into
a contest of personality, the dangers of demagoguery, and the ways mass media
and technology influence how voters perceive their leaders and how politicians
view their responsibilities.
On the role of personality in politics in the modern era,
Bullitt asked:
How do certain
aspects of personality bear on a politician’s value and success? What kinds of
personality in a politician can enable him best to reconcile his duties of
democratic leadership — to give direction and to be responsive? How are the
qualities of independent character and inner purpose in a politician related to
the need for him to serve, survive, and lead?
He was not naïve about the competing motives that
attracted people to politics, including “power, glory, zeal for contention or
success, duty, hate, oblivion, hero worship, curiosity, and enjoyment of the
work.” He knew many a politician who behaved like “a warm and shiny salesman
who rehearses his sincerity before a mirror every morning and burns a candle to
opinion polls each night.”
But the best politicians, he argued, were the men who
understood that “to enjoy politics one must enjoy people,” adding, “It helps if
one likes them as well.” That enjoyment was not a narcissistic desire to seek
attention and adulation but a give-and-take tempered by an understanding that
those same people might end up disliking the politician when he did his
job. “When a politician makes people sacrifice for their own good,” Bullitt
observed, “they may never forgive him the price he made them pay.” A good
politician understands that this is part of the bargain.
Bullitt contrasted such leaders with the growing
challenge of “men who enter politics to become the center of attention,” the
kind of would-be leader who “thinks of himself as an institution” rather than
serving the one to which he has been elected. “The demagogue who gives the
people what they want has fewer dilemmas, and they are mainly tactical. He may
enjoy an immediate ascendancy over the statesman who does not,” Bullitt wrote.
Demagogues also tend to focus on grand schemes rather than the often unglamorous,
day-to-day work of elected office, a problem that has only grown since
Bullitt’s era. As the Manhattan Institute’s Andy Smarick argued recently,
America is now
somehow burdened by countless public officials who seem entirely disinterested
in their jobs. Our national legislature is inept. The current president
appointed to many of the highest federal offices individuals comically
unprepared for those responsibilities. The palace guard of the previous
administration repeatedly lied about the cognitive decline of the president.
A surfeit of performative, unstatesmanlike politicians
plagues our political culture.
The result is evident in the functional decline of many
of our political institutions. “As both referee and advocate, [the politician]
plays in a game for which he helps to make the rules, and the rules are the
object of the game,” Bullitt argued. But demagogues lack the humility to
understand fully the consequences of the political game: “Recognition for
accomplishment is passing and uncertain.” Demagogues are politicians who
“forget that high office is a tool and not a prize,” and that tool is meant to
be used to improve the lives of the people who elected them.
Bullitt also offered prescient insights into the
declining power of political parties and the rise of new media, particularly
television, and its transformative impact on political messaging. Reading him
today, we are reminded that such problems are not new, even if the
transformation wrought by social media and the internet has accelerated them.
***
Although it may not have been his intention, Bullitt
ended up giving readers a decent list of ideal qualities to look for in a
politician. Two among them are relevant for our own time: first, “a sense of
history to avoid living only in the present and therefore assuming either that
his own epoch is eternal, that it is easy to transform, or that it can be
insulated from change.” No wonder candidates on the progressive left offer
fantasies of a new world without prisons or free markets, ruled over by a
benevolent and omnipotent state. Likewise, populist candidates on the right
offer visions of a nation that has jettisoned its allies and that rewards
winners and punishes losers based on an ever-shifting set of partisan
priorities — all to the purported end of restoring the country to the very time
when Bullitt first wrote his book.
Second, Bullitt argued that a politician “needs an inner
life with a system of principles for his direction.” Contrast that with the
general other-directedness and evanescent, social media–driven pursuit of clout
that characterizes so many younger politicians today.
Bullitt knew that we tend to get the politicians we
deserve. “The kinds of politicians’ personalities that citizens encourage and
permit partly decide the direction and execution of our public policies,” he
wrote, lamenting that character seemed to be undervalued by voters. They were
swayed, he thought, more by the appearance of “warmth” than by the evidence of
virtue.
Today, performative politics is the rule rather than the
exception. On the right, White House social media accounts offer a daily
firehose of juvenile AI slop seemingly meant to keep the president’s ego
soothed and his base entertained. On the left, politicians such as New York
City Mayor Zohran Mamdani use public funds to pay social media influencers to
promote his administration, often without disclosing that they are being paid.
“In a campaign, people are not interested in theory,” Bullitt argued. “The lessons
are more often moral than intellectual.” What moral lesson does our current
politics impart?
What we permit in our politicians also points us in the
direction of what we might, eventually, change. “As politicians have come to
need to be liked, citizens have come to need to be entertained,” Bullitt said.
“People have acquired more of the outlook of the guest or customer, whose
function is not to act and to decide but to receive, consume, and be
entertained.” He urged his fellow Americans to reject this passivity and to
reject politics as entertainment. We could do the same, if we could summon the
will. It makes no sense to complain about the quality of our politicians if we
refuse to take responsibility for the permission structure that we, the voters,
have created for them. Or, as Bullitt wrote, “If we insist on truth, we cannot
wish for illusions to beguile us.”
No comments:
Post a Comment