All politicians I've met (bar one) have been very intelligent or at least very cunning when lacking in hard IQ.

What all politicians who run for more than one election term understand: You need to get re-elected. All else stems from that.

The longer versions goes something like this:

1) Change is slow
2) To be able to fuel change, you must keep working at it
3) Due to 1+2, you need to be at it for a long time
4) To be at it for a long time, you need to get re-elected
5) To get re-elected you need to be popular
6) To be popular, you need to echo the sentiments of the voting masses (not minorities)
7) To really compete against others, who are also popular, you need to have a lot of funding to get coverage
8) To get lot on funding, you need to echo the sentiments of those who can fund you
9) Often the sentiments of masses and funders are in direct conflict and you have to betray one or the other
10) When in doubt, betray the masses, because priority no. 1 is to get re-elected and funders have longer memory than voters and in this day and age coverage means more than being popular due to your opinions.

Q.E.D.

And once you do the loop 1-10 plenty of times, it becomes an automaton. It runs by and feeds itself. Pretty soon, it becomes the major goal, not just the sub-goal to help you get things done.

Thus, everything is for sale, except the ability to get re-elected.

There are of course the select few who have strong principles, but they don't usually last for very long in this game, unless their principles happen to be miraculously in-line with both the voters and the funders.

exactement. For those interested, I would direct you to Richard Fenno's Homestyle or David Mayhew's The Electoral Connection.

This is pretty correct. Most local politicians that i know personally are intelligent and highly principled.

When it comes to advancing an agenda (say putting more of the budget into transit rather than road widening) they rely on their staff to tell them how far they can push it without getting thrown out of office, or what aspects of issues are really important to voters so compromises can be struck etc.

At the federal level its probably all too easy to become divorced from reality.

Presumably at higher levels the game becomes much harder as well, so to survive one has to throw those principles away (if one had them to begin with).

10 sums it up, the rest is chaff.

OH my GOSH!
BRAVO to You! This sums it all up. I'll drink to that, and I'll buy the house a round, heck, make mine a double with that!

You have just officially summed it up for all career politicians. It's all about re-election. It's all sad but true. (Metallica song ring a bell?) It all boils down to re-election. Tell them what they want to hear, must get re-elected. The means justifies the end!

I had thought about running for politics in my younger days, but on reflection, i just couldn't sleep comfortably!

sheisters