Why bad things happen to good people in politics




A veteran of America's political trenches explains why public service has become a dirty term -- and how we can clean up the system


By FRED BRANFMAN




Illustration by Adam McCauley






Fred Branfman has worked in American politics for 25 years, beginning with the war in Southeast Asia when, after serving there as an educational advisor, he helped expose the secret U.S. bombing of Laos. He subsequently worked with Tom Hayden to found 
the grassroots Campaign for Economic Democracy in California, and served
as research director for Governor Jerry Brown, helping shape the Brown administration's innovative policies in technology, education and job training. He also
served as research director for Sen. Gary Hart's think tank, co-writing the main economic plank of Hart's promising 1988 presidential campaign before it was sunk by the "Monkey Business" scandal. Branfman has worked on campaigns for city council, 
state Assembly, the U.S. Senate and U.S. President.


In 1990, following his father's death and his mother's stroke, Branfman dropped out of politics and began a spiritual journey that took him from India, where he worked briefly at Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying; to Hungary where he studied with spiritual teacher Laszlo Honti; to Jerusalem, where he lived and studied with Hasidim; and to six months of silent meditation, including a three-month retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA. 


Branfman is currently directing For Generations to Come, a San Francisco-based  project that supports people grappling with the meaning of life in the face of their own death.





  
how is it that most of our politicians, left or right,
start out well-motivated -- a teenaged Bill Clinton earnestly
pumping John F. Kennedy's hand, an idealistic Newt Gingrich
visiting European battlefields and vowing to end war -- and
turn years later into the paunchy, cynical and compromised pols that we have come to so distrust?


We tend to blame the politicians themselves, focusing on Clinton's indecisiveness or Gingrich's
pettiness. But in fact, our present system would
corrupt even Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama, were either to run for office in America. 


To a young person asking me for advice about getting into politics today, I'd say you must be prepared to confront the Four Iron Laws of political
life:






Law #1: 
Money talks, bullshit walks.




Congressman Ozzie Meyers of Abscam fame was right.
Your main activity in politics, for the rest of your
life, will be raising money. And raising it from total
strangers, many of whom you will neither like nor respect,
and who are mainly interested in having their egos stroked
and/or getting something out of you.


The chief personal trait you will need to succeed is
insincerity. We're talking a dozen or more phone calls a
day, as you exude warmth to disembodied voices, no matter
how tired, distracted or miserable you actually are.


We're talking an endless round of cocktail parties,
breakfasts, lunches and dinners, making small talk with
strangers, laughing at their jokes, learning to tell little
stories with a wink of the eye and pat on the shoulder,
communicating how much you really like and value people for
whom you feel nothing.




Next page: Paranoid? Or just realistic?