There was a moment right near the end of Tuesday night’s Democratic Party debate in Cleveland, Ohio, when Barack Obama remarked, almost offhandedly, “You know, there is a vanity aspect and ambition aspect to politics.” I’d been watching the debate with some indifference — as in, slouched on the couch thinking, “I’ve heard most of this before” — but this made me sit up straight. No matter what one thinks of Obama, it was a startlingly honest statement coming from the mouth of a politician.
Central to the strategy of politicians in any modern Western democracy — especially when it comes to people running for President of the United States — is to pretend ignorance of the two 800-pound gorillas, whose names are “Vanity” and “Ambition,” that always sit in the middle of any political arena. Mass communications, especially, require all serious politicians striving for power in modern democratic countries to develop a keen awareness of how they appear on television and the Internet (i.e., to cultivate a certain degree of vanity). And the arduousness of American political campaigns — where candidates often run for office for two or more years — requires a sustained, not to say fierce, ambition.
Yet almost all political candidates, when asked why they’re running for office, say they’re running for selfless reasons. They say they’re running to rectify wrongs, or out of a desire to serve the public, or because they’ve been called to public service by others, or simply out of a sense of duty. These things may be true, but they’re no more than feckless yearnings without the twin forces of vanity and ambition backing them.
Tocqueville perspicaciously observed that people living in democracies value equality above all else. We voters don’t know quite how to react when directly confronted with deeply ambitious people. In striving to become leaders, they inexorably reveal a degree of elitism our egalitarian souls find distasteful or even suspicious.
Although he merely flicked at the topic, Obama reminded us that living in a democratic society, and loving equality as we do, most of us rarely think directly about the role of vanity and ambition in politics.
Like the very rich, presidential candidates are different from you and me. They have more vanity and ambition.
