Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life - Softcover

Introduction
Personal and Public Perceptions
 
I am a politician—have been most of my adult life. Politics is not usually looked on as a noble profession, so I don’t tell people that is what I do when I am introduced. I would rather they get to know me first, discover something else about me that might go on the plus side to offset all the negative assumptions about politicians. I have relied on the belief that even though politics has an unsavory reputation and politicians are not highly regarded, most seem to like and respect the politicians they know personally. This has been true in my own experience. With few exceptions, the more I worked with others in the profession, the more appreciation I had for them and their efforts, even though we might not have always agreed.
 
Despite its reputation, politics is attractive and tends to be addictive. Once people are persuaded to become active participants, they get hooked. They find politics invigorating and fulfilling. Still, there are some who, after their first try, become disillusioned and drop out because they think that participating in the game entitles them to win, but they are not in the majority. It has not been my experience that familiarity with politics breeds contempt. Rather, familiarity brings some degree of appreciation and respect, even though one knows more about the less savory parts of the game. Contempt for politics seems strongest among those who choose to be spectators and not get involved. So I tell you without apology that I am a politician. I want to bring you into that experience so you can see for yourself what the game looks and feels like to a participant.
 
I was introduced to politics the year I finished a master’s program in journalism and became a staff intern for the Illinois legislature. I was part of a Ford Foundation program to encourage state legislatures to develop their own sources of information and become less dependent on executive agencies and lobbyists in making decisions. That was fifty years ago.
 
I lived in Springfield, the state capital, for twenty-five years. For eight of those years I represented the city and surrounding area in the Illinois House of Representatives. The city lived and breathed politics. The leading families had made their fortunes doing business with the state. Who you knew was important. Loyalty mattered. Being reliable brought rewards. Politics was influence, and jobs and contracts.
 
It is fitting that the architecture of that prairie city is dominated by the dome of the State Capitol, legacy of Abraham Lincoln, the city’s favorite son. It was Lincoln who, when dividing the spoils as a member of the Long Nine in the statehouse, saw the economic potential of politics and worked to make Springfield the state capital, letting members from other cities have the Illinois Central Railroad and the state’s new land grant university.
 
I experienced politics from a variety of vantage points during my years in Springfield: Democratic precinct captain, candidate, township official, staff to the legislative leaders, state representative, assistant to the governor, deputy state auditor general, campaign manager, and policy consultant. I also went back to the university for a graduate degree in economics, a discipline intertwined with politics in many ways. Shortly before leaving Illinois I ran for the state senate, a race I lost badly.
 
Twenty-four years ago, Kathleen Vinehout and I bought a farm in rural western Wisconsin and we moved our family north. There she ran a fifty-cow dairy operation for ten years before being elected to the Wisconsin State Senate, defeating the incumbent in a close race. Since then, she has been reelected twice. From the vantage point of political spouse, I experienced politics up close and personal in a second state, one with a very different reputation from Illinois. Since 1950, Illinois handily leads Wisconsin in the number of officeholders sent to jail, but it also produced five leaders of their respective parties in Congress and one U.S. president. Both results, I think, have their origins in the fact that in Illinois, many more political families go back several generations. The young are schooled early in the game, and everyone plays for keeps. The underlying processes in the two states, how-ever, are very similar. Political forces and incentives are not limited by state boundaries or to any particular party. The ideological differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties are great, but both play the political game the same way.
 
I began writing Our Politics as a way to make sense of the political game both for myself and for others. Why is it played the way it is? What are the forces that have shaped and changed it? What are the all too human motivations that animate the players and impact the outcomes? After one of Kathleen’s campaigns, a university professor sent her a questionnaire asking about her personal reactions, because, he said, researchers don’t know very much about how politics is experienced by the politician.
 
Lots of eyes watch politicians and record what is seen from the outside. Numerous memoirs are written by politicians that focus mostly on personalities and relationships, what happened to who and when. This book is not the personal story of an individual player in the political arena. It is not a memoir. Rather it seeks to describe, from the point of view of a player on the field, what the arena looks like, how the league is structured and the teams put together, how the rules that influence strategies and determine winners are made, and the impact those structures and forces have on the political experience of being a candidate and an elected public official.
 
Even those who have closely observed the process from the outside are surprised when they move to the inside. George Thiem, a Pulitzer Prize–winning political reporter for the old Chicago Daily News, who won his prize covering Illinois state government and was later elected to the General Assembly as part of a “blue-ribbon ticket,” wrote at the end of his first and only term:
 
It is only three feet from the press box in the Illinois House of Representatives to one of the big red leather chairs on the House floor. But when you make the transition from newspaper correspondent to member of the General Assembly as I did last January, you enter a new world. I never quite realized how different it would be. Now, after six months, I can say in all candor it isn’t as easy as it looks. The pressures, the frustrations, the constant necessity for making decisions, the close contact with hundreds of human problems add up to a bewildering yet challenging experience.
 
Our Politics attempts to bridge that three-foot gap.
 
I have thoroughly enjoyed politics and being a politician. There is exhilaration in the struggle of the campaign and the cheers of the crowd. Watching the votes come in on election night and being in the lead is a great high. There is a lifelong and instant camaraderie with those who have shared the political experience. Making decisions for the community and enacting laws gives a sense of meaning, importance, and direction. Being recognized on the street massages the ego, although at times I would have preferred to be anonymous. Politics has been a good life.
 
The endlessly fascinating part of politics has been the people I met. During the few times in my life I had a regular job, I found that I would get into a rut driving the same streets from home to work every day, running into the same people, having the same conversations. Not so with politics. I became familiar with every neighborhood and street in the city. I went to cocktail...