POLITICIANS' DELUSIONS OF MORALITY

I quit smoking (for the third or fourth time) two months ago, and I still
miss my cigars. At some point, every day, I think how sweet a puff would be
right now.

I'm sorry I ever started. I wonder how the habit caught on in the first
place, since starting is so unpleasant. The taste is loathsome and the
smoke chokes you. Why did the first man who ever smoked persist long enough
to learn to enjoy it, especially with no advertising?

Three of my four kids smoke. I wish they didn't, I hope they'll quit, but
they could do much worse. Booze, drugs and other thrills haven't hooked
them. But these are things we negotiate among ourselves. All four of them
are adults now, and they know what I'd prefer, but I figure that if my
affection doesn't stop them, my nagging won't either.

Besides, we have more important things to talk about. And when we do talk
about smoking, we talk in gentle nudges. We don't talk in that booming Ted
Baxter style that politicians adopt when the subject of tobacco comes up.
It's wonderful the way guys who take bribes, cheat on their wives and
promote late-term abortion preach the urgent necessity of protecting "our
children" from tobacco leaves, especially if they can squeeze a few hundred
billion out of the deal.

So I'm delighted that the big tobacco bill has flopped in the Senate,
leaving Washington's latest hero, Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican,
with egg on his handsome face. It finally sank in with the brighter members
of his party that this bill wasn't about "our children"; it was about
power, money, lawyers and a level of greed that must have impressed even
the tobacco companies.

When men like Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy express their concern for the
youth of America, it's always a good idea to take a close look.

Is it possible that the tobacco debacle will inspire a new birth of
humility among our politicians? For reasons that escape me, they always
fancy themselves our moral and spiritual leaders, as if they'd been plucked
out of monasteries to supervise the country.

The truth - which they ought to know better than anyone - is that they are
men with certain low skills, including the ability to raise money and speak
in bland cant. As Mae West once said, goodness has nothing to do with it.
They hope, after using all their wiles, to be chosen, by a majority of
those who bother voting in a two-party system, over a single alternative.

You might think that winning office on such terms would breed realism, the
cousin of humility. But it doesn't seem to. A man can cheat his way up,
betray his family and followers, misrepresent his opponent's views, arrange
discreetly illegal campaign donations, mouth platitudes he doesn't believe
in for a moment, and still, after winning by a whisker, feel that his
countrymen have selected him to represent them on Mount Sinai. (Never
doubting, of course, that his countrymen have chosen wisely.)

Those who repeat Churchill's dictum that democracy is the worst form of
government "except for all the others" seldom look at the others. The
confusion of power with moral elevation is worse under democracy than under
any other system.

The Soviet Politburo never seemed to have illusions about itself; dictators
like Saddam Hussein don't seem to think spiritual leadership is their
special province; the old kings of Europe enjoyed their mistresses and
hired their mercenaries and left the moral stuff to the bishops. Such men
understood that they owed their power to fortune, not virtue. Even the most
arrogant of them seldom dreamed of correcting the personal habits of their
subjects.

It would be a healthy exercise for every politician to look in the mirror
every morning and remind himself that he holds office only because, in a
two-man race against another mediocrity, a modest majority of those
half-informed people who imagined that their votes mattered reckoned that
he was the lesser evil. And they weren't too sure about that.

Checked-by: Richard Lake