Of course she is. You have to be to play the game.
Anyone who wants to be President of what is arguably the most powerful country in the world is a power-seeker.
It takes an incredible ego to believe that you, more than all the smart, capable people within the borders of this nation, deserve to be President.
Almost certainly, there is someone more deserving and better-suited out there. But you fight the damn fight anyway, because you want that power, and you’re not afraid to tell people you deserve it and that they should help you get it. That’s what campaigning is.
Bernie Sanders wanted power. Barack Obama wanted power—he only had two years of experience as a Senator before campaigning for President, but he thought he could win, so he went for it. I don’t think I need to explain that the Bushes and Bill Clinton wanted power, and so they fought hard and got it.
Women who want high-level power are nearly always deemed as power-hungry, which should not be surprising because they are, in fact, just that. That this is regularly raised as a character flaw for female politicians but rarely for male ones is a bizarre but well-documented phenomenon.
When women seek a promotion, people tend to suddenly distrust them and think of them as more power-hungry and unlikeable, unlike for men, who experience no such drop in positive ratings. Their flaws and failures are brought to the front and center as major character flaws that render them unpromotable, while their skills and accomplishments are tossed far behind and aside.
This gender-based phenomenon of distrust and sudden drop in likeability was exactly what Elizabeth Warren experienced when she was seeking election as Senator.
When a woman is able to attain that position of power she seeks and can stop pushing for it, interestingly, this distrust nearly entirely disappears and is quickly forgotten. If Elizabeth Warren was actually running for President, you can be damned sure she’d have experienced angry “power-hungry” and “untrustworthy” jeers from many of the very same Bernie Sanders supporters who propped her up as their strawman female candidate.
People seek to become President for power. Every Presidential candidate in recent memory does, regardless of how far to the political left or right they may be. Every member of Congress, useless as they may or may not be, wants power. And they will fight tooth and nail to get it. Yet for men, it is rare that their reasoning for campaigning is ever chided as a character flaw as it is for women.
If you want to be in politics, you need a sense of ego. You must desire power. You want to make life-altering decisions for thousands or millions of other people, knowing that if you mess up, you can create problems on a global scale, but you’ll of course assume you’re too smart for that.
If you want to do good in the world, you don’t go have to go into the dirty world of politics, much less the immensely dirty world of Presidential-hopeful politics. You don’t put your life and they lives of your loved ones up to the microscopes of our nation’s media and allow them to inevitably be dragged through the mud. You become a teacher, or a researcher. You start a nonprofit to advocate for causes you believe in. Or you make a lot of money and donate it to people who need it.
The structure of American democratic elections naturally select for the power-hungry. You cannot win if you don’t want power really, really bad. You can phrase it in whatever altruistic terms you want. But everyone lined up at those endless debates wanted power. It’s a given.
Here’s what matters:
First: What does your candidate of choice say they believe in, and what plans do they have to act on their beliefs?
Second: In the past, have they actually acted on these beliefs in the face of high-intensity opposition and have still been able to bring about productive action?
Third: Have their past failures (they all have failures) created wide-scale problems?
That about wraps it up. It’s pretty damn simple. Vote for someone who believes in the things that you do and you actually have evidence that they can and will do those things, and that they won’t make things worse than they already are.
Politicians are not your friends. And you put yourself at risk if you let your sentiment for them cloud your judgment. They are ego-driven, power-hungry people. They might kiss your baby or smile and shake your hand on the campaign trail and tell you that they care about you, but that is besides the point. What matters is what they can get done: the policies they enact and the relationships they establish when in office. They are representatives at best, dangers at worst, and all you should hope from them is that they do the things they say they will.
