How do you learn to be a politician?
There’s no school, no textbook, no user guide.
You can learn from politicians with more experience. But all political lives end in failure — so the saying goes — so you would be learning from failures, or people on their way to becoming failures.
Besides, there’s a culture of secrecy around politics. Failures don’t like to admit their failings. Loyalty is rated more highly than truth-telling. A good part of politics is deal-making, and it might be hard to explain what got traded for what. Some of what politicians do or don’t do can be explained only by laziness and ignorance, and who wants to admit to that?
Maybe that’s why there are so few good books written by politicians about their time in politics. Apart from the culture of secrecy — which compels them to leave out all the stuff that might actually be useful to those who come after — ex-politicians are usually trying to play up their accomplishments and play down their failures. They’re re-writing history. Their books are politics in another form.
So how do you learn to be a politician?
All you can do is watch and listen. That’s what I did for fifteen years. And this is what I learned.