When incapacitated or even dead candidates win elections, it gets clearer that the candidate is only the emblem of the team.
Even for a candidate with all of his faculties, the job of senator or president is too huge for one man to wrap his mind around. He needs a group to help him, instruct him, direct him.
Unless my eyes decieve me there are three kinds of arrangements: where the candidate manages his own staff and organization, where the candidate inherits the system (Yes Minister?), and where the organization anoints the candidate.
Who is part of the package you vote for/fight for? Who is Fetterman's regent? Who is the power behind the WhiteHouse teleprompter? this month.
I lived in Ottawa during the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Canadian_federal_election and was in a bible-study with several individuals my own age who worked on parliament hill as staff to various tory MPs. It was a trying time for them as they all lost their jobs when their bosses lost their elections.
ReplyDeleteHowever there was a large pool of newly-elected never-served-in-parliament "Reform" party MPs who were in search of experienced staff, so they all quickly found equivalent new jobs in short order, and continued to write position papers for their new boss, influenced by their reading the same editorials, authors, and think-tanks that they'd read before.
Oddly enough, in each case after reading their briefs the new bosses all turned out to have pretty much the same position on all the bills brought forward from the previous parliament as their previous boss had held.