Responsible citizens really ought to take the time to settle for themselves the distinction between a politician and a public servant, and then attribute to each camp every one of the officeholders who represent them at the national, state, county, and local levels of government.
In my mind a public servant holds and is aware he holds office at the pleasure of his constituents, ever-conscious of the appropriateness of his tenuous tenure. He may even self-impose a fixed number of terms during which he allows himself to serve his neighbors so as to avoid giving the impression, or worse, of having asserted ownership of the office for a duration of his own or his handlers' pleasure and choosing.
A public servant passes through an office and gladly returns to private citizenship, pleased to have fulfilled an obligation shared by all citizens, that to take ownership of his government by direct participation in it. He recognizes the responsibility he accepts for safekeeping democracy, even at its most local and basic stratum, and acts to preserve and to pass laws and ordinances that are not contrary to the public good and the public will, until he may vouchsafe his office to his successor. Most importantly, he is careful not to strip off by degrees the rights of his fellow citizens by the passage of multiple and unnecessary laws, or by the overturning of good and necessary laws passed before him.
When an officeholder passes from being a servant to a politician he refuses to leave when he has overstayed his welcome. He assembles to himself a cadre of supporters whose overriding purpose it is to ensure continued election by whatever means. His tenacious defense of his precious possession is awesome and alarming. The interests who support his continuation in office demand his loyalty, and eventually compel his obedience, in exchange for the insidious influences of lucre and flattery and manufactured adulation. A politician is bought. A public servant desires to return to his field. A politician will die in office, propped up by toadies and sycophants, and piles and piles of money.
A public servant is sincere. He proposes or votes for unpopular legislation when and because it is right to do so. He responds to dumbfounded and disbelieving critics who furiously clamor for his head that they may have it because he will not run for office again, and then he keeps his word and doesn't. A politician, rather, votes for unpopular legislation because he knows there is not a damn thing his constituents will do about, all the town hall meetings and tea parties in the world notwithstanding. No one is voting him out. He is in it for the long haul.
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A public servant does not cast hypocritical votes. When, for instance, a legislature determines that a governor ought not to have the right to appoint, say, an interim United States senator to fill a vacant seat from his state, believing as a body, rather, that the knowledgeable citizens of that state have the greater right to fill the seat, a public servant would not, a mere five years later, feign a change of heart and join with his fellow public servants in even considering eliminating that law and arrogating to themselves the authority to reassign that right to a subsequent governor who happens now to share the party affiliation of those in the majority of that legislature. A politician would, however, and a legislature full of them, an awesome and alarming thing, certainly will.
Every true and honest citizen with the capacity to reason beyond his own political inclinations must consider such an act of brazen and irredeemably professional politicians to be nothing short of an insult. It is beyond an insult. Such an act is an absolute denigration of the importance of each and every citizen these politicians ostensibly represent, a thorough rejection of the slightest consideration of consequence for their perfidy, a complete and undivided usurpation of each and every citizen's right to choose their own representation, and these politicians will do it because the citizens will do nothing in response. No one is going to vote them out. They're in it for the long haul.
Nicholas J. Voegeli is a certified public accountant, former Sun Prairie City Councilor and retired Navy officer.
