Barton Swaim

“Why do we trust men who have sought and attained high office by innumerable acts of vanity and self-will? When a work colleague makes a habit of insisting on his own competence and virtue, we may tolerate him, we may even admire his work, but his vanity is not an inducement to trust him. Why, then, do we trust the men who make careers of persuading us of their goodness and greatness, and who compete for our votes? Catherine Zuckert makes this point powerfully in an essay on Tom Sawyer. Tom, remember, is brave and clever and has a firm sense of the right thing to do, but he is animated mainly by a hunger for glory. He is, in short, the essence of an able politician. “People like Tom Sawyer serve others not for the sake of the others,” writes Zuckert. “They serve because they glory in receiving glory. . . . We should reward such people with the fame they so desire—if and when they perform real public services. But we should not trust them.”II I feel the force of that last sentence now: we go badly wrong when we trust them. Indeed much of the hand-wringing commentary about the loss of trust in government resulting from Vietnam and Watergate is simply, I now think, a failure to appreciate the simple truth that politicians should never have been trusted in the first place. They may be lauded when they’re right and venerated when they’re dead, but they should never be trusted.”
― Barton Swaim, The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics

“The people involved in each of these events would have made the understandable but often mistaken assumption that the governor had a clear idea of who they were and what it was they were doing. That’s why high-level politicians need speechwriters: not because they’re so dense they need someone to tell them what to say but because no normal person can be expected to say something interesting that many times a day, on that many subjects, to that many separate groups. Talking points explain what the event is, who will be present, the event’s agenda if there is one, some relevant background, and what we—the speechwriters—believe will be appropriate or interesting for the governor to say. For the unimportant events or the ones he didn’t care much about, he would wait until three or four minutes before the event began to look at the talking points. If the event was in the office or if you were with him on the road, he preferred that you tell him what the event was and what he should say.”
― Barton Swaim, The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics