There were two guys like that in my class at CMU: Dec/an McCu//agh*, and... another guy. Hmm, I have no idea what happened to that guy post-graduation. I know he got involved with Opus Dei. I'd be shocked if nothing came of that smarmy fucker.
*who wasn't seeking office, but was pretty nakedly ambitious, and was also involved in some ugliness with a GF
I knew one guy like this in the left-wing organizations at college. He would always dress like a 40-year-old in a button-down shirt and hand out Democrat candidate bumper stickers, but otherwise behave like a normal member of left-wing organizations. He got nowhere near politics, unfortunately for him, because he didn't have any money and Pitt (unlike Howard, amazingly) was not the place to find left-wing people with money to network with.
Found by following the link in the previous post. Coincidence? I think not...
My debate nerd friends (high school friends who did college debate) all know (knew) Ted Cruz. And uniformly think he is Satan risen from the sewers of hell.
I knew one guy in college who was planning to run for office at some point. He is on the ballot this November for a statewide office and will probably win.
6: As anybody who read Sandman knows, Death is female.
Anyway, I never knew anybody like that and I never did debate or model congress.
How many Presidents were this type of person? Bill Clinton is the one that came to mind.
The only extracurricular activity I did was journalism and they didn't let me talk to the student government types because I wasn't a journalism major or because I was an asshole or something.
Yes, I also know a few people who knew young Ted Cruz, and he really does seem to have been unusually hated, even for people of this type. I mean people HATE him in the "worst person I have ever met" sense.
I knew a bunch of people of this type, of course, having gone to fancy ass schools and being a lawyer; some of the not that bad ones are quite powerful now, some have gone nowhere, one of the worst, and a guy I've known well since I was 14, is both one of the most successful and most evil.
AIHMHB, I went to high school with a guy who is now a former U.S. Senator. He moved into the area as a sophomore and by senior year was popular enough to easily win the election for senior class president.
Not so much aspiring to be mayor (there weren't really any mayors when I was at uni), but Oxford was lousy with these types, especially in OUSU. None from my year have made it into national politics that I know of (as MPs or MEPs I mean), but there are probably some local councillors.
On the Onion link, I'd never encountered a "senior class gift campaign" before. Wow. They hit you up for cash (like, on top of fees) before you've even left the university?
Ted Cruz does seem to been an amazing person in his ability to inspire a deep, profound loathing in anyone who interacts with him. It's one of the things that makes his successful political career kind of amazing. Of all the slimy things you could cynically expect of a politician "openly hated by everyone that knows him" is something I don't think anyone could reasonably expect.
I am not upset that some people like this succeed. Sometimes they are not conniving fiends but are people with a passion and a goal.
I can't speak for Reed (or yes, any other politician), but someone I knew in college was a Chinese-born immigrant, who came to the US when was 12; he worked with his parents every weekend in their shop and volunteered at a local hospital. He majored in engineering. His plan: MD/PhD from MIT/Harvard, eventual training in pediatric surgery, and a job back home near his parents at a major medical center, where he would run a lab (research on artificial organs) and save children.
He's 52, and that's exactly what he's doing. Was it annoying to be in his engineering class? Yup. Am I complaining? No. Would I trust him with a child's life? yes. Am I hoping that as he steps down from his surgical career, we actually get the artificial liver he was dreaming of 30 years ago? Yes.
Yeah, someone could say but you're not talking about a politician, but I think there can be honorable politicians, even though they do have to get themselves dirty to actually have any power.
I've made a lot of life choices that keep me from ever crossing paths with this kind of person.
...the artificial liver he was dreaming of 30 years ago?
Ugh. Isn't Taco Bell enough artificial meat for the world.
I've made a lot of life choices that keep me from ever resulted in repeatedly crossing paths with this kind of person. Wahoowa!
21: no, "Wahoowa!" sounds more like trombone players.
Oxford was lousy with these types, especially in OUSU.
Was it ever. I knew one of them vaguely, one Sh*r*d*n W*stl*k*, and I recently learned that he was a SPAD for Er/c P/ckles, which is not only exactly where I thought he would end up, but precisely where he deserved to end up.
15 is a good point. Normally you expect them to have some sort of ability to be personally charming because, you know, they're in politics.
There was an article a little while ago, maybe in Vox, arguing that the reason so many mainstream politicians lack a good public persona (I think it mentioned Gore, Dole, Boehner) is that you can be good at the behind-closed-doors side of the job, garnering donations and endorsements and organizing different actors and all that, without actually having charisma.
Have seen a few students like this over the years. There was one memorable one at Georgetown in the early nineties who seem to fashion himself as a young Bill Clinton. Reasonable strategy though doesn't appear to have worked out.
Only person in college like this was so generally disdained that it seemed clear that his ceiling would probably be town council. On the other hand, the present Governor of Colorado was a housemate one year and he was a totally likeable person and was not at all someone who was aspiring to a political career, just a normal bright and slightly self-effacing person. Haven't seen or heard from him in >40 years but he'd be a natural running mate for Hillary -- governor experience, from the West, popular in a state that Dems need to carry -- but would make the age of the ticket somewhere around 130 so I think she'll want someone younger.
1: huh, we must have been at C|\/|U at almost the same time. I thought Declan ended up at the EFF which is maybe not as real-world powerful as he hoped but still lets him get adulation from the masses.
23: there must be *some* people who don't loathe Ted Cruz. Right? Or maybe they hate him but feel they owe him a favor?
I think the most ambitious and successful person I went to college with is now a partner in one of the most important law firms in Omaha. I'm going to call that a win for him.
The most successful person I was close to is probably the motorized wheel chair making guy.
Oh god, that smarmy fuck who cried in third grade because his smarmy speech didn't win him a trip to Washington probably has a job in the Walker administration. I CAN'T LOOK. He had such a viscerally satisfying losing streak all through school. This is some kind of parable about liberal complacency, isn't it.
I think my high school principal deliberately didn't send me to Model UN and that kind of stuff because she thought I was trending toward being too smarmy.
One thing I've always felt is that you need to be mildly mentally ill to be a politician, at least mostly. At a minimum, you need to believe -- and I mean sincerely believe, and most of them do believe this -- that it's not just good for you personally to be in a position of power, but that it's good for the WORLD if people rally to your banner and donate massive amounts of time, energy and money to get you a job. That's weird!
AIHPMHB, some professor once told a story in service of the point that politicians tend to push themselves socially and go through swings of over- and underconfidence. After someone (George Wallace, I think) lost a big election, he retired to his bed inconsolable about his future chances. After various unsuccessful attempts to lift him up, his staff withdrew a bunch of cash from his campaign account and literally poured it over him in bed to remind him of his resources.
Then what? They wrapped up all the money in the bedsheets, made a hobo sack, and swung it at him until he fell out?
That's also why Scrooge McDuck never suffered from depression.
It's why I bathe in a tub of $5 bills nightly. There's over $500 in there, goddamnit, and I feel good.
That's why I always wash my hands after touching money.
I could only afford to do that with nickels. That sounds uncomfortable. I guess that's why poor people are sad.
I don't remember his name but I remember that some guy who wanted to be in politics (not as the politician, but as a consultant) was assigned to our naked vegetarian co-op. He was pleasant enough, open about being in the wrong place, and adamant that he absolutely never be in any pictures with us.
"Wahoowa!" sounds more like trombone players.
Buncha blowhards. And they just slide their way through life.
38 is why I wash vegetables before eating them.
38 -- I think I might know that guy. Did he end up in City of Berkeley politics?
The reason you don't need to wash bananas is because United Fruit is sufficiently evil that you can be sure no hippie taint was ever near your fruit.
38: "Assigned" by whom or in what context? Campaigning for the co-op?
You didn't get assigned to volunteer for a nudist group when you turned 18?
There are several houses in the co-op system. Applicants can express preferences but get assigned by Central Office. Sometimes there's a striking misfit. Usually there's room to transfer to another house by the following semester.
41: Honestly, I don't remember. He was fair, blondish, light red-ish hair. A little heavy. Nice enough, smarmy.
Hmmm maybe not. My accidentally-in-the-veggie-co-op straight arrow politician guy was rail thin.
There was a minor risk in the Berkeley co-op system that you would end up living with unattractive nudists or 28 year old mentally ill non-student heroin addicts*, but that didn't happen that often and it was so, so cheap. I lived in one for a bit, not as an undergrad, and it was so awesome. I'm surprised more colleges don't have the same thing, basically ultra-cheap non-frat frat-like group housing for weirdos. I wonder if it's still as cheap.
Oh, co-op as in living place rather than store.
And the website says $450-880 per month, which I guess is still insanely cheap for Berkeley.
That includes food. Which co-op did you live in for a bit?
group housing for weirdos
It requires the right housing stock, former boarding houses or former frats. It'd be hard to make it work financially without that.
36/40 - On the internet no one knows you're a raccoon.
that it's not just good for you personally to be in a position of power, but that it's good for the WORLD if people rally to your banner and donate massive amounts of time, energy and money to get you a job. That's weird!
Well, no, strictly you just need to sincerely believe that it's good for the WORLD if you're in a position of power instead of any of the other clowns running for the position. That's a much less outrageous thing to believe.
Disagree. 53 is a rational position for a voter or a normal person to have. It explains why some people get involved in politics at the local level. But it doesn't really hold for a substantial political campaign. Given how brutal and all-consuming a major campaign is, "I guess I'm not as bad as those other morons" isn't enough to provide the motivation to sustain one psychologically for a political campaign. You need something more, some kind of personal sense that giving power to you is justified because you're the personal embodiment of something bigger and more important.
55: They have to believe in something? They can't just be selfish egomaniacs?
Don't you disagree with somebody I'm agreeing with.
There is a sad story of how I almost went to Cal and then had the plan scuttled by my mother for reasons of cost, then on May 2 got accepted to the co-op where my sane, responsible pianist friend lived, which would make it affordable, then couldn't rescind the rejection because they were oversubscribed, and so the year of knocking myself out cramming two years of high school into one and getting myself accepted to my top-choice college ended in the most baffling way. For a few months I stopped feeling like I had any agency at all.
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I think this is the lifetime peak depressive desire to leave my family and spare them the pain of living with me. Of all the chronic diseases to saddle them with surely this is the worst and dullest, endlessly broadcasting its idiocies like a broken car alarm.
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I mean, let us at least acknowledge, however much worse the alternative would be, that I do make them suffer, and not trivially. Let us have a moment of compassion for them. This is about all I've got on the "don't suffer in silence, reach out" self-care front. As you were.
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Are you having this lifetime peak now, or are you describing the months after getting screwed out of going to Cal?
53: Sounds like my justification for being on the board of our homeowners association the last twenty-plus years. I went to my first board meeting shortly after we bought in, and didn't like the way the then board was treating a fellow homeowner. So I ran for the board so I could object when they did that. I figured someone needs to be running things, and it's better not to leave it to those who have an obsessive desire to control other people's lives.
Now. (Or half an hour ago. It's going hilariously hour-by-hour; now I'm full of happy endorphins because I survived the last hour! This is so fucked up.) I was too bewildered back then to have such feelings. I did jump on the existentialist fiction canon and read it all, though; no better timing possible.
On the main topic: for the big campaigns you also have to have a personality that relishes performance, in addition to all these beliefs, right? That can mix things up in odd ways.
Hang in there, lk. Most people, I think, make most other people suffer, and make their families suffer the most. But, as you say, it's a lot better than the alternative.
Then I am going to hope that it was indeed your lifetime peak, and you are now on the downslope away from it, never to return.
Take good care lk. Sending best wishes your way.
Now you're even further away from your lifetime peak! And now you're even further! (Hang in there. That sounds awful.)
Lately whenever I imagine political personalities the foremost is Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, because that has been on television at the gym a lot. News on the Rialto, vampires: you messed with the wrong railsplitter.
lk, it sucks, but take care of yourself. In a good way, not the all-too-attractive "I'm going to drink this bathtub full of brownie batter" way.
What is wrong with the brownie batter alternative?
It's all so strange, Karamazov, such sorrow and then brownie-batter pancakes after it. Thanks, you guys.
72: Well, you know in the sequel that Dostoyevsky didn't live to complete, they all lived happily ever after.
71: Drinking the batter from the bathtub is gross. Proper self-care requires the use of a series of mugs or glasses.
74: Anyway, haven't we already established that the bathtub is where you keep your money?
It's where you keep your gin, surely.
I put it in the drawer with the kitchen towels, in the back. We don't use it often.
76: Nah - it's where you make your gin.
lk: let it all be downhill from that peak. You made it
Hang in there, lk. We're all here for you.
You know, lk, when you're feeling down, feeling blue, and you find yourself rereading Dostoyevsky, your perspective is likely to be more than a little bit skewed. And those Russian novelists won't help you: a fascinating window into a "traditional" world in the throes of western-style industrialization, but (or therefore?) their emotional register is, er, somewhat extreme.
Hang in there.
Having been that family member a couple of times, yes it can now and then be a bit of a drag, but nothing like what would be years-long consuming anguish and grief if anything were to happen to the beloved sometimes-annoying one.
82. gets it exactly right. Hang in there, kid.
All good things to you, lurkey. I've found other chronic conditions are plenty annoying for loved ones too, and it goes with the territory. But loving through that is part of loving.
de-lurking to offer supportive wishes to Lurid.
Somewhat past my lifetime peak, I think there's no way you could be as burdensome as you think you are (when at the peak).
Has the bouldering gym been of help?
plus, 82.
Best