Elections are virtuous as well as necessary, we’re o^ en told, good for the health of the democracy. How, then, can we explain the curiously corrupting effect vote-seeking has on politicians? Some of it is owed to the presidency itself. “We elect a king every four years,” William H Seward, Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, said during the Civil War, when Lincoln did indeed assume despotic powers.
Presidential aspirants are Caesars in training, treated like mini-gods: the dizzy circuit of prime-time television appearances, the magazine covers, the queuing throngs. You try giving it up.