The maddening seduction of power

There's an old saying that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don't know if that's true, but power does have a funny effect on the people who get it.

Take for example a man named Glenn. A handyman and contractor, Glenn made a reputation for himself in a township south of here in 1991 by donating a sizeable chunk of his time to building a large playground at the municipal complex. The local Republican Party, which had had a monopoly on political power for about 15 years, knew a good thing when one surfaced, and tapped Glenn to run for township committee in 1992.

Not surprisingly, he won. And that was where things started to go wrong for Glenn.

The problems started to surface in 1995, in the third year of his first term on the Township Committee, when another resident, named David, did the unthinkable. He not only mounted a campaign for the township committee under the banner of the Democratic Party, he won.

The trouble between Glenn and David began quickly. During the four years they served together -- each man was elected to a second term -- Glenn, who frequently called himself a champion of bipartisanship, called the much-shorter David a "dwarf piece of garbage," and reportedly even jumped across the dais to yell at him while he was talking to a resident after the committee meeting had ended.

As time went on, things only got worse. By virtue of being in power so exclusively for so long, members of the GOP had fallen into the habit of making deals that helped one another's financial interests. Word got into the community of a major land deal in the western portion of the township that would make some of the old-time GOP faithful a few million dollars richer. Glenn, who considered himself a watchdog for the public, saw nothing wrong with it.

By the time I came into the picture, in early 1999, there were days Glenn barely seemed to be in the same reality as anyone else. Anyone who disagreed with him was a liar. Any critique of his voting record was a personal attack. He became incapable of telling political allies from political opponents, and slapped down fellow Republicans on the township committee when they disagreed with him.

In his own eyes at least, it seemed Glenn was an unappreciated messiah. While his political opponents stayed at home watching TV and living the fine life, Glenn was wrestling with developers and fighting for the betterment of the community. He also considered himself an expert at everything, as he tried to demonstrate with one embarrassing display after another.

Not surprisingly, Glenn lost re-election in 1999, along with three other Republican committee members. For the first time in 20 years, the GOP had no representation in township government. It was an incredible upset, and contained for those willing to listen a warning against power-brokering and backroom deals.

Glenn wasn't willing to listen. While party officials opted to lay low for a while and plan for the next election, he continued to spout off rather publicly about the evil people afoot in the Democratic Party and how unappreciated he had been.

In 2000, he managed a letter-writing campaign against a Democratic committeeman seeking re-election, attacking his church attendance of all things, and penning some of the most poisonous letters I've ever read.

Not surprisingly after the Republicans lost the election that time as well -- the second year in a row, in a GOP-dominated township -- the party leadership apparently told Glenn to hit the trail.

I'd like to say that what happened with Glenn -- the slide from handyman benefactor to the shrill, embittered small-town politician -- is a rare thing, but I don't think I can. Politics, even local politics, can do strange things to the people who get involved in it.

Regardless of the party, there's an expectation among the party powerful that elected officials are going to toe the party line whether they agree with it or not. That's easy on issues where you
don't have a strong opinion, but eventually the choice will come of embracing the party position and betraying your conscience, or doing the right thing and standing by your convictions.

Very few people have the strength to be true to their principles when the pressure starts to sing the party tune. It gets lonely quickly, and power brokers usually don't get into those positions because they play nicely or fairly.

Most people start out with the small stuff, even if they don't realize it, by letting the party do their thinking for them. Some go beyond that and start playing games by voting for political advantage or to comply with what the higher-ups wish, a move that in time can lead them to abandon their own positions for whatever the party tells them. It's all the same sin, just in steadily growing degrees.

That's the path Glenn took. By the time he was through in politics, he saw nothing wrong with the Republican officers making themselves a few million dollars by adding sewerage to increase the land's attraction to developers, even though a Superior Court judge in Flemington had harsh words to say on the subject. Everything for him boiled down to a simple Republican-good, Democrat-bad formula.

That sort of simplistic thinking should bother everyone. By the time people start thinking that only good people are found on their side of the aisle, and that their side of the aisle is the only place good people can be found; that unless everything is done under their control, it's going to be done poorly; that everyone who has a criticism is a liar, a muck-raker, a troublemaker or a politically motivated malcontent; that the only view worth consideration is their own -- it's time for them to leave political life behind.

It's a shame politicians don't do that more often.