NE OF MY favorite tasks of being a senator is hosting town hall meetings. I held thirty-nine of them my first year in the Senate, all across Illinois, in tiny rural towns like Anna and prosperous suburbs like Naperville, in black churches on the South Side and a college in Rock Island. There’s not a lot of fanfare involved. My staff will call up the local high school, library, or community college to see if they’re willing to host the event. A week or so in advance, we advertise in the town newspaper, in church bulletins, and on the local radio station. On the day of the meeting I’ll show up a half hour early to chat with town leaders and we’ll discuss local issues, perhaps a road in need of repaving or plans for a new senior center. After taking a few photographs, we enter the hall where the crowd is waiting. I shake hands on my way to the stage, which is usually bare except for a podium, a microphone, a bottle of water, and an American flag posted in its stand. And then, for the next hour or so, I answer to the people who sent me to Washington.

Attendance varies at these meetings: We’ve had as few as fifty people turn out, as many as two thousand. But however many people show up, I am grateful to see them. They are a cross-section of the counties we visit: Republican and Democrat, old and young, fat and skinny, truck drivers, college professors, stay-at-home moms, veterans, schoolteachers, insurance agents, CPAs, secretaries, doctors, and social workers. They are generally polite and attentive, even when they disagree with me (or one another). They ask me about prescription drugs, the deficit, human rights in Myanmar, ethanol, bird flu, school funding, and the space program. Often they will surprise me: A young flaxen-haired woman in the middle of farm country will deliver a passionate plea for intervention in Darfur, or an elderly black gentleman in an inner-city neighborhood will quiz me on soil conservation.

And as I look out over the crowd, I somehow feel encouraged. In their bearing I see hard work. In the way they handle their children I see hope. My time with them is like a dip in a cool stream. I feel cleansed afterward, glad for the work I have chosen.

At the end of the meeting, people will usually come up to shake hands, take pictures, or nudge their child forward to ask for an autograph. They slip things into my hand—articles, business cards, handwritten notes, armed-services medallions, small religious objects, good-luck charms. And sometimes someone will grab my hand and tell me that they have great hopes for me, but that they are worried that Washington is going to change me and I will end up just like all the rest of the people in power.

Please stay who you are, they will say to me.

Please don’t disappoint us.

IT IS AN American tradition to attribute the problem with our politics to the quality of our politicians. At times this is expressed in very specific terms: The president is a moron, or Congressman So-and-So is a bum. Sometimes a broader indictment is issued, as in “They’re all in the pockets of the special interests.” Most voters conclude that everyone in Washington is “just playing politics,” meaning that votes or positions are taken contrary to conscience, that they are based on campaign contributions or the polls or loyalty to party rather than on trying to do what is right. Often, the fiercest criticism is reserved for the politician from one’s own ranks, the Democrat who “doesn’t stand for anything” or the “Republican in Name Only.” All of which leads to the conclusion that if we want anything to change in Washington, we’ll need to throw the rascals out.

And yet year after year we keep the rascals right where they are, with the reelection rate for House members hovering at around 96 percent.

Political scientists can give you a number of reasons for this phenomenon. In today’s interconnected world, it’s difficult to penetrate the consciousness of a busy and distracted electorate. As a result, winning in politics mainly comes down to a simple matter of name recognition, which is why most incumbents spend inordinate amounts of their time between elections making sure their names are repeated over and over again, whether at ribbon cuttings or Fourth of July parades or on the Sunday morning talk show circuit. There’s the well-known fund-raising advantage that incumbents enjoy, for interest groups—whether on the left or the right—tend to go with the odds when it comes to political contributions. And there’s the role of political gerrymandering in insulating House members from significant challenge: These days, almost every congressional district is drawn by the ruling party with computer-driven precision to ensure that a clear majority of Democrats or Republicans reside within its borders. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to say that most voters no longer choose their representatives; instead, representatives choose their voters.

Another factor comes into play, though, one that is rarely mentioned but that helps explain why polls consistently show voters hating Congress but liking their congressman. Hard as it may be to believe, most politicians are pretty likable folks.

Certainly I found this to be true of my Senate colleagues. One-on-one they made for wonderful company—I would be hard-pressed to name better storytellers than Ted Kennedy or Trent Lott, or sharper wits than Kent Conrad or Richard Shelby, or warmer individuals than Debbie Stabenow or Mel Martinez. As a rule they proved to be intelligent, thoughtful, and hardworking people, willing to devote long hours and attention to the issues affecting their states. Yes, there were those who lived up to the stereotype, those who talked interminably or bullied their staffs; and the more time I spent on the Senate floor, the more frequently I could identify in each senator the flaws that we all suffer from to varying degrees—a bad temper here, a deep stubbornness or unquenchable vanity there. For the most part, though, the quotient of such attributes in the Senate seemed no higher than would be found in any random slice of the general population. Even when talking to those colleagues with whom I most deeply disagreed, I was usually struck by their basic sincerity—their desire to get things right and leave the country better and stronger; their desire to represent their constituents and their values as faithfully as circumstances would allow.

So what happened to make these men and women appear as the grim, uncompromising, insincere, and occasionally mean characters that populate our nightly news? What was it about the process that prevented reasonable, conscientious people from doing the nation’s business? The longer I served in Washington, the more I saw friends studying my face for signs of a change, probing me for a newfound pomposity, searching for hints of argumentativeness or guardedness. I began examining myself in the same way; I began to see certain characteristics that I held in common with my new colleagues, and I wondered what might prevent my own transformation into the stock politician of bad TV movies.

ONE PLACE TO start my inquiry was to understand the nature of ambition, for in this regard at least, senators are different. Few people end up being United States senators by accident; at a minimum, it requires a certain megalomania, a belief that of all the gifted people in your state, you are somehow uniquely qualified to speak on their behalf; a belief sufficiently strong that you are willing to endure the sometimes uplifting, occasionally harrowing, but always slightly ridiculous process we call campaigns.

Moreover, ambition alone is not enough. Whatever the tangle of motives, both sacred and profane, that push us toward the goal of becoming a senator, those who succeed must exhibit an almost fanatical single-mindedness, often disregarding their health, relationships, mental balance, and dignity. After my primary campaign was over, I remember looking at my calendar and realizing that over a span of a year and a half, I had taken exactly seven days off. The rest of the time I had typically worked twelve to sixteen hours a day. This was not something I was particularly proud of. As Michelle pointed out to me several times a week during the campaign, it just wasn’t normal.

Neither ambition nor single-mindedness fully accounts for the behavior of politicians, however. There is a companion emotion, perhaps more pervasive and certainly more destructive, an emotion that, after the giddiness of your official announcement as a candidate, rapidly locks you in its grip and doesn’t release you until after Election Day. That emotion is fear. Not just fear of losing—although that is bad enough—but fear of total, complete humiliation.

I still burn, for example, with the thought of my one loss in politics, a drubbing in 2000 at the hands of incumbent Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush. It was a race in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong, in which my own mistakes were compounded by tragedy and farce. Two weeks after announcing my candidacy, with a few thousand dollars raised, I commissioned my first poll and discovered that Mr. Rush’s name recognition stood at about 90 percent, while mine stood at 11 percent. His approval rating hovered around 70 percent—mine at 8. In that way I learned one of the cardinal rules of modern politics: Do the poll before you announce.

Things went downhill from there. In October, on my way to a meeting to secure an endorsement from one of the few party officials who had not already committed to my opponent, I heard a news flash on the radio that Congressman Rush’s adult son had been shot and killed by a pair of drug dealers outside his house. I was shocked and saddened for the congressman, and effectively suspended my campaign for a month.

Then, during the Christmas holidays, after having traveled to Hawaii for an abbreviated five-day trip to visit my grandmother and reacquaint myself with Michelle and then- eighteen-month-old Malia, the state legislature was called back into special session to vote on a piece of gun control legislation. With Malia sick and unable to fly, I missed the vote, and the bill failed. Two days later, I got off the red-eye at O’Hare Airport, a wailing baby in tow, Michelle not speaking to me, and was greeted by a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune indicating that the gun bill had fallen a few votes short, and that state senator and congressional candidate Obama “had decided to remain on vacation” in Hawaii. My campaign manager called, mentioning the potential ad the congressman might be running soon—palm trees, a man in a beach chair and straw hat sipping a mai tai, a slack key guitar being strummed softly in the background, the voice-over explaining, “While Chicago suffered the highest murder rate in its history, Barack Obama…”

I stopped him there, having gotten the idea.

And so, less than halfway into the campaign, I knew in my bones that I was going to lose. Each morning from that point forward I awoke with a vague sense of dread, realizing that I would have to spend the day smiling and shaking hands and pretending that everything was going according to plan. In the few weeks before the primary, my campaign recovered a bit: I did well in the sparsely covered debates, received some positive coverage for proposals on health care and education, and even received the Tribune endorsement. But it was too little too late. I arrived at my victory party to discover that the race had already been called and that I had lost by thirty-one points.

I’m not suggesting that politicians are unique in suffering such disappointments. It’s that unlike most people, who have the luxury of licking their wounds privately, the politician’s loss is on public display. There’s the cheerful concession speech you have to make to a half-empty ballroom, the brave face you put on as you comfort staff and supporters, the thank-you calls to those who helped, and the awkward requests for further help in retiring debt. You perform these tasks as best you can, and yet no matter how much you tell yourself differently—no matter how convincingly you attribute the loss to bad timing or bad luck or lack of money—it’s impossible not to feel at some level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community, that you don’t quite have what it takes, and that everywhere you go the word “loser” is flashing through people’s minds. They’re the sorts of feelings that most people haven’t experienced since high school, when the girl you’d been pining over dismissed you with a joke in front of her friends, or you missed a pair of free throws with the big game on the line—the kinds of feelings that most adults wisely organize their lives to avoid.

Imagine then the impact of these same emotions on the average big-time politician, who (unlike me) has rarely failed at anything in his life—who was the high school quarterback or the class valedictorian and whose father was a senator or admiral and who has been told since he was a child that he was destined for great things. I remember talking once to a corporate executive who had been a big supporter of Vice President Al Gore during the 2000 presidential race. We were in his suitably plush office, overlooking all of midtown Manhattan, and he began describing to me a meeting that had taken place six months or so after the election, when Gore was seeking investors for his then-fledgling television venture.

“It was strange,” the executive told me. “Here he was, a former vice president, a man who just a few months earlier had been on the verge of being the most powerful man on the planet. During the campaign, I would take his calls any time of day, would rearrange my schedule whenever he wanted to meet. But suddenly, after the election, when he walked in, I couldn’t help feeling that the meeting was a chore. I hate to admit it, because I really like the guy. But at some level he wasn’t Al Gore, former vice president. He was just one of the hundred guys a day who are coming to me looking for money. It made me realize what a big steep cliff you guys are on.”

A big steep cliff, the precipitous fall. Over the past five years, Al Gore has shown the satisfaction and influence that a life after politics can bring, and I suspect the executive is eagerly taking the former vice president’s calls once again. Still, in the aftermath of his 2000 loss, I imagine Gore would have sensed the change in his friend. Sitting there, pitching his television idea, trying to make the best of a bad situation, he might have thought how ridiculous were the circumstances in which he found himself; how after a lifetime of work he could have lost it all because of a butterfly ballot that didn’t align, while his friend the executive, sitting across from him with the condescending smile, could afford to come in second in his business year after year, maybe see his company’s stock tumble or make an ill-considered investment, and yet still be considered successful, still enjoy the pride of accomplishment, the lavish compensation, the exercise of power. It wasn’t fair, but that wouldn’t change the facts for the former vice president. Like most men and women who followed the path of public life, Gore knew what he was getting himself into the moment he decided to run. In politics, there may be second acts, but there is no second place.

MOST OF THE other sins of politics are derivative of this larger sin—the need to win, but also the need not to lose. Certainly that’s what the money chase is all about. There was a time, before campaign finance laws and snooping reporters, when money shaped politics through outright bribery; when a politician could treat his campaign fund as his personal bank account and accept fancy junkets; when big honoraria from those who sought influence were commonplace, and the shape of legislation went to the highest bidder. If recent news reports are accurate, these ranker forms of corruption have not gone away entirely; apparently there are still those in Washington who view politics as a means of getting rich, and who, while generally not dumb enough to accept bags of small bills, are perfectly prepared to take care of contributors and properly feather their beds until the time is finally ripe to jump into the lucrative practice of lobbying on behalf of those they once regulated.

More often, though, that’s not the way money influences politics. Few lobbyists proffer an explicit quid pro quo to elected officials. They don’t have to. Their influence comes simply from having more access to those officials than the average voter, having better information than the average voter, and having more staying power when it comes to promoting an obscure provision in the tax code that means billions for their clients and that nobody else cares about.

As for most politicians, money isn’t about getting rich. In the Senate, at least, most members are already rich. It’s about maintaining status and power; it’s about scaring off challengers and fighting off the fear. Money can’t guarantee victory—it can’t buy passion, charisma, or the ability to tell a story. But without money, and the television ads that consume all the money, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose.

The amounts of money involved are breathtaking, particularly in big state races with multiple media markets. While in the state legislature, I never needed to spend more than $100,000 on a race; in fact, I developed a reputation for being something of a stick-in-the-mud when it came to fund-raising, coauthoring the first campaign finance legislation to pass in twenty-five years, refusing meals from lobbyists, rejecting checks from gaming and tobacco interests. When I decided to run for the U.S. Senate, my media consultant, David Axelrod, had to sit me down to explain the facts of life. Our campaign plan called for a bare-bones budget, a heavy reliance on grassroots support and “earned media”—that is, an ability to make our own news. Still, David informed me that one week of television advertising in the Chicago media market would cost approximately half a million dollars. Covering the rest of the state for a week would run about $250,000. Figuring four weeks of TV, and all the overhead and staff for a statewide campaign, the final budget for the primary would be around $5 million. Assuming I won the primary, I would then need to raise another $10 or $15 million for the general election.

I went home that night and in neat columns proceeded to write down all the people I knew who might give me a contribution. Next to their names, I wrote down the maximum amounts that I would feel comfortable asking them for.

My grand total came to $500,000.

Absent great personal wealth, there is basically one way of raising the kind of money involved in a U.S. Senate race. You have to ask rich people for it. In the first three months of my campaign, I would shut myself in a room with my fund-raising assistant and cold-call previous Democratic donors. It was not fun. Sometimes people would hang up on me. More often their secretary would take a message and I wouldn’t get a return call, and I would call back two or three times until either I gave up or the person I was calling finally answered and gave me the courtesy of a person-to-person rejection. I started engaging in elaborate games of avoidance during call time—frequent bathroom breaks, extended coffee runs, suggestions to my policy staff that we fine-tune that education speech for the third or fourth time. At times during these sessions I thought of my grandfather, who in middle age had sold life insurance but wasn’t very good at it. I recalled his anguish whenever he tried to schedule appointments with people who would rather have had a root canal than talk to an insurance agent, as well as the disapproving glances he received from my grandmother, who for most of their marriage made more money than he did.

More than ever, I understood how my grandfather must have felt.

At the end of three months, our campaign had raised just $250,000—well below the threshold of what it would take to be credible. To make matters worse, my race featured what many politicians consider their worst nightmare: a self-financing candidate with bottomless pockets. His name was Blair Hull, and he had sold his financial trading business to Goldman Sachs a few years earlier for $531 million. Undoubtedly he had a genuine, if undefined, desire to serve, and by all accounts he was a brilliant man. But on the campaign trail he was almost painfully shy, with the quirky, inward manner of someone who’d spent most of his life alone in front of a computer screen. I suspect that like many people, he figured that being a politician—unlike being a doctor or airline pilot or plumber—required no special expertise in anything useful, and that a businessman like himself could perform at least as well, and probably better, than any of the professional pols he saw on TV. In fact, Mr. Hull viewed his facility with numbers as an invaluable asset: At one point in the campaign, he divulged to a reporter a mathematical formula that he’d developed for winning campaigns, an algorithm that began

Probability = 1/(1 + exp(-1 × (-3.9659056 + (General Election Weight × 1.92380219)… and ended several indecipherable factors later.

All of which made it easy to write off Mr. Hull as an opponent—until one morning in April or May, when I pulled out of the circular driveway of my condo complex on the way to the office and was greeted by row upon row of large red, white, and blue lawn signs marching up and down the block. BLAIR HULL FOR U.S. SENATE, the signs read, and for the next five miles I saw them on every street and along every major thoroughfare, in every direction and in every nook and cranny, in barbershop windows and posted on abandoned buildings, in front of bus stops and behind grocery store counters—Hull signs everywhere, dotting the landscape like daisies in spring.

There is a saying in Illinois politics that “signs don’t vote,” meaning that you can’t judge a race by how many signs a candidate has. But nobody in Illinois had ever seen during the course of an entire campaign the number of signs and billboards that Mr. Hull had put up in a single day, or the frightening efficiency with which his crews of paid workers could yank up everybody else’s yard signs and replace them with Hull signs in the span of a single evening. We began to read about certain neighborhood leaders in the black community who had suddenly decided that Mr. Hull was a champion of the inner city, certain downstate leaders who extolled Mr. Hull’s support of the family farm. And then the television ads hit, six months out and ubiquitous until Election Day, on every station around the state around the clock—Blair Hull with seniors, Blair Hull with children, Blair Hull ready to take back Washington from the special interests. By January 2004, Mr. Hull had moved into first place in the polls and my supporters began swamping me with calls, insisting that I had to do something, telling me I had to get on TV immediately or all would be lost.

What could I do? I explained that unlike Mr. Hull I practically had a negative net worth. Assuming the best-case scenario, our campaign would have enough money for exactly four weeks of television ads, and given this fact it probably didn’t make sense for us to blow the entire campaign budget in August. Everybody just needed to be patient, I would tell supporters. Stay confident. Don’t panic. Then I’d hang up the phone, look out the window, and happen to catch sight of the RV in which Hull tooled around the state, big as an ocean liner and reputedly just as well appointed, and I would wonder to myself if perhaps it was time to panic after all.

In many ways, I was luckier than most candidates in such circumstances. For whatever reason, at some point my campaign began to generate that mysterious, elusive quality of momentum, of buzz; it became fashionable among wealthy donors to promote my cause, and small donors around the state began sending checks through the Internet at a pace we had never anticipated. Ironically, my dark-horse status protected me from some of the more dangerous pitfalls of fund-raising: Most of the corporate PACs avoided me, and so I owed them nothing; the handful of PACs that did give, like the League of Conservation Voters, typically represented causes I believed in and had long fought for. Mr. Hull still ended up outspending me by a factor of six to one. But to his credit (although perhaps to his regret) he never ran a negative TV ad against me. My poll numbers stayed within shouting distance of his, and in the final weeks of the campaign, just as my own TV spots started running and my numbers began to surge, his campaign imploded when allegations surfaced that he’d had some ugly run-ins with an ex-wife.

So for me, at least, the lack of wealth or significant corporate support wasn’t a barrier to victory. Still, I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways. Certainly it eliminated any sense of shame I once had in asking strangers for large sums of money. By the end of the campaign, the banter and small talk that had once accompanied my solicitation calls were eliminated. I cut to the chase and tried not to take no for an answer.

But I worry that there was also another change at work. Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.

And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways—I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways—I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share with them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate: the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in rural parts of the state.

Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population—that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions. You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most of the people you represent.

And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you don’t want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all over again. You realize that you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh face; you haven’t changed Washington, and you’ve made a lot of people unhappy with difficult votes. The path of least resistance—of fund-raisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops—starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought.

THERE ARE OTHER forces at work on a senator. As important as money is in campaigns, it’s not just fund-raising that puts a candidate over the top. If you want to win in politics—if you don’t want to lose—then organized people can be just as important as cash, particularly in the low-turnout primaries that, in the world of the gerrymandered political map and divided electorates, are often the most significant race a candidate faces. Few people these days have the time or inclination to volunteer on a political campaign, particularly since the day-to-day tasks of working on a campaign generally involve licking envelopes and knocking on doors, not drafting speeches and thinking big thoughts. And so, if you are a candidate in need of political workers or voter lists, you go where people are already organized. For Democrats, this means the unions, the environmental groups, and the prochoice groups. For Republicans, it means the religious right, local chambers of commerce, the NRA, and the antitax organizations.

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term “special interests,” which lumps together ExxonMobil and bricklayers, the pharmaceutical lobby and the parents of special-ed kids. Most political scientists would probably disagree with me, but to my mind, there’s a difference between a corporate lobby whose clout is based on money alone, and a group of like-minded individuals—whether they be textile workers, gun aficionados, veterans, or family farmers—coming together to promote their interests; between those who use their economic power to magnify their political influence far beyond what their numbers might justify, and those who are simply seeking to pool their votes to sway their representatives. The former subvert the very idea of democracy. The latter are its essence.

Still, the impact of interest groups on candidates for office is not always pretty. To maintain an active membership, keep the donations coming in, and be heard above the din, the groups that have an impact on politics aren’t fashioned to promote the public interest. They aren’t searching for the most thoughtful, well-qualified, or broad-minded candidate to support. Instead, they are focused on a narrow set of concerns—their pensions, their crop supports, their cause. Simply put, they have an ax to grind. And they want you, the elected official, to help them grind it.

During my own primary campaign, for example, I must have filled out at least fifty questionnaires. None of them were subtle. Typically they would contain a list of ten or twelve questions, phrased along the following lines: “If elected, will you solemnly pledge to repeal the Scrooge Law, which has resulted in widows and orphans being kicked to the curb?”

Time dictated that I fill out only those questionnaires sent by organizations that might actually endorse me (given my voting record, the NRA and National Right to Life, for example, did not make the cut), so I could usually answer “yes” to most questions without any major discomfort. But every so often I would come across a question that gave me pause. I might agree with a union on the need to enforce labor and environmental standards in our trade laws, but did I believe that NAFTA should be repealed? I might agree that universal health care should be one of the nation’s top priorities, but did it follow that a constitutional amendment was the best way to achieve that goal? I found myself hedging on such questions, writing in the margins, explaining the difficult policy choices involved. My staff would shake their heads. Get one answer wrong, they explained, and the endorsement, the workers, and the mailing list would all go to the other guy. Get them all right, I thought, and you have just locked yourself into the pattern of reflexive, partisan jousting that you have promised to help end.

Say one thing during the campaign and do another thing once in office, and you’re a typical, two-faced politician.

I lost some endorsements by not giving the right answer. A couple of times, a group surprised us and gave me their endorsement despite a wrong answer.

And then sometimes it didn’t matter how you filled out your questionnaire. In addition to Mr. Hull, my most formidable opponent in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate was the Illinois state comptroller, Dan Hynes, a fine man and able public servant whose father, Tom Hynes, happened to be a former state senate president, Cook County assessor, ward committeeman, Democratic National Committee member, and one of the most well-connected political figures in the state. Before even entering the race, Dan had already sewn up the support of 85 of the 102 Democratic county chairmen in the state, the majority of my colleagues in the state legislature, and Mike Madigan, who served as both Speaker of the House and chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party. Scrolling down the list of endorsements on Dan’s website was like watching the credits at the end of a movie—you left before it was finished.

Despite all this, I held out hope for a few endorsements of my own, particularly those of organized labor. For seven years I had been their ally in the state legislature, sponsoring many of their bills and making their case on the floor. I knew that traditionally the AFL-CIO endorsed those who had a strong record of voting on their behalf. But as the campaign got rolling, odd things began to happen. The Teamsters held their endorsement session in Chicago on a day when I had to be in Springfield for a vote; they refused to reschedule, and Mr. Hynes got their endorsement without them ever talking to me. Visiting a labor reception during the Illinois State Fair, we were told that no campaign signs would be allowed; when my staff and I arrived, we discovered the room plastered with Hynes posters. On the evening of the AFL-CIO endorsement session, I noticed a number of my labor friends averting their eyes as I walked through the room. An older guy who headed up one of the state’s bigger locals walked up and patted me on the back.

“It’s nothing personal, Barack,” he said with a rueful smile. “You know, Tom Hynes and me go back fifty years. Grew up in the same neighborhood. Belonged to the same parish. Hell, I watched Danny grow up.”

I told him I understood.

“Maybe you could run for Danny’s spot once he goes to the Senate. Whaddya think? You’d make a heck of a comptroller.”

I went over to my staff to tell them we would not be getting the AFL-CIO endorsement.

Again things worked out. The leaders of several of the largest service workers unions—the Illinois Federation of Teachers, SEIU, AFSCME, and UNITE HERE, representing textile, hotel, and foodservice workers—broke ranks and chose to endorse me over Hynes, support that proved critical in giving my campaign some semblance of weight. It was a risky move on their part; had I lost, those unions might have paid a price in access, in support, in credibility with their members.

So I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I don’t consider this corrupting in any way; I don’t mind feeling obligated toward home health-care workers who clean bedpans every day for little more than the minimum wage, or toward teachers in some of the toughest schools in the country, many of whom have to dip into their own pockets at the beginning of every school year to buy crayons and books for their students. I got into politics to fight for these folks, and I’m glad a union is around to remind me of their struggles.

But I also understand that there will be times when these obligations collide with other obligations—the obligation to inner-city children who are unable to read, say, or the obligation to children not yet born whom we are saddling with debt. Already there have been some strains—I’ve proposed experimenting with merit pay for teachers, for example, and have called for raising fuel-efficiency standards despite opposition from my friends at the United Auto Workers. I like to tell myself that I will continue to weigh the issues on the merits—just as I hope my Republican counterpart will weigh the no-new-tax pledge or opposition to stem cell research that he made before the election in light of what’s best for the country as a whole, regardless of what his supporters demand. I hope that I can always go to my union friends and explain why my position makes sense, how it’s consistent with both my values and their long-term interests.

But I suspect that the union leaders won’t always see it that way. There may be times when they will see it as betrayal. They may alert their members that I have sold them out. I may get angry mail and angry phone calls. They may not endorse me the next time around.

And perhaps, if that happens to you enough times, and you almost lose a race because a critical constituency is mad at you, or you find yourself fending off a primary challenger who’s calling you a traitor, you start to lose your stomach for confrontation. You ask yourself, just what does good conscience dictate exactly: that you avoid capture by “special interests” or that you avoid dumping on your friends? The answer is not obvious. So you start voting as you would answer a questionnaire. You don’t ponder your positions too deeply. You check the yes box up and down the line.

POLITICIANS HELD CAPTIVE by their big-money contributors or succumbing to interest-group pressure—this is a staple of modern political reporting, the story line that weaves its way into just about every analysis of what’s wrong with our democracy. But for the politician who is worried about keeping his seat, there is a third force that pushes and pulls at him, that shapes the nature of political debate and defines the scope of what he feels he can and can’t do, the positions he can and can’t take. Forty or fifty years ago, that force would have been the party apparatus: the big-city bosses, the political fixers, the power brokers in Washington who could make or break a career with a phone call. Today, that force is the media.

A disclaimer here: For a three-year span, from the time that I announced my candidacy for the Senate to the end of my first year as a senator, I was the beneficiary of unusually—and at times undeservedly—positive press coverage. No doubt some of this had to do with my status as an underdog in my Senate primary, as well as my novelty as a black candidate with an exotic background. Maybe it also had something to do with my style of communicating, which can be rambling, hesitant, and overly verbose (both my staff and Michelle often remind me of this), but which perhaps finds sympathy in the literary class.

Moreover, even when I’ve been at the receiving end of negative stories, the political reporters I’ve dealt with have generally been straight shooters. They’ve taped our conversations, tried to provide the context for my statements, and called me to get a response whenever I’ve been criticized.

So personally, at least, I have no cause for complaint. That doesn’t mean, though, that I can afford to ignore the press. Precisely because I’ve watched the press cast me in a light that can be hard to live up to, I am mindful of how rapidly that process can work in reverse.

Simple math tells the tale. In the thirty-nine town hall meetings I held during my first year in office, turnout at each meeting averaged four to five hundred people, which means that I was able to meet with maybe fifteen to twenty thousand people. Should I sustain this pace for the remainder of my term, I will have had direct, personal contact with maybe ninety-five to one hundred thousand of my constituents by the time Election Day rolls around.

In contrast, a three-minute story on the lowest-rated local news broadcast in the Chicago media market may reach two hundred thousand people. In other words, I—like every politician at the federal level—am almost entirely dependent on the media to reach my constituents. It is the filter through which my votes are interpreted, my statements analyzed, my beliefs examined. For the broad public at least, I am who the media says I am. I say what they say I say. I become who they say I’ve become.

The media’s influence on our politics comes in many forms. What gets the most attention these days is the growth of an unabashedly partisan press: talk radio, Fox News, newspaper editorialists, the cable talk-show circuit, and most recently the bloggers, all of them trading insults, accusations, gossip, and innuendo twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As others have noted, this style of opinion journalism isn’t really new; in some ways, it marks a return to the dominant tradition of American journalism, an approach to the news that was nurtured by publishers like William Randolph Hearst and Colonel McCormick before a more antiseptic notion of objective journalism emerged after World War II.

Still, it’s hard to deny that all the sound and fury, magnified through television and the Internet, coarsens the political culture. It makes tempers flare, helps breed distrust. And whether we politicians like to admit it or not, the constant vitriol can wear on the spirit. Oddly enough, the cruder broadsides you don’t worry about too much; if Rush Limbaugh’s listeners enjoy hearing him call me “Osama Obama,” my attitude is, let them have their fun. It’s the more sophisticated practitioners who can sting you, in part because they have more credibility with the general public, in part because of the skill with which they can pounce on your words and make you seem like a jerk.

In April 2005, for example, I appeared on the program to dedicate the new Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield. It was a five-minute speech in which I suggested that Abraham Lincoln’s humanity, his imperfections, were the qualities that made him so compelling. “In [Lincoln’s] rise from poverty,” I said in one part of my remarks, “his self-study and ultimate mastery of language and of law, in his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all of this, we see a fundamental element of the American character, a belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

A few months later, Time magazine asked if I would be interested in writing an essay for a special issue on Lincoln. I didn’t have time to write something new, so I asked the magazine’s editors if my speech would be acceptable. They said it was, but asked if I could personalize it a bit more—say something about Lincoln’s impact on my life. In between meetings I dashed off a few changes. One of those changes was to the passage quoted above, which now read, “In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles.”

No sooner had the essay appeared than Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, weighed in. Under the title “Conceit of Government,” she wrote: “This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time Magazine and explaining that he’s a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better.” She went on to say, “There is nothing wrong with Barack Obama’s resume, but it is a log-cabin-free zone. So far it is also a greatness-free zone. If he keeps talking about himself like this it always will be.”

Ouch!

It’s hard to tell, of course, whether Ms. Noonan seriously thought I was comparing myself to Lincoln, or whether she just took pleasure in filleting me so elegantly. As potshots from the press go, it was very mild—and not entirely undeserved.

Still, I was reminded of what my veteran colleagues already knew—that every statement I made would be subject to scrutiny, dissected by every manner of pundit, interpreted in ways over which I had no control, and combed through for a potential error, misstatement, omission, or contradiction that might be filed away by the opposition party and appear in an unpleasant TV ad somewhere down the road. In an environment in which a single ill-considered remark can generate more bad publicity than years of ill-considered policies, it should have come as no surprise to me that on Capitol Hill jokes got screened, irony became suspect, spontaneity was frowned upon, and passion was considered downright dangerous. I started to wonder how long it took for a politician to internalize all this; how long before the committee of scribes and editors and censors took residence in your head; how long before even the “candid” moments became scripted, so that you choked up or expressed outrage only on cue.

How long before you started sounding like a politician?

There was another lesson to be learned: As soon as Ms. Noonan’s column hit, it went racing across the Internet, appearing on every right-wing website as proof of what an arrogant, shallow boob I was (just the quote Ms. Noonan selected, and not the essay itself, generally made an appearance on these sites). In that sense, the episode hinted at a more subtle and corrosive aspect of modern media—how a particular narrative, repeated over and over again and hurled through cyberspace at the speed of light, eventually becomes a hard particle of reality; how political caricatures and nuggets of conventional wisdom lodge themselves in our brain without us ever taking the time to examine them.

For example, it’s hard to find any mention of Democrats these days that doesn’t suggest we are “weak” and “don’t stand for anything.” Republicans, on the other hand, are “strong” (if a little mean), and Bush is “decisive” no matter how often he changes his mind. A vote or speech by Hillary Clinton that runs against type is immediately labeled calculating; the same move by John McCain burnishes his maverick credentials. “By law,” according to one caustic observer, my name in any article must be preceded by the words “rising star”—although Noonan’s piece lays the groundwork for a different if equally familiar story line: the cautionary tale of a young man who comes to Washington, loses his head with all the publicity, and ultimately becomes either calculating or partisan (unless he can somehow manage to move decisively into the maverick camp).

Of course, the PR machinery of politicians and their parties helps feed these narratives, and over the last few election cycles, at least, Republicans have been far better at such “messaging” than the Democrats have been (a cliché that, unfortunately for us Democrats, really is true). The spin works, though, precisely because the media itself are hospitable to spin. Every reporter in Washington is working under pressures imposed by editors and producers, who in turn are answering to publishers or network executives, who in turn are poring over last week’s ratings or last year’s circulation figures and trying to survive the growing preference for PlayStation and reality TV. To make the deadline, to maintain market share and feed the cable news beast, reporters start to move in packs, working off the same news releases, the same set pieces, the same stock figures. Meanwhile, for busy and therefore casual news consumers, a well-worn narrative is not entirely unwelcome. It makes few demands on our thought or time; it’s quick and easy to digest. Accepting spin is easier on everybody.

This element of convenience also helps explain why, even among the most scrupulous reporters, objectivity often means publishing the talking points of different sides of a debate without any perspective on which side might actually be right. A typical story might begin: “The White House today reported that despite the latest round of tax cuts, the deficit is projected to be cut in half by the year 2010.” This lead will then be followed by a quote from a liberal analyst attacking the White House numbers and a conservative analyst defending the White House numbers. Is one analyst more credible than the other? Is there an independent analyst somewhere who might walk us through the numbers? Who knows? Rarely does the reporter have time for such details; the story is not really about the merits of the tax cut or the dangers of the deficit but rather about the dispute between the parties. After a few paragraphs, the reader can conclude that Republicans and Democrats are just bickering again and turn to the sports page, where the story line is less predictable and the box score tells you who won.

Indeed, part of what makes the juxtaposition of competing press releases so alluring to reporters is that it feeds that old journalistic standby—personal conflict. It’s hard to deny that political civility has declined in the past decade, and that the parties differ sharply on major policy issues. But at least some of the decline in civility arises from the fact that, from the press’s perspective, civility is boring. Your quote doesn’t run if you say, “I see the other guy’s point of view” or “The issue’s really complicated.” Go on the attack, though, and you can barely fight off the cameras. Often, reporters will go out of their way to stir up the pot, asking questions in such a way as to provoke an inflammatory response. One TV reporter I know back in Chicago was so notorious for feeding you the quote he wanted that his interviews felt like a Laurel and Hardy routine.

“Do you feel betrayed by the Governor’s decision yesterday?” he would ask me.

“No. I’ve talked to the Governor, and I’m sure we can work out our differences before the end of session.”

“Sure…but do you feel betrayed by the Governor?”

“I wouldn’t use that word. His view is that…”

“But isn’t this really a betrayal on the Governor’s part?”

The spin, the amplification of conflict, the indiscriminate search for scandal and miscues—the cumulative impact of all this is to erode any agreed-upon standards for judging the truth. There’s a wonderful, perhaps apocryphal story that people tell about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the brilliant, prickly, and iconoclastic late senator from New York. Apparently, Moynihan was in a heated argument with one of his colleagues over an issue, and the other senator, sensing he was on the losing side of the argument, blurted out: “Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, but I’m entitled to my own opinion.” To which Moynihan frostily replied, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”

Moynihan’s assertion no longer holds. We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation. Depending on your viewing preferences, global climate change is or is not dangerously accelerating; the budget deficit is going down or going up.

Nor is the phenomenon restricted to reporting on complicated issues. In early 2005, Newsweek published allegations that U.S. guards and interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention center had goaded and abused prisoners by, among other things, flushing a Koran down the toilet. The White House insisted there was absolutely no truth to the story. Without hard documentation and in the wake of violent protests in Pakistan regarding the article, Newsweek was forced to publish a self-immolating retraction. Several months later, the Pentagon released a report indicating that some U.S. personnel at Guantanamo had in fact engaged in multiple instances of inappropriate activity—including instances in which U.S. female personnel pretended to smear menstrual blood on detainees during questioning, and at least one instance of a guard splashing a Koran and a prisoner with urine. The Fox News crawl that afternoon: “Pentagon finds no evidence of Koran being flushed down the toilet.”

I understand that facts alone can’t always settle our political disputes. Our views on abortion aren’t determined by the science of fetal development, and our judgment on whether and when to pull troops out of Iraq must necessarily be based on probabilities. But sometimes there are more accurate and less accurate answers; sometimes there are facts that cannot be spun, just as an argument about whether it’s raining can usually be settled by stepping outside. The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those—like the White House press office—who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.

Today’s politician understands this. He may not lie, but he understands that there is no great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may be complicated. The truth may cause consternation; the truth will be attacked; the media won’t have the patience to sort out all the facts and so the public may not know the difference between truth and falsehood. What comes to matter then is positioning—the statement on an issue that will avoid controversy or generate needed publicity, the stance that will fit both the image his press folks have constructed for him and one of the narrative boxes the media has created for politics in general. The politician may still, as a matter of personal integrity, insist on telling the truth as he sees it. But he does so knowing that whether he believes in his positions matters less than whether he looks like he believes; that straight talk counts less than whether it sounds straight on TV.

From what I’ve observed, there are countless politicians who have crossed these hurdles and kept their integrity intact, men and women who raise campaign contributions without being corrupted, garner support without being held captive by special interests, and manage the media without losing their sense of self. But there is one final hurdle that, once you’ve settled in Washington, you cannot entirely avoid, one that is certain to make at least a sizable portion of your constituency think ill of you—and that is the thoroughly unsatisfactory nature of the legislative process.

I don’t know a single legislator who doesn’t anguish on a regular basis over the votes he or she has to take. There are times when one feels a piece of legislation to be so obviously right that it merits little internal debate (John McCain’s amendment prohibiting torture by the U.S. government comes to mind). At other times, a bill appears on the floor that’s so blatantly one-sided or poorly designed that one wonders how the sponsor can maintain a straight face during debate.

But most of the time, legislation is a murky brew, the product of one hundred compromises large and small, a blend of legitimate policy aims, political grandstanding, jerry-rigged regulatory schemes, and old-fashioned pork barrels. Often, as I read through the bills coming to the floor my first few months in the Senate, I was confronted with the fact that the principled thing was less clear than I had originally thought; that either an aye vote or a nay vote would leave me with some trace of remorse. Should I vote for an energy bill that includes my provision to boost alternative fuel production and improves the status quo, but that’s wholly inadequate to the task of lessening America’s dependence on foreign oil? Should I vote against a change in the Clean Air Act that will weaken regulations in some areas but strengthen regulation in others, and create a more predictable system for corporate compliance? What if the bill increases pollution but funds clean coal technology that may bring jobs to an impoverished part of Illinois?

Again and again I find myself poring over the evidence, pro and con, as best I can in the limited time available. My staff will inform me that the mail and phone calls are evenly divided and that interest groups on both sides are keeping score. As the hour approaches to cast my vote, I am frequently reminded of something John F. Kennedy wrote fifty years ago in his book Profiles in Courage:

Few, if any, face the same dread finality of decision that confronts a Senator facing an important call of the roll. He may want more time for his decision—he may believe there is something to be said for both sides—he may feel that a slight amendment could remove all difficulties—but when that roll is called he cannot hide, he cannot equivocate, he cannot delay—and he senses that his constituency, like the Raven in Poe’s poem, is perched there on his Senate desk, croaking “Nevermore” as he casts the vote that stakes his political future.

That may be a little dramatic. Still, no legislator, state or federal, is immune from such difficult moments—and they are always far worse for the party out of power. As a member of the majority, you will have some input in any bill that’s important to you before it hits the floor. You can ask the committee chairman to include language that helps your constituents or eliminate language that hurts them. You can even ask the majority leader or the chief sponsor to hold the bill until a compromise more to your liking is reached.

If you’re in the minority party, you have no such protection. You must vote yes or no on whatever bill comes up, with the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be a compromise that either you or your supporters consider fair or just. In an era of indiscriminate logrolling and massive omnibus spending bills, you can also rest assured that no matter how many bad provisions there are in the bill, there will be something—funding for body armor for our troops, say, or some modest increase in veterans’ benefits—that makes the bill painful to oppose.

In its first term, at least, the Bush White House was a master of such legislative gamesmanship. There’s an instructive story about the negotiations surrounding the first round of Bush tax cuts, when Karl Rove invited a Democratic senator over to the White House to discuss the senator’s potential support for the President’s package. Bush had won the senator’s state handily in the previous election—in part on a platform of tax cuts—and the senator was generally supportive of lower marginal rates. Still, he was troubled by the degree to which the proposed tax cuts were skewed toward the wealthy and suggested a few changes that would moderate the package’s impact.

“Make these changes,” the senator told Rove, “and not only will I vote for the bill, but I guarantee you’ll get seventy votes out of the Senate.”

“We don’t want seventy votes,” Rove reportedly replied. “We want fifty-one.”

Rove may or may not have thought the White House bill was good policy, but he knew a political winner when he saw one. Either the senator voted aye and helped pass the President’s program, or he voted no and became a plump target during the next election.

In the end, the senator—like several red state Democrats—voted aye, which no doubt reflected the prevailing sentiment about tax cuts in his home state. Still, stories like this illustrate some of the difficulties that any minority party faces in being “bipartisan.” Everybody likes the idea of bipartisanship. The media, in particular, is enamored with the term, since it contrasts neatly with the “partisan bickering” that is the dominant story line of reporting on Capitol Hill.

Genuine bipartisanship, though, assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained—by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate—to negotiate in good faith. If these conditions do not hold—if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs of the tax cut are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so—the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100 percent of what it wants, go on to concede 10 percent, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this “compromise” of being “obstructionist.” For the minority party in such circumstances, “bipartisanship” comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled, although individual senators may enjoy certain political rewards by consistently going along with the majority and hence gaining a reputation for being “moderate” or “centrist.”

Not surprisingly, there are activists who insist that Democratic senators stand fast against any Republican initiative these days—even those initiatives that have some merit—as a matter of principle. It’s fair to say that none of these individuals has ever run for high public office as a Democrat in a predominantly Republican state, nor has any been a target of several million dollars’ worth of negative TV ads. What every senator understands is that while it’s easy to make a vote on a complicated piece of legislation look evil and depraved in a thirty-second television commercial, it’s very hard to explain the wisdom of that same vote in less than twenty minutes. What every senator also knows is that during the course of a single term, he or she will have cast several thousand votes. That’s a whole lot of potential explaining to do come election time.

Perhaps my greatest bit of good fortune during my own Senate campaign was that no candidate ran a negative TV ad about me. This had to do entirely with the odd circumstances of my Senate race, and not an absence of material with which to work. After all, I had been in the state legislature for seven years when I ran, had been in the minority for six of those years, and had cast thousands of sometimes difficult votes. As is standard practice these days, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had prepared a fat binder of opposition research on me before I was even nominated, and my own research team spent many hours combing through my record in an effort to anticipate what negative ads the Republicans might have up their sleeves.

They didn’t find a lot, but they found enough to do the trick—a dozen or so votes that, if described without context, could be made to sound pretty scary. When my media consultant, David Axelrod, tested them in a poll, my approval rating immediately dropped ten points. There was the criminal law bill that purported to crack down on drug dealing in schools but had been so poorly drafted that I concluded it was both ineffective and unconstitutional—“Obama voted to weaken penalties on gangbangers who deal drugs in schools,” is how the poll described it. There was a bill sponsored by antiabortion activists that on its face sounded reasonable enough—it mandated lifesaving measures for premature babies (the bill didn’t mention that such measures were already the law)—but also extended “personhood” to previable fetuses, thereby effectively overturning Roe v. Wade; in the poll, I was said to have “voted to deny lifesaving treatment to babies born alive.” Running down the list, I came across a claim that while in the state legislature I had voted against a bill to “protect our children from sex offenders.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, snatching the sheet from David’s hands. “I accidentally pressed the wrong button on that bill. I meant to vote aye, and had it immediately corrected in the official record.”

David smiled. “Somehow I don’t think that portion of the official record will make it into a Republican ad.” He gently retrieved the poll from my hands. “Anyway, cheer up,” he added, clapping me on the back. “I’m sure this will help you with the sex offender vote.”

I WONDER SOMETIMES how things might have turned out had those ads actually run. Not so much whether I would have won or lost—by the time the primaries were over, I had a twenty-point lead over my Republican opponent—but rather how the voters would have perceived me, how, entering into the Senate, I would have had a much smaller cushion of goodwill. For that is how most of my colleagues, Republican and Democrat, enter the Senate, their mistakes trumpeted, their words distorted, and their motives questioned. They are baptized in that fire; it haunts them each and every time they cast a vote, each and every time they issue a press release or make a statement, the fear of losing not just a political race, but of losing favor in the eyes of those who sent them to Washington—all those people who have said to them at one time or another: “We have great hopes for you. Please don’t disappoint us.”

Of course, there are technical fixes to our democracy that might relieve some of this pressure on politicians, structural changes that would strengthen the link between voters and their representatives. Nonpartisan districting, same-day registration, and weekend elections would all increase the competitiveness of races and might spur more participation from the electorate—and the more the electorate is paying attention, the more integrity is rewarded. Public financing of campaigns or free television and radio time could drastically reduce the constant scrounging for money and the influence of special interests. Changes in the rules in the House and the Senate might empower legislators in the minority, increase transparency in the process, and encourage more probing reporting.

But none of these changes can happen of their own accord. Each would require a change in attitude among those in power. Each would demand that individual politicians challenge the existing order; loosen their hold on incumbency; fight with their friends as well as their enemies on behalf of abstract ideas in which the public appears to have little interest. Each would require from men and women a willingness to risk what they already have.

In the end, then, it still comes back to that quality that JFK sought to define early in his career as he lay convalescing from surgery, mindful of his heroism in war but perhaps pondering the more ambiguous challenges ahead—the quality of courage. In some ways, the longer you are in politics, the easier it should be to muster such courage, for there is a certain liberation that comes from realizing that no matter what you do, someone will be angry at you, that political attacks will come no matter how cautiously you vote, that judgment may be taken as cowardice and courage itself may be seen as calculation. I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.

And my constituents. After one town hall meeting in Godfrey, an older gentleman came up and expressed outrage that despite my having opposed the Iraq War, I had not yet called for a full withdrawal of troops. We had a brief and pleasant argument, in which I explained my concern that too precipitous a withdrawal would lead to all-out civil war in the country and the potential for widening conflict throughout the Middle East. At the end of our conversation he shook my hand.

“I still think you’re wrong,” he said, “but at least it seems like you’ve thought about it. Hell, you’d probably disappoint me if you agreed with me all the time.”

“Thanks,” I said. As he walked away, I was reminded of something Justice Louis Brandeis once said: that in a democracy, the most important office is the office of citizen.