Candidates are not your messiah

I think the ultimate lesson from the Eliot Spitzer fiasco is to remind us all to step back and refrain from holding up political candidates as saviors for our favored political party, saviors for our particular political philosophy or saviors for the nations as a whole.

They are vessels for ideas and policies and investing emotionally in them leads to all sorts of nasty unintended actions and consequences. The Spitzer case is an extreme example but to a lesser extent we see this same dynamic play out almost daily during the Democratic primary. Hillary and Obama partisans have invested themselves emotionally in their clients to such a degree that they are constantly left defending statements and actions espoused by the candidate, the campaign or surrogates. Often times these defenses are silly and are proffered by otherwise intelligent people who feel an obligation to defend their candidate no matter what.

The Republican cult-of-personality that surrounded George W. Bush was always disturbing to me. That "intelligent" people would defend his constitution shredding, his distortions about Saddam Hussein and WMD's, etc. was just infuriating. Talking heads on TV - spinning away, fooling no one and just embarrassing themselves - that's what we should all keep in mind as we find ourselves becoming too emotionally invested in a particular candidate.

DDay over at Digby's place touched on this yesterday,

This is an object lesson into why you should not invest yourself so heavily into politicians...
...the larger point is that politicians are not demigods. They should not be seen as if they walk on water. They're people and they've been given tremendous power and that can have a negative influence. In the current political fight, we should consider this and try to keep an even keel.

Invest in ideas, use the politicians to advance those ideas. Do not confuse the politician with the actual substantive idea.