Last week, I finished the excellent Founding Brothers, an attempt by author Joseph Ellis to "render human and accessible that generation of political leaders customarily deified and capitalized as Founding Fathers". You know that old adage that history repeats itself? It's true. My favorite quote from the book concerns the early workings of American-style democratic politics:
"...the very notion that a candidate should openly solicit votes violated the principled presumption that such behavior itself represented a confession of unworthiness for national office."
How refreshing and quaint.
