If Saint Louis University wasn’t talking politics before, it
certainly has been this month.

The debate was sometimes about the issues–but all the planks of
all the platforms of the five executive board tickets in the recent
Student Government Association elections were so numerous and, in
some cases, similar, that they were rarely able to sustain

informal conversation. Rather, at least in my experience, the
talk was mostly around the candidates themselves–ranging from
experience to personality–which has led me to conclude a very
fundamental thing about U.S. politics: It’s just like falling in
love.

Someone else has presented you with a vision for the future.
They’re going there; they have the determination and the resolve to
convince themselves and others that there’s no question they’ll
make it.

If they’re the real thing, they’ll be moving fast and appear
unable to tarry for more than a brief moment during which they
extend an invitation to you.

The momentum and the passion of a genuine politician or lover
strikes you with the threat of such abandonment, such a fear of
being left behind, that you jump headfirst into the swiftest
current of this person’s rushing, churning river.

You’re going somewhere, the speed of it all tells you–issues or
shortcomings be damned (remember that song “When a Man Loves a
Woman,” about the guy with “loving eyes” who can never see his
lover “played for a fool”?).

Of course there is the cynic’s take on it, and it often applies.
All advertising and campaigning is really about, they say, is
targeting another person’s inadequacies and presenting yourself as
the solution to them. Yeah, that happens a lot–in politics and
romance.

There’s also the fact that, in both cases, the object of
affection may be composed solely of image and lack any kind of
substance.

But listen to the way the candidates and campaign staffers–the
believers–talk about what they do.

Stand in a room packed to double its capacity with supporters as
the returns are announced. Feel the atmosphere compress and then
deflate–or burst, overwhelmed with an explosion of applause that,
at its peak, sounds distorted even to the human ears that register
it within the room.

The quintessential political junkie, Hunter S. Thompson, wrote
in his book Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 that
there’s no greater kick in the world than running for elective
office (he ran for sheriff in Aspen, Colo. in the late 1960s)–not
even covering an election as a journalist.

Here’s a man who, in his own words, had come into contact with
nearly “every kind of drug known to civilized man”–not to mention
covered numerous national campaigns. He was close enough to those
candidates to traverse the nation on the same buses and sleep just
rooms away in the same hotels.

He was there with them for nearly every spike and slump, and
even he says nothing matches being in the “arena” itself, as Nixon
often called it.

It’s about pouring your body and soul into a dream, but for the
candidate it’s also about being the person into which such passion
from the masses is transferred.

In Citizen Kane, the classic movie about one man’s quest for
love by all the wrong means, Joseph Cotten delivers one of the most
telling lines about Charles Foster Kane: “He married for love.
That’s why he did everything. That’s why he went into politics: It
seems we weren’t enough, he wanted all of the voters to love him
too.”

When Kane loses the election, the jaded candidate withdraws like
a wounded lover, and in a final, cynical salute to politics, offers
Cotten a toast, “To love on my terms–those are the only terms
anybody ever knows.”

He has lost his faith in love–not the issues, not the returns,
not even any individuals themselves (yet). And that may be the
difference between the way we look at politics and the way we look
at love, for love is often the retreat from that public
rejection.

But not all love is a retreat.

The love that politics embodies is a fresh, innocent kind of
love that’s not afraid to flaunt itself. It’s a confident love that
doesn’t care for cheap shots from cynics but holds itself to a
higher, nobler standard.

In short, it holds itself to beauty. Like the ancient
philosophers who believed that politics was the test of one’s
resolve–that if one could do good in that contest, one could do
good anywhere–true love does not hide but rises to the
challenge.

Of course there are a lot of people who are just consuming lies
from candidates (on the left and the right)–who in the world of
politics are just being sold an image and nothing else.

But perhaps they can learn something from the genuine among us,
who see that the love of politics is more important than its sex.
And maybe those who’ve become disillusioned with the world of
dating will be revived by the fever of the election, which has yet
to fully subside.

After all, spring is just around the bend.

Andrew Ivers is a sophomore studying English and political
science.