Leadership Quote by Jim Hodges

There is something almost comically deflating in Hodges's line: the quiet admission that public life is less a parade of passions than a hallway of polite distance. The phrasing matters. "Most people" is a politician's safety blanket, a way to generalize without indicting anyone in particular. And "don't come up to me" centers the physicality of politics: the job isn’t only speeches and votes, it’s bodies in proximity, handshakes, eye contact, the low-grade theater of access.

The real payload sits in "express a lot of emotion". Hodges isn’t claiming people feel nothing; he’s noting they rarely perform it in front of him. That’s an observation about power as much as temperament. In the presence of elected officials, citizens often self-edit, compressing anger or hope into something socially acceptable: a brief complaint, a compliment, a request. Emotion becomes a private currency, spent carefully around someone who can help, ignore, or retaliate in small bureaucratic ways.

Contextually, this reads like a remark from the retail-politics layer of governance, where the public imagines politicians as lightning rods for outrage and adoration, but the lived reality is more muted. It also hints at a kind of loneliness specific to office: you are constantly seen, yet rarely met. The line subtly undercuts the myth of the emotionally flooded public square. What he encounters is not a mob, but a managed civility that keeps democracy functional and, sometimes, disappointingly bloodless.