Politics & Power Quote by Kin Hubbard

Democracy’s cruel joke, Hubbard suggests, isn’t that voters choose poorly. It’s that the kind of person we fantasize about electing never survives the machinery built to produce “serious” contenders. The line snaps because it treats “the best man” as an obvious, almost folksy standard while quietly admitting the system has other job requirements: fundraising stamina, tolerance for humiliation, the knack for pleasing contradictory audiences without sounding like you’re lying (even when you are).

Hubbard was a newspaper humorist in an era when U.S. politics was hardening into modern mass persuasion: party organizations, patronage, headline-driven scandals, and the early nationalization of campaigns. His deadpan phrasing carries a Midwestern skepticism toward civic pieties. “We would all like” is the tell: a collective wish, shared in theory, that collapses on contact with incentives. Everyone wants virtue; few reward it when it arrives as boring honesty, unpopular competence, or unwillingness to flatter.

The subtext is less “politicians are bad” than “the electorate is complicit.” If the best person never runs, it’s partly because running looks like a moral compromise and partly because voters punish the traits that make someone “best”: caution, candor, nuance, an allergy to ego. Hubbard doesn’t romanticize an unreachable hero; he points at a selection process that filters for ambition and performance over stewardship. The joke lands because it’s a tiny sentence with a big indictment: our ideal leader is structurally unelectable.