As you suffer your way through the next three weeks of relentless campaign commercials filled with half-truths, lies, and slander, think about this account of Benjamin Franklin’s election to the Pennsylvania Assembly back in 1751:
Indeed, Franklin was very proud of his aristocratic sense of obligation to serve the public and of his genteel disdain for electioneering. Like any good eighteenth-century gentleman, he stood, not ran, for office. Campaigning for public office was regarded as vulgar and contemptible. No self-respecting gentleman would engage in it, and certainly not Franklin, whose status as a gentleman was still suspect in the eyes of some. His election to the assembly, he recalled with pride, “was repeated every Year of Ten Years, without my ever asking and Elector for his Vote, or signifying either directly or indirectly any Desire of being chosen.
That’s from The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, by Gordon S. Wood.
My how things have changed over the past 255 years.
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