I myself have vacillated on this at times, but I'd like to see others not just state, but explain their views. So are politicians mere tools of an ideological program where it does not matter what they do so long as they implement or support certain policies, or are we to think of our political/civic leadership as humans beings to be judged in their own right?
There's no question that the base of each party presumes that politicians should be mere ideological tools. Unfortunately I find more and more people advocating what is essentially a parliamentary approach to partisan government. Consider all the congressional Dems derided by some of their activist base for voting to reopen government for only the word of the Sen Majority Leader. A parliamentary approach would be to stay in opposition and if the Pubs can't get a majority let the government fall. Then the parties could switch sides and if the Dems couldn't get it done, we get to be Italy.
Lest not to pick solely on the Dem base, the same thing happened on the opposite side last summer in IL when 15 Pubs voted to end a two-year impasse and vote for a tax hike over the Govs objections. The fact that it saved taxpayers 3/4 of a billion in interest payments mattered not since Pubs were supposed to reflexively vote against all taxes no matter what. Force the Dems to put together a majority for the budget was what many Pub activists said, again taking an almost parliamentary view of government without realizing it.
When I became politically active almost 30 years ago the vast majority of candidates at all levels were judged as Cath says "in their own right". But generations change, and the expectations change as well. The ability to speak to nuanced reality has lost ground to the ability to speak with a clear sense of the sides of an issue as a high school debater would. It's happened before in US politics (check out the latter half of the 1800's), so it doesn't surprise me that this particular mode has returned. But I'm old school, so I don't have to agree with it.
On a totally unrelated note, Muon has decided not to run in 2018
