Our Politics

Book excerpt: Douglas Kane, an American politician and economist, offers readers a straightforward, personal account of what it is like to run for and hold public office—the demands, conflicts, temptations, and rewards created by political, economic, and social forces. Throughout the book, Kane references Illinois and Wisconsin politics. The campaigns of his wife, Kathleen Vinehout, and her years in the Wisconsin senate show that the centralization of political power, the structure of campaign organizations, and the policy decisions that Kane experienced as an Illinois legislator are not unique to any one state. In Our Politics Kane reflects on his nearly fifty years of active engagement in state and local politics. In a series of essays, he seeks to understand the forces, motivations, incentives and technologies that shape our politics and produce the consequences that we live with every day. He describes how candidates and officeholders deal with the fundamental contradictions inherent in the democratic process, and how and why the political power structure has changed. He also explores the personal experience of being a legislator, from deciding how to vote to building relationships with party leaders, fellow legislators, the governor, and the voters in the district. Kane concludes by considering the possibility of change, how it might happen, and the steps that candidates, political parties, activists and others might take to better our politics with results more to our liking. While many journalists record politics from the outside, and numerous political memoirs focus on personalities and what happened to whom and when, this book gives an insider’s view of politics at the level of state government. This book is not about those politicians but about our politics, which together we have created and together we must deal with.