This article describes the corrosive effect on the psyche of a normal (?) human being who decides to run for President of the United States.

This is speculative, but some parts of the article may describe what can happen when someone becomes a cult leader--or a even a trainer in high demand LGAT

OP-ED COLUMNIST
You'll Never Walk Alone
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: February 21, 2004 New York Times

You are running for president, which means you have sentenced yourself to social confinement. It's the opposite of solitary confinement. From now until Election Day, you will never be alone, and you will never shut up.

You rush into great halls and begin talking; you work the rope lines and keep talking; you get into the van with the reporters, and you are talking still. You become a mouth that shakes hands, but it's not really conversation you're having because the people you talk to are all interchangeable.

In normal conversation, people's ideas evolve as they learn new things.

But in the game you are in, evolution is taken by the pundits as opportunism, inconsistency as hypocrisy, and ambiguity as weakness. Changing your mind or admitting error is a political sin, and will lead to a week of negative coverage.

So when somebody asks you a question, your brain begins searching its internal hard drive for the appropriate 450-word speechlet-response, which you have already repeated 200 times before. You don't dare utter an unrehearsed thought; you don't dare veer toward candor.

If you are smart, you will train yourself not to think at all, and you will fill every monologue with enough caveats so you can claim consistency no matter what happens later on.

Remember, you are no longer a human being. You are a freak. You must manufacture certitude and omniscience to prove you're a real leader.

You dominate every room you enter, and it is all about you.

The rallies are about you. The ads are about you. The strategy sessions are about you. The you-ness of you becomes overwhelming, except that it's not really you. It's the meta-you. The vast complexity of your life is reduced to a handful of endlessly recycled moments and clichés: war hero, man of faith, experienced, leader in a time of crisis.

You begin to notice that as the image of you is magnified, the actual you becomes lost. But there's nothing you can do about it because the hopes of a party, of half the nation, rest on you, so you have to go on with your queen bee life. You have to surrender yourself to your handlers' schemes. You have to boast about your own character in a way that would be repulsive in any other context. Every day you are scheduled to do a series of "events," which are not really events, just speeches. You enter cavernous halls, always to the same music, the same waves of applause, the same introductory jokes, and you pretend it is all happening for the first time.

You are there to say things people in the audience already agree with so they can applaud their own ideas, but there comes a weird moment when their adulation ceases to thrill. It becomes part of the routine. It is bestowed on the person who happens to look like a winner at that moment, and it can be withdrawn in an instant. It's not clear whether people are applauding your many fine qualities or whether they are applauding the meta-you, which they see as the idealized extension of themselves.

After the speech, the disposable cameras come out. Some people just want their pictures taken with you; politics falls away and sheer celebrity takes over.

Other people come up to flatter, and sometimes they say the most amazing, heartfelt things — that they would trust you with a son's life. And your procession out of the room is a series of five-second bursts of intimacy. Some encounters would be genuinely moving if you had time to stop and actually meet the person.

After each rally you are back in the bubble of your co-conspirators, the whispering aides who tell you where to go next. These days there are little video cameras everywhere, because no moment should go untelevised. There are donors who think that because they've given you money, they own you like a racehorse. Their advice is either hopelessly vague ("You need to get a strong message") or ridiculously parochial ("If you'd just pick up on cement industry reform, this whole race would turn around").

If you haven't entirely lost your objectivity, you are aware of the corrosive perversity of it all. Presidential campaigning seems to have been designed to strip away personality, stunt thought and destroy the autonomous self. The only thing that can be said for it is that it prepares you for the freakish, boy-in-the-bubble life that is the modern presidency.

hey corboy,

thanks for that article. Fascinating. I remember growing up, my mother always used to say that to run for President you had to be pretty sick.

I love that line about dominating every room you walk into. So true for forum leaders. It must be so intoxicating/exhausting for them that they stop going into 'normal' rooms and stick to the Landmark Centers. They certainly don't have much free time for checking out the real world.

dutch