What kind of person becomes a politician?
I don’t get it. I never have. Since 2004, I’ve profiled dozens of elected officials: Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Mark Sanford, Susana Martinez, Mitch Daniels, Jim Webb, Julian Castro, Sherrod Brown, John Boehner, John Kasich, Jon Tester and John Hickenlooper, among others. But while I’ve discovered a lot of things I didn’t know before, like the fact that Mitt Romney “love[s] water,” I’ve failed to isolate whatever quirk of nature or nurture makes some people believe they’re uniquely qualified to represent the interests of millions, or tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of their fellow human beings, and at the same time makes them willing to subject themselves, and their loved ones, to the merciless humiliation of modern campaigning, which basically consists of begging strangers for money while other strangers on cable TV and Twitter warp everything you say and do.
Observing these figures at close range hasn’t really helped. In fact, they tend to seem even more alien — more exaggerated, calculated and opaque — in the flesh. After a while, I gave up. I started to suspect that the only way to understand politicians would be to hang out with some aspiring office holder who, unlike Romney, Christie and the rest of them, hadn’t already been a politician for decades. Someone who was still learning how to be a politician. Someone who still remembered what it was like to not be a politician. But where would I find someone like that?
Then I heard that P.G. Sittenfeld was running for the U.S. Senate from Ohio — the same P.G. Sittenfeld I went to college with. (There is only one person in America named P.G. Sittenfeld.) I’d never really gotten to know a politician before. Now someone I already knew had decided to become a politician. The opportunity to watch that transition in real time was too good — and too rare — to pass up.
And so that’s how I found myself crammed into the cluttered backseat of a green Chevy Cruze at 7 a.m. on a recent Wednesday, heading north from Cincinnati to Toledo on Interstate 75.
“You know who deserves to be a wealthy person?” Sittenfeld asked his aide, a lanky 20-year-old undergrad named Parker Smith.
“Who?” Smith said from the driver’s seat.
“Whoever created recurring donations,” Sittenfeld said. “If I called and asked you for like, 400 bucks, you might bristle. But giving 20 bucks every month? That’s easy!”
Smith nodded.
Sittenfeld is new to politics; the sum total of his electoral experience consists of serving on the Cincinnati City Council for the last four years. He is only 30 years old. If he wins next November, he would just barely clear the Senate’s Constitutional age requirement. The next youngest senator would be nearly a decade his senior. In fact, he would be one of the youngest senators in U.S. history, as well as the first member of his generation, the so-called millennial generation, elected to such high office.
Of course, that’s if Sittenfeld wins. When former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, one of the most prominent Democrats in the state, announced in February that he would also be competing for a chance to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Rob Portman in 2016, the contest immediately became a clash of the generations. (Strickland is 73.) So far, the older generation appears to be winning. According to the latest polls, Strickland would defeat Portman by 6 percentage points in a head-to-head matchup. The relatively unknown Sittenfeld, meanwhile, would lose by 25. Taking note, the Ohio Democratic Party decided in April to break its own rules and endorse the elder, safer bet.
“This is not a Little League Baseball game,” Strickland said at the time. “This is a U.S. Senate race.“
The point was to force Sittenfeld out; it didn’t work. Hence our trip to Toledo. After about an hour and a half on the road, the candidate began to crave his usual campaign-trail breakfast. Smith pulled off the highway.
“McDonald’s has shockingly good oatmeal,” Sittenfeld explained. “I’m sure it’s, like, laced with…”
“Sugar?” Smith suggested.
“Yeah.”
Just then, Sittenfeld’s iPhone rang; his father’s face appeared on screen.
“I’m at the beautiful Wapakoneta exit,” Sittenfeld told his dad. “You know who was born in Wapakoneta? The first man on the moon!”
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