The Candidate

In a way we the film the candidate made us see the upbringing of a political candidate. In the film we did not only see the side of a candidate as the person marketed to obtain your votes but rather a very real person with a family and mission. In the film we saw just how hard it is to run as a candidate. The whole fiasco of a performance is what shows us the meaning of what it takes to become a politician. First and foremost we can see in the start of the film the integrity of the candidate. This is the son of the governor of the state but instead of becoming competent in his lot in life he decided to become an activist and to pursue what he thinks is the right way of life which is basically preserving nature. We see in his character that he does not want to become a politician although asked many times. He does not want to be the people he hated but he do want to have a stage in where to voice out his good intentions to the public and thus he entered the agreement to run for senate with the promise of the campaign manager that he can do whatever he wanted to do but the guarantee of the brash actions would be losing in where he agreed. We can see in his earlier character the sincerity of his motive to uphold good governance and act upon the problems of the people. His way in the initial stage of his campaign is by people to people campaigning face to face and asking the people what they wanted. In later scenes we can however see that this kind of campaigning cannot win an election. That is my perception of the film. The irony of the politician is that in order to clean the troubles of your constituents you must get yourself dirtied. Goodness cannot guarantee you a good life and in order to attain what you wanted you must be bad yourself. Good can come out of evil as Willie Stark put it. With this mindset the pure candidate is then taken in a roller coaster ride of his life in where we see just how it is that we manipulate the people in elections. We never wanted them to see us as normal people who make mistakes and wrong judgments. If we wanted them to vote for us we must make them believe that we got all the answers to all the lifes problems and not doing so would invite losing. As is the system, winning requires sacrifice and in the film we saw the sacrifice as the innocence of the candidate. Gone is his personal conviction to the ideologies he hold, gone is the integrity of his words for as we saw his speeches started from dynamic and spontaneous and went to practiced manipulation. The realization only sink in after the faade won them the election with his last words: What then?