Sometimes I don’t know which is worse: hypocrisy or politics. Maybe they’re synonymous. And maybe in order to be a politician, you have to be a hypocrite. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case; but is that the full story?

In speech scheduled for later today, the leader of the opposition, David Cameron, will say that the social recession in Britain is worse than the economic one. It’s a clever choice of words, and it’s also probably true. Kudos to the speech writers. But, Gordon Brown, the country’s prime minister, has made the accusation that Cameron will say anything to get elected. I wonder if Brown was looking in mirror when he said that.

One of my favorite professors, Dr John Riggs, said that the one thing that politicians wanted more than anything else was to get reelected. Obviously, he was referring to all of them; not just those in the British Conservative Party. In fact, if Brown loses the General Election later this year, as seems probable, he will go down in history as one of the shortest serving PMs in British history; so you can bet the farm that he wants to be reelected.

How have we managed to allow constituent representation to compromise the integrity of our elected officials? It’s probably been like that from the beginning; it’s just that we didn’t notice quite so much. Then, unlike now, we shared beliefs in the most important things. We majored in the majors, not the minors. We focused on those things that would give us the biggest bang for the buck.

I’m reading an excellent book right now entitled The 80/20 Priniciple by Richard Koch. Most of us claim to know this principle, but few of us actually put it into practice. Instead of concentrating on the 20% of things that would give us 80% of the results we want, we focus on devoting 80% of our energies to get that extra 20%. In other words, we major in the minors.

The same thing has happened in politics, and we’ve encouraged it. We’ve told politicians by our letters, emails, and most of all, our votes that if they don’t pander to our own pet projects (which fall into the 20% of the overall results), we won’t vote for them. (At the end of the day, it’s the votes that determine the outcome of all democratic elections.) Consequently, we’ve forced our elected representatives to devote their resources and, to a large extent, their integrity to giving us those things in order to stay in office.

Who then, are the hypocrites? Are they the ones who must compromise their convictions in order to get our votes, or are they the ones who force them to do so?