E. B. White said democracy
is a letter to the editor and 
I’m not sure I agree though I 
love letters to the editor 
particularly loony ones that 
begin by quoting Bob Dylan’s
“Like a Rolling Stone” and end 
by endorsing “nobody” for 
president (“if nobody wins 
nobody loses”) but when I 
think of democracy in American 
I think not of Tocqueville but 
of The Great McGinty
a Preston Sturges movie 
where the big city hero now 
a bartender recounts how 
he, a bum, got paid to vote early, 
vote often, and so impressed 
the machine boss that he rose 
to become an alderman 
then the mayor of the city 
then governor and would have 
kept the job, too, if he hadn’t
(thanks to do-gooder wife) 
tried to do some good for 
the people some think 
the moral is that politics 
is crooked but I think it’s
that anyone can grow up 
to be governor

(David Lehman, from the 10 November 2006 edition of the Times Literary Supplement, p. 10)