And after you're elected, although you do have a good opportunity to become wealthy in some instances, you still have to wear a tie to work everyday, people write nasty letters about you in the newspapers and if your kid gets arrested for shoplifting you have to deny you even know the little devil or face losing when you run for re-election. 

All that was bad enough, but in the recent national elections, we had a new twist known as negative advertising. 

This is where you pay an advertising firm two or three million dollars to invent television and radio commercials saying your opponent has bad breath, sleeps in his underwear and doesn't love the Lord. 

I happen to have been doing a great deal of traveling during the final weeks of the campaign, and after seeing negative commercial after negative commercial, I became concerned that every candidate running was some sort of dishonest mudbrain. 

Began one: "Do you really want a man like Harvey Snucklehouser representing you in Washington? 

"He cheats on his income tax, doesn't put the shower curtain inside the tub when he bathes in hotel rooms, his mother wears combat boots and he pulled for the Mets in the World Series.". 

Another said: "How could anybody vote for Bernice (Dingbat) Flournoy? She's so stupid she thinks Beirut was a famous baseball player, she smells like a goat herder, probably is a communist and has fat thighs." 

In Georgia, incumbent Republican Sen. Mack Mattingly basically stayed out of his campaign with the exception of buying commercials that said his opponent, Democrat Wyche Fowler, hardly ever bothered to appear for votes during his term as U.S. representative. 

Fowler got even, however. He beat Mattingly, who won't be making ANY appearances in the Senate anymore. 

I have a friend who once ran for a local county post. He lost. 

"It was the worst experience I ever had," he said. "Every time I told a lie, they caught me, and every time I told the truth, nobody would believe me." 

There are lot of better ways to abuse oneself than going through the expense, turmoil and humiliation of running for and/or holding political office. 

You could open a meat market in Ralph Nader's neighborhood, get a job as Frank Sinatra's press agent, or become a newspaper columnist and say you think television evangelists are a bunch of crooks. 

I once asked a man who was running for Congress just why on earth he would wan t to put himself through such an ordeal and have people say bad things about him and be mistrustful of him. 

"Well," he replied, "I was already a lawyer." 

In my mind, that's still not reason enough