"Robert A. Heinlein - Take back your Government" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

besieged by telephone calls from women who want to help in your campaign.
They sound like enthusiastic volunteers; you will find very quickly that they
are political streetwalkers who will support any candidate and any issue,
without compunction, for a very low price.
Brush them off, but politely - a practical politician should never go out of
his way to make anyone sore; your purpose is to win elections, not
arguments. Let the opposition hire them. They are hardly worth the low price
they charge, even to him. Later on in the campaign you will find that he hired
one of them a little sooner than you had expected; she worked as an unpaid
volunteer all through the campaign in your office and turned in nightly reports
to the opposition.
Don't let it throw you. As a politician you must learn to expect such little
disappointments. And don't let it shake your faith in human nature. If you take
the trouble to count up you will find that you know many more people who are
certainly honest than the number who are just as certainly crooked. The
crooks just seem more numerous because they get in your hair more.
I am inclined to believe, although I am not sure, that the average
difference in political honesty between men as a group and women as a
group in this country is actually considerable and not just a matter of a lower
pay scale for corruption on the part of women. As a result of punching
thousands of doorbells and talking with many, many men and women I am of
the opinion that women usually know less about political issues than men
and consequently are less inclined to realize that political issues are of moral
consequence. This probably results in part from the fact that most women, in
their daily occupations, are not thrown out into the world to the same extent
as their men folk and consequently never really find out what makes the
wheels go around.17
Furthermore, the husband is inclined to encourage the little woman to
remain in ignorance; it gives him a chance to show off at home how much he
knows without betraying just how little it is - since it is still more than she
knows.
In any case, I have heard hundreds of times, in campaigning from door to
door, this remark: "Oh, I leave everything of that sort up to my husband!" And
she does, too - she doesn't know a filibuster from first base and she thinks an
alderman is something to hang clothes on.
So, when somebody tips her off that she can pick up a few dollars in a
campaign year by a little light work in her neighbourhood, she is ripe for it,
gullible, willing to work for low wages, and so naive she doesn't know that it's
loaded. It won't even worry her to work for the candidate George is voting
against, because she does not think it matters. She can work in a dozen
campaigns and never find out anything about men nor issues; she just knows
that State Senator Slotmachine is such a nice man and here is some


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literature about him and would you like to have a car sent around to take you
to the polls?
Slotmachine is a nice man, too - he's an old hand in this business; his
public personality is a work of art. You would enjoy having dinner with him.
After a while, if she is bright enough to mark a sample ballot, she does