{"id":61,"date":"2003-09-07T14:56:34","date_gmt":"2003-09-07T14:56:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=61"},"modified":"2017-09-06T22:49:22","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T16:49:22","slug":"congressmen-in-platos-cave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2003\/09\/congressmen-in-platos-cave\/","title":{"rendered":"Congressmen in Plato&#8217;s Cave"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\">\n<\/head><body><p><\/p><p> David Brooks has a typically delightful and instructive piece in the current issue of  <i> Atlantic <\/i> .  He points out that over four decades, 49 members of Congress have run for President, and of those exactly 49 have been beaten.  The main reason, he says, is that Congressmen live in a political form of \u201cPlato\u2019s cave,\u201d and have little contact with reality; they have contact only with the \u201cshadows\u201d of reality that come to them through lobbyists, other Congressmen, and others who are as obsessed with politics as the politicians are.   <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Brooks has a typically delightful and instructive piece in the current issue of Atlantic . He points out that over four decades, 49 members of Congress have run for President, and of those exactly 49 have been beaten. The main reason, he says, is that Congressmen live in a political form of \u201cPlato\u2019s cave,\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Congressmen in Plato&#8217;s Cave<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"David Brooks has a typically delightful and instructive piece in the current issue of Atlantic . 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