The day that the excruciatingly close race in Virginia ended—and the Democrats gained control of the U.S. Senate—the winner, James Webb, apparently had words of praise for his defeated foe, Senator George Allen. Instead of complaining of vote fraud or demanding a recount, Allen had “graciously conceded”, in the words of the Washington Post, and was so pleasant on the phone with Senator-elect Webb that the two agreed to get together for lunch next week.

The news stunned and silenced the campaign crowd gathered for Webb’s somewhat delayed final victory celebration. The Webb partisans had seen the race in dramatic adversarial terms that allowed for no sense of worth in the opposition candidate. What they were witnessing was serious statesmanship on both sides. They should not have remained mum. They should have cheered.

I have found that politicians are often unusually admirable people, contrary to all the cynical folklore and despite the clear exceptions. I would rather have my fate adjudicated by most of them than by, say, your average (appointed) judge, a “jury of my peers” or, certainly, the kind of people who populate the broadcast news stations. Separate them from their immediate self-interest in survival—and that is a crucial condition—and you are likely to find in the ranks of the pols public spirited individuals of discretion and wisdom, kindness and generosity. People like that are usually the kind attracted to politics in the first place. Most are extroverts who enjoy people. They want to make a positive difference. They want you to love them. There are worse qualities than those.

Allen and Webb are examples. You probably saw the worst of them on display in recent months. In such high profile campaigns the pressures from media and campaign consultants and the demands of fund raising are impossible to withstand. The candidate’s finer sensibilities become a liability and his survival instinct is constantly invoked to do what he “must” do if he wants to win. The normally wry, charming fellow and the intelligent, reflective woman winds up on TV screen as a candidate mouthing the most mushy jabber that the pro realizes is the mere distillation of some consultant’s polling and focus group testing. The real person is hard to recall, even to the person himself.

There are endless good moments in a big campaign like one for the U.S. Senate, of course. There is real joy in taking part in the lives of one’s diverse constituents, and of having hundreds or thousands of them volunteer as part of one’s own campaign. A candidate is humbled to see people he doesn’t even know make decisions to support him that require true sacrifices in time, effort and money. No wonder most candidates who lose are surprised. Everywhere they go they are experiencing approbation and good cheer. In the campaigns where I ran for office in the state of Washington, I felt that whole new worlds of friendships and social experience had opened to me.

In many cases I think that what candidates would really like is a gentlemanly contest where they could put out interesting position papers (does anyone do that any more?) and have the media report on them, weigh new ideas, conduct serious debates and take part in panel discussions where each side got more than sound bite attention. They’d like a string of coffee hours where their standard talk could be challenged by thoughtful questions. In short, they’d like the campaigns that used to be described in civics books, back in the days when students studied civics.

Some of the idealized campaign does take place. But then a candidate makes a mistake, like the “macaca” remark of George Allen, and that is seized upon—not by the opponent alone, but by a hostile media. In the case of Allen, the macaca moment was covered and recovered in over 40 articles by the high-minded folks that bring you The Washington Post. MSNBC ran a tape of it almost as part of their theme music.

Then, not satisfied, the press started delving into Allen’s past to find if there were other insensitive things he might have said. They had to go all the way back to his college days, passing over his whole adult life and his long career in public service, when some people who now oppose him politically said that as a teenager he had been heard to use the “N word”, while others (supporters) said that he did no such thing. (And wasn’t all of that edifying?). After a day or two, a reporter thought to ask whether James Webb—surely fluent in the salty private rhetoric that you might expect from a Marine—had ever used the “N word” and he didn’t deny it. Others said he definitely did.

Finally, desperately, Allen brought forth some steamy sexual scenes from Webb’s novels and insisted that the voters should read them. Webb was embarrassed. Unfortunately for Allen—and the advisors who egged him on—so was the public and he actually went down in the polls thereafter.

Now, candidates are ultimately responsible for what they say, even off-hand and in jest, and for what they raise as “issues”, but there is no doubt that the real lowering of the Virginia campaign was accomplished largely by the press (the Washington Post especially) and the candidates’ campaign advisors. Sadly, the public never gets a chance to defeat THEM.

So I want to offer some sympathy for the whole tribe of candidates, regardless of party. Running for office is an act of ego assertion, of course, but it also is a wonderful gift to our free society. Representative democracy is an analogue of the free market economy where, following Adam Smith, the selfish interests of the individual wind up benefiting the general good. What would we do without candidates who are willing to offer themselves up for scrutiny and evaluation? If they didn’t give us choices, we would be stuck with self-perpetuating officials we couldn’t change.

But in many ways the utility, if not the nobility, of the politician is hidden by the built-in conflicts of the selection process itself. Unlike actors in the economy, politicians almost always must tell the voters not only why their “product” (their candidacy) is good, but also why they are better than the competition. In practice, they must harp on the real or exaggerated flaws of the other side. That doesn’t happen in most economic choices because companies have learned not to trash the competition, not by name anyhow. Doing so could hurt one’s own brand in the long term, and (unlike the few weeks or months of a political race) it is the long term that determines success in the economic marketplace.

Candidates, too, would rather not disparage their opponents—who would?--and would not do so if they could win otherwise. See a candidate who says nothing bad about his opponent and you are witnessing a race that, de facto, has already been won. Can you imagine job seeking in the private sector if it was expected that you would run down the other job candidates and do so in public? Facing the institutional imperative to “go negative,” many of us will not even think of entering politics as a candidate.

It’s even more remarkable that some politicians prove virtuous when one realizes that that virtue is refined in the heat of real world conflict. Some handle temptation better than others, clearly. Many fail, including several sad reprobates who stooped to the sale of their offices this past year or so and wound up in court, and then in jail. Many more, however, are falsely charged or are pilloried for failings that, post-election, quickly shrink in media notice. (Maybe the media would have covered the obviously planned revelation of Rep. Foley’s dirty emails to pages if it had been made a year after the congressman retired from office. Maybe not, too, but there is no way in the latter instance that it would have been on the front pages of the national press for weeks—as it was.)

In short, scandals sometimes are valid, and often are not. Some are contrived. We all know the popular assumption in the statement, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” But as a congressman I know sagely remarks, “In Washington, where there’s smoke there’s often a smoke machine.” It is arduous simply to operate in such an environment.

So, give the political candidates their due.

And what they are due, losers as well as winners, is a genuine thank you for offering themselves for public service. We need them all to assure the competition that makes democracy credible.