Power in the wrong hands.

It has always seemed to me a problem with democracy that the 'peoples representatives' are chosen from individuals who feel themselves apart, superior to the ordinary man or women and see themselves best able to dictate their own needs through the medium of politics.
The ability to thrust oneself forward into the limelight and once there, keep oneself in the limelight by what ever means comes to hand are part of the tools of the trade.
Inflated egos are normally not what people find attractive in friends or colleagues but somehow we seem to accept it in the political class.
Feeding this aura we create a monster someone who believes their own hype and brooks no opposition. The inflated sense that I am right and everyone else is wrong is bad enough when supported by ones own opinion but if this opinion is artificially bolstered by an electorate. An electorate who listen and believe the rhetoric to the exclusion of their own common sense, simply because the rhetoric deals them a dream like the advert for the Lottery, then the mix is toxic.
The politician or the councillor, having been elected have an epiphany, their ideas re entrenched by the support they have had at the election so that any opposition to them becomes heresy. This unconditional "electoral support" is overpowering, and prone to megalomania.
 "Other people" are discounted and one sees the fear in people who's job could be at risk if they were to get on the wrong side of elected official. 
It has been my observation that they are often rude and dismissive, often dictatorial and feared. They have an overblown relationship in the forming of  'policy' but also crucially in commissioning the policy which should be the realm of the employed council official.
Once again faced with the maxim, "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely", one can only feel sad that power in the wrong hands destroys much of what it comes into contact with and is damaging since  it destroys the potential for creativity, replacing innovation with fear for stepping out of line.