I strongly agree it's a loser's game - given our current political system. People who aren't willing to fight dirty and compromise their morals will fail since

I strongly agree it's a loser's game - given our current political system. People who aren't willing to fight dirty and compromise their morals will fail since that's where the money is - and that's sort of my point. We need to change the system to make it so that these people can fairly compete by pulling money out of the political system and evening the playing field. I'm also not advocating that blindly loyal idiots should be in charge - a good comparison to make is to look at more local governance. On a local level the stakes are much lower so the money being thrown around is far less - this lets people get into politics because they want to make change which is an anomaly at the national level - most of those politicians are there because it's a career and they value preserving that over everything else. Another decent idea in this direction is term limits but I'm a bit concerned that that might deprive us of competency.