The leftist writer Upton Sinclair tried it, as did Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal too: there is no shortage of authors in American history who aspired to political power.
They were all unsuccessful, however - Sinclair wanted to become governor of California in 1934, Mailer mayor of New York in 1969, and Vidal twice failed to make the California congressional delegation - once in the 1960s and once in the 1980s.
Now Nicholas Kristof, author and until recently a columnist for the New York Times, wants to become Governor of Oregon. The sixty-two-year-old competes as a democrat. Experts rate his chances as mixed, but the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner is convinced that he can help the people in the Northwest out of many crises. In a final column for the Times, entitled “Farewell to Readers”, he called for the fight against indifference and poverty. His experiences from Darfur, where he had reported on the genocide, to his structurally weak homeland of Yamhill in Oregon had shown him that cynicism does not help and that one must actively fight against injustice. Everyone in Oregon should have a chance, says the campaign website "Nick for Oregon", which is still quite empty.There are still no concrete policy proposals, but according to press reports, Kristof has already collected more than a million dollars in donations.
For the election campaign, Kristof left a successful career behind.
He was one of the journalists who early suspected that the George W. Bush administration was lying when it founded the war in Iraq on the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
Kristof's research was later mentioned in the indictment against I. Lewis Libby, formerly Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Getting readers to abandon their indifference
In the past few years Kristof has increasingly turned to his own homeland.
With a book about the life stories of his former classmates in Yamhill, he set a counterpoint to the often criticized "parachute journalism", in which reporters only fly into an area for a few days.
Kristof often stated that his mission as a journalist was to get readers to abandon their indifference.
Critics accused him of taking sides instead of just informing about a conflict.
For many, however, the moral certainty of this position has been shaken by the years under Donald Trump.
Kristof felt strengthened in his view that journalists could also have an attitude as long as they made it transparent as their own opinion.
He sees himself in a tradition of American journalists like Ida B. Wells, who wrote against the injustice of lynching and "racial segregation" in the south of the country.