I always say for most politicians their first two goals are getting re elected and acquiring more power. Their third goal is to monetize their power. Look at how wealthy Gore, Clinton, Obama, and Biden became as a result of politics even though they never "earned" much as politicians. Finally, occasionally, politicians do something right or terribly wrong, but one of the more interesting studies done by Princeton was to show an almost zero correlation between how the public felt on an issue and how Congress voted.