What's the point of even voting? Well, I do it because it's more fun than not voting, I guess... ;-)

Besides, one can always hope.

"Do they just want the job for the prestige and the money?"

I don't think that's necessarily the case. I think that a good many candidates come to believe that they can make a difference if they get into office. Still, once they get there, it's not easy. They will have to fight against the incredible inertia of the $ySStem and all the special interests that run it.

Here's an interesting example from history: Emiliano Zapata was Mexico's most idealistic and popular guerrilla commander during the lengthy Mexican Revolution against Huerta's federal military government forces. Zapata had himself grown up as a peasant in the State of Morelos, and his heart was with the poor people. He fought to redistribute the land from the wealthy to the people who actually worked the land. He became tremendously popular in Morelos, because he always kept to his ideals. He wouldn't sell out.

Well, Zapata finally attained military successes that put him in such a strong position that he was able to enter Mexico City, and he was made the President of Mexico...for a brief period.

It was brief because Emiliano Zapata discovered that he simply could not get his orders carried out by the bureaucrats on down the chain of command. He could not carry out the reforms he wanted to because the system in Mexico was so corrupted that he couldn't work through its various levels of officials. Those embedded in the system were sure that Zapata would sell out, with the right inducements, and would work with them, keeping up a superficial appearance of being a "man of the people", whilst selling the people out to the entrenched interests.

He refused to do that, but he was stymied at every turn by his bureaucracy, and he could not find enough educated people who shared his ideals to replace them...it would have meant replacing thousands of officials at various levels.

Accordingly he became disgusted and he voluntarily gave up the Presidency, basically told them all to go to hell, and went back to Morelos, where he continued leading the revolutionary armies and defending the State of Morelos against attacks from outside its own borders.

He was assassinated there within a few years by being lured into a trap set by federal government soldiers (their commander had contacted Zapata, saying he wanted to switch sides and join the guerillas...this had happened before on various occasions, but this time it was a trap). So that put an end to the most honest revolutionary in Mexico. A man that honest and capable could not be allowed to live in a country run by a corrupt and entrenched elite.

I would suggest that it is almost that difficult and that dangerous for an honest and idealistic man or woman to lead the USA government out of the morass it is in and to institute genuine reforms and changes in basic policy.