Thanks for the kind words.
I'm somewhat familiar with the phenomenon. Ten years ago I went through a personnel-development seminar with an HR hired gun who had formerly been the top personnel guy at Diamond Shamrock 25 years ago now. During breaks, or as comments sprinkled throughout his presentation (which was better than the usual "getting to know my navel" stuff some people -- like, infamously, Royal Dutch Shell -- have indulged in), he regaled us with some stories about trying to do HR consulting and staff development in the District of Columbia. He had been brought in after the Anne Burford Gorsuch brouhaha during the Reagan Administration to straighten some things out that were obviously broken.
He said he had never before (or since) seen personalities with such incredible power drives -- these people's eyes practically glowed in the dark with their need to get, and wield, power. He told of guys with master's degrees from Yale taking $25,000/year jobs on some obscure Congressional or departmental staff, just so they could get their hands on policy -- any policy, some policy, big or little policy. He didn't say so, but I got the distinct impression that he was trying to warn us that places like Washington (and the executive suite) were overrun with diseased personalities flailing around to get more power to solve whatever major malfunction it was that drove them.
He said it was his common experience that people he was told to interview wouldn't see him on the Interior Department premises, but would insist on another venue, over lunch, and then they would try to lay a marker. They would imply very strongly that they were doing this consultant a favor which they expected would be repaid if the consultant ever got into a position to do so (such as a plummy appointment with hiring authority). They were allergic to being seen with him at all.
He may have made a few other comments, but that was the burden of it, that Washington was awash in powerful, talented, strongly mismotivated personalities.
Your comments about Elizabeth Dole sound familiar, if not from things I've read about her (Southern belle, society doyenne, exclusive education, married for power -- certainly it can't have been for Bob's little blue pills), then from things I've read about other women similarly situated. I've heard very similar things about a former mayor of Houston, Kathryn Whitmire, who is supposed to be a whirlwind of tempestuous self-consequence and a force for upheaval within her extended family (her brother is a prominent Democratic state senator). She truncated her own political future by having an ill-advised affair with a very married black city councilman that state Republicans found out about, and about which said Republicans are rumored to have been very quick to let her know, when she momentarily set her sights on the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by Kay Bailey Hutchison (who herself once swatted Big John Connally's daughter over the head with a notebook in her offices -- Big John's daughter was on Kay's staff, back in the day, when Kay was still a state officer).
Just as someone once said that the rich really are not at all like you and me, it is equally true that people who are driven by the appetite for power are likewise unlike the mass of humanity, a mark of distinction which does not, despite what their egos doubtless tell them, work in their favor. It was for people like them that the Framers wrote the Constitution, to turn them against one another, to cause them to butt heads at every turn, and to be able to cooperate only "diodically", i.e. with a bias in the general direction of the People's best interest.
I set against that something I once saw in the faces of candidates for Congress who were undergoing a "school for candidates" then run by Michigan Representative Guy van der Jagdt, a leathery, cynical pol of the old school who carried in his face the marks of liberal Democratic victory after liberal Democratic victory from the 1960's and 70's, when the Democrats were drunk with power and BATF-confiscated booze that they had wheeled in on dollies onto the Senate floor in case lots, on days when Congress was about to adjourn for the holidays.
But there was none of that in the faces of the new candidates, but rather a candid openness and a manifest desire to help and serve that gave me the strong impression, however erroneous it may have been, that these were the very best people in the world.
That was years and years ago, and I suppose many of the successful candidates from that class have reached the ends of their public careers by now -- a dozen or 15 years is pretty common. But what the country has accomplished in the meantime has been extraordinary, from the overthrow of international Communism to the impeachment of Bill Clinton for misconduct that was common in the 1960's (remember Wayne Hays and Wilbur Mills?) to the abolition of the welfare trap. It's been an interesting few decades.