People who want big money go into business because that's where it is. As the Republican Party became entirely corrupted, more and more conservatives have been running for office as an entry business job, serve business as long as required and then leave for the payoff of high-paying jobs. But that's hardly all, or even most.
For a lot of those who go into politics it's about ideology. For those whose ideology is about serving the people, it's about public service. For those whose ideology is about the ideology, like Sanders and his socialism, and there are more ideologues than just him, the big passion is embedding the ideology. For those who want power, like Moscow Mitch, the passion's for power.
Sanders and the Clintons, before leaving the WH, were all proven never interested in money by not bothering to accumulate any. Sure, Sanders liked his high paying job well enough to do what he needed to keep it (by voting for Democratic legislation he claimed to despise) for nearly 30 years, but he could have made so much more money if he'd bothered. He didn't.
The Clintons are public service liberals. Only after the presidency in their late 50s, when the Clintons wanted to be able to remain in DC and couldn't begin to afford to, and wanted to start a charitable foundation to build a means of continuing lives of service around, did they look to make money. There were lots of newly ultra wealthy people eager to pay 6 digits for trophy speakers, and they had the big names.
VP Biden is another public service liberal. On entering congress at the age of 29, he decided never to own stocks or bonds to avoid the constant question of conflicts of interest, and he never has. During over 40 years of enormous runup of national and planetary wealth due to greatly increased production, while people all around him became incredibly wealthy, he held to it. It's proven not about money for him, and that's the same for many others of his type.
Moscow Mitch is different, but not because he's in it for personal wealth. He is wealthy now and presides over a party he's helped to embed great corruption in, by money; but for many years it was definitely secondary to power for him. He's famous for a soulless craving for power, not achievements or ideology, just personal power. He's hardly the only one, just extremely successful. He raised millions for decades by selling his influence and used it to elect people to office who'd owe him. He did eventually marry the daughter of one of the Chinese billionaires he's sold his influence to ever since Tiananmen Square. And money has been laundered through marriage ever since.
So, examples. You'll find if you look for it that the vast majority of people who run for office as Democrats are doing it for other reasons, not money. In fact, the idea's more than a little bit of of a joke. Politicians constantly have to raise huge money as donations just to throw it into the sinkhole of keeping their jobs so that they can do or be whatever they actually came for. In politics, the big money-money corruption's all among conservatives, certainly at the national level, and at that it's still usually best by far to skip politics and head straight for the moolah.
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