Politicians don't want intelligent, independent, healthy and balanced people around them. Some cousin-fucking goatherd isn't going to get into deep conversations about specific parts of policy.

It's not just that - their presence ensures everyone else is too busy to look at what the elites are doing, too. People don't really have time or energy to pay attention to more abstract problems, like politicians fleecing them with ridiculous taxes and corporations controlling what they think, when they have to worry about getting stabbed to death while riding the bus to work. It's a much more immediate problem.