Whatever happened to the importance of character in choosing our leaders?
I don’t think you need a dictionary to understand character. You know and feel it when you see it. It’s the basic quality of a person — their essence, in other words.
Against the backdrop of what is called performance politics — candidates running for air time to fill their campaign coffers — it’s easier to focus on their bad rather than good character.
Face it, character seems to matter less than ever in the swirl of courtroom antics and nasty words hurled between people of differing political persuasions.
It’s a soap opera political world in which we watch an adult film star describe alleged sexual trysts with a former president, a somewhat insignificant congresswoman threatening to hold up legislative actions, and others dealing with alleged campaign finance corruption.
Once upon a time, being a person of character was important to politicians, character being those traditional inner qualities cherished like truth-telling, empathy, duty to the public good rather than private gain and style over substance.
Now we seem to witness more bad than good character in our leaders. Perhaps that’s because bad news draws more attention, while the slow, often unheralded work of building consensus or crafting legislation gets less.
Don’t get me wrong, there are good political leaders in our midst, people of character who put country above party and who try to live by their oaths of office, not deny them. But in all the noisy and confusing hoopla we sometimes fail to commend them.
In his farewell letter to “friends and citizens,” President George Washington focused on the need for unity in the emerging new republic and warned that the forces of geographical sectionalism, political factionalism, and interference by foreign powers in the nation’s domestic affairs threatened the stability of the republic. If these warnings sound familiar today, they should, given the partisan party politics in our midst.
Each year on Washington’s birthday a senator reads the first president’s farewell on the Senate floor, each party alternating taking turns. The House of Representatives has abandoned this practice since 1984,
Here are a few of Washington’s comments about the need for unity and the dangers of political factions:
“The unity of government which constitutes you as one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pain will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth…
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”
John C. Morgan is an author and teacher. His weekly columns appear at www.readingeagle.com.
