I am not politically savvy, but I have been thinking about this for a while.
I am not sure if honesty should be considered such an important prerequisite to holding political office. People seem to make a big deal about it–Hillary was not honest with her email, Trump lied about this or that–whatever.
Usually, when people lie, it’s either to cover their ass, or hide corruption, or enrich themselves personally. This is not to say it’s right to lie or be misleading/dishonest, but it seems to be mainly centered around the individual and protecting themselves.
If we cast off the cliche of “every politician lies”, I feel like lying is a minor characteristic that everyone, politician or not, does at some time or another.
No matter the severity of a candidate’s dishonesty, I posit that judgment should be a much better indicator of a candidate’s readiness for office. In the end, it seems to me that we as a nation are much more affected by a candidate’s choices when it comes to policy and diplomacy than we are by his or her personal qualities.
I think “LIAR” is a term that unfairly makes a political office personal, when it should really be only about a candidate’s ability to make policy decisions. How much bad judgment is about dishonesty and how much of it is incompetence? I’d prefer a habitual liar that at least understands the nuances of geopolitics.
I expect politicians to exaggerate. I expect them to cover up, gloss over, or mischaracterize their minor failings. When it comes to their official acts in office I want them to tell the truth. Nixon certainly understood the nuances of geopolitics as well as anyone else at the time but his dishonesty led him to commit crimes. I don’t expect anyone to be a perfectly honest person, you can go lie to whoever you like, but when a government official says up is down, black is white, I have no reason to consider an extensive knowledge of geopolitics will serve the nation.
My observation is that lack of honesty is a serious unforgivable flaw in the candidate you oppose, and a negligible consideration – if it’s acknowledged to exist at all – in the candidate you favor.
My perspective is that Hillary appears to lie to obscure some of the truth, and Trump appears to lie because he doesn’t recognize the truth. So on the one hand you have limited honesty, and on the other hand you have limited perception. The latter worries me much, much more.
If the person you’re voting for has a proven track record of publicly supporting a cause and then reversing him/herself once elected, and/or repeatedly creates scandals by lying through their teeth (with the result of nullifying what good they could have done), dishonesty could be viewed as a lethal handicap to holding office.
Dishonesty isn’t a positive trait but it’s not a deal breaker for me. If a President is doing what I feel is the right thing then I can overlook the means by which he accomplishes it. I’d prefer he accomplished things by honest and open means but if it comes down to it, I’ll judge him by what he’s done rather than how he did it.
I’ll give FDR as an example. He was one of our more dishonest Presidents. But I think the things he did were right. And he even used his dishonesty for good causes; when isolationists were opposed to giving aid to Britain during WWII, Roosevelt went ahead and did it anyway while denying he was doing it.
There are, objectively, things that do not at all impact a person’s qualifications for president, and would be twisted or misinterpreted in a way to be harmful to the candidate when it shouldn’t be, that I’m fine with lying to cover it up. Your political leanings would motivate you to class the lie depending on how you feel about the candidate.
There was a newspaper article recently that attempted a classification of lies into ones designed to get oneself out of trouble (the alleged Hillary variant) and ones intended to puff oneself up (the purported Trump variant).
Intriguing :dubious: but for one thing it doesn’t take into account overlap between the two main categories of lying. I wouldn’t want to work for (or closely with) either type, never mind voting for one as President.
Meantime, here’s another analysis in which the personality types of political liars are summarized as anal retentive and anal expulsive (take a wild guess who is who between our top two candidates).
That’s something interesting to consider. I can’t know how I would have felt about it at the time. I expect the president to be less than forthcoming in dealing with foreign policy matters of that nature, but I didn’t know he outright lied about aiding Britain. FDR was IMHO one of our greatest presidents, unquestionably THE greatest in the 20th century and beyond I’d say, overall I can’t say he was a bad president because of dishonesty. Assuming my current self at the time I think I be unhappy about that, but I’m sure attitudes about presidential power were different also. There was plenty of dishonesty that followed his time, until Nixon’s fall a lot of people assumed presidents were beyond the law as well as our modern notions of trustworthiness. I have to think about this, not that it’s right for a president to lie to the nation, but what the limits of acceptability are. When I consider Reagan, a man who bragged about his ability to lie, and the lies he told about the Iran-Contra deal among others, I feel like the problem with allowing the ‘good lie’ is that it just leads to bad lies by presidents who don’t turn out to be acting in our best interest in the end.