How much should the personal morality and lives of politicians play a role in politics?
While I’m hardly a fan of Rick Perry, what he said did have a point:
I don’t think there’s a concrete answer to any of that. If a politician’s personal conduct gives you reason to doubt he will do what he says he’ll do, then it’s fair to take that into consideration. But being a good person doesn’t mean you’ll be a good politician, and dishonesty or failings in one area of your life does not guarantee you will be less honorable in another area of your life. It’s reasonable to be suspicious of that, but the reasons a man cheats on his wife are not necessarily similar to the reasons he might “cheat on” his business partner (I’ll grant that Rick Perry has been pretty faithful to his business partners as governor). If nothing else, people in politics tend to be very good at compartmentalizing.
Nothing in reality, though the perception of a given candidate’s moral code can certainly help or hinder them in regards tot he ignorant vote. Track record is a better indicator of what someone might do, but that is fraught with uncertainty as well. What is ethical, legal, and practical are all different things, and an intelligent voter knows it. All three should be taken into consideration in a stance on any given issue. Personally, I distrust any politician who claims to have black and white views, or sacred cows. The world is not that simple, and things change. I want decision makers who understand that and will review each situation on it’s own merits. I do my best to elect candidates who move in that direction.
There are different types of immorality and they may not correlate well with each other. AFAIK no allegation of marital infidelity was ever made against Nixon, yet he is often considered one of the most immoral and corrupt of modern Presidents. (The same statement could be made about another recent President.) It’s widely thought Eisenhower had a wartime mistress, yet he was among the greatest and least corrupt of modern Presidents.
Political ruthlessness, if that’s a type of “immorality,” may even be a good attribute for a President to have. Kennedy and Johnson were ruthless, yet near-great. Truman wasn’t ruthless, but was widely viewed as the product of a very corrupt political machine, yet was among the greatest.
This doesn’t fully answer OP’s question, but I hope it adds nuance. Certainly any simplistic “cheat on your wife and cheat on your country” conclusion is nonsense.
In a secular state, none.
First, because saints don’t exist. Expecting a politican, just because he’s in the spotlight, to be a perfect moral being is unrealistic.
Second, because being a moralistic close-minded bigot doesn’t make somebody a good politican. A good politican is somebody who is able to listen to his advisors and pick not only yes-men but competent advisors (smarter than himself); soembody who has a broad general compass (like “treating all people decently”) allowing real world solutions to real problems (that e.g. providing care for mothers at Planned parenthood is better for everybody than forbidding it, as the results show) and one who stands fast on his principles against lobbyists and fringe pressure groups.
I don’t see any point he has. First, Rick Perry is that idiot who lies to win evangelicals over, right?
There’s both deliberate lie and ignorance of basic facts so strong in there that I wouldn’t trust him if he said that grass is green.
Secondly, somebody stating something doesn’t make it so. Do you have any proof of correlation or causation, other than “I believe it”?
I don’t see any half-way plausible explanation as to why these things should be connected. Cheating on your wife is either because lack of control over sexual desires, or because there’S something wrong interpersonally in your marriage.
Cheating on your business partner means either that you believe that “as long as you can get away with it, you are allowed to, because it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and if I don’t, somebody else will cheat me, so I’ll do it first to be smarter” or you are convinced your partner is scum.
In fact, I can see very easily the opposite being true: somebody who’s so repressed about his sex life that he doesn’t “cheat” on his wife (not that he’s very nice to her or anything, he only doesn’t have sex with somebody else), but cheats on his business partner because he believes in zero-sum game.
I agree with Rick Perry on this one point. We have to judge a candidate by what we know of him and, assuming we know an unnamed candidate who cheats on his wife, it is perfectly fair to weigh that fact along with all the others. A candidate’s personal life is one place we can see how he treats the people he has sworn to take care of. If he ditches them when it isn’t convent for him, personally, then I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect a nameless voter to
be less than trusting.
Candidates know personal morality is important to voters. Yet, some candidates just can’t, or won’t, behave with the most basic of personal morality that 90% of the population expects on a day-to-day basis. It doesn’t sound like those candidates are very serious about their job, it sounds like they just care about getting the nookie.
In the end, why should I trust a politician to take my interests into account when he can’t be bothered to take his own wife’s interest into account?
Of course personal morality should, and does, “play a role” in politics. Hairstyle plays a role in politics, for goodness sakes.
I don’t know that it’s always sound or logical to draw conclusions about political behavior to random choices in a person’s personal life, however. Nor is it always true (as pointed out upthread) that people who have made morally questionable decisions will be poor performers as leaders. It pisses me off to no end to have to say that, but it’s clearly true.
My default position is politicians have no morals.
Morals, like ethics, are soluble in cash.
But it wasn’t about how he treats people, only whether he cheats. Therefore, a known liar like Perry who campaigns on trampling people’s rights and establishing a sectarian faith as dominant, but presumably doesn’t cheat on his wife, is better than another candidate who is for human and civil rights, but cheated on his wife once.
A candidate like Newt Gringrich, is by that logic preferable over another candidate because he didn’t cheat on his wife. He just treated them like dirt, like divorcing one on her hospital bed.
This makes me really glad that the puritan streak is missing from our politics. When Schröder and Fischer were up for election, nobody gave a damn that they had been married three or four times before, or how much younger their new wife was. More worrying was that everybody knew that Schröder was a power-hungry unprincipled asshole, but the alternative was letting the consies get power, so he was the lesser evil.
JFK and Martin Luther King both cheated on their wives, but I will take them any day ten times over for their progress in civil rights instead of somebody like Bush.
Good is not nice. Doing what’s good for the country requires a clear head and the ability to listen. This is not related anywhere to how you treat your wife, or whether you can abstain when the world is watching you.
As for “90%” of the country - I doubt you can get 90% of the country to agree on how to treat women. Half of them wants women in the kitchen (not all barefoot and pregnant, but certainly not out in the workforce giving orders to men). Or is this “appearance over substance” - it’s not about treating the woman as your spouse like an equal, but simply keeping up appearances by not having sex with somebody else, but otherwise everything is allowed, like demeaning her?
Sounds very similar to how the fundies are against abortions - when other people have them. When their own daughters are pregnant, they have the same rate as non-fundies, though they often travel elsewhere so the neighbours don’T see it.
False dichtomy and completly unrelated. His wife’s interests require the ability to personally relate, to find time after a long workday (14 or more hrs) to be nice, time for romantic gestures .. which often end up being cancelled due to stress on the job, dealing with fawning admirers and being away from home while under stress.
Keeping your interests as voter into account doesn’t require any personal ability. It requires the discipline to get facts, evaluate solutions as to which work, implement them if necessary against a hostile press / party/ loud fringe groups.
A lot of people are not good at personal relationships, but very good at finding solutions. The morality apostles will select a smarmy, lying candidate over a good one because the first flatters their own narrow set of morals, while the other may not even be married.
Yes he did, FTR, and all while making a big public show about Bill Clinton’s infidelity.
That raises another aspect of the issue – being a hypocritical weasel is in itself an indication of untrustworthiness. Either he doesn’t actually believe in the professed rule he breaks (in which case he’s lying to cynical pander to the peanut gallery, and might easily lie about other matters as well), or he does theoretically believe in the rule, breaks it anyway, and rationalizes away the misbehavior (in which case he might break other rules and rationalize those transgressions away as well).
Yes, to me the hypocrisy and cynicism are a separate issue from the marital infidelity.
Marital infidelity doesn’t disqualify a candidate in my eyes. We are all made of the same clay and all that. Anyone can fall prey to temptation.
It takes a whole other level of dishonesty and cynicism to go out in public, while you yourself are cheating, and lambast someone else for the same transgression.
Turn that around:
“If you’ll cheat on your business partner, you’ll cheat on your wife.”
Would you consider this a true statement?
Assuming cheating on either party (business partner or wife) is immoral for the sake of argument, this would mean you could use the same reasoning to presume all business cheats are also unfaithful spouses.
This is probably not true and this line of argument would probably be laughed at.
It’s a pithy, idiotic quote from a man that not even a majority of Texans trust and who couldn’t get a majority vote the last time he faced a serious conservative challenge in a statewide election. He wins Texas elections because he has the Republican Party of Texas firmly in hand. A philandering, brain-dead goon could win in Texas if he had the ® next to his name.
Morals are kinda subjective. Character is easier to idnetify.
Many values that are mainstream in American politics are completely immoral, so personal morality plays no role in politics as all successful politicians disregard morality.
Among the voters, there are obvious links. People whose lives revolve around punishing women for having sex, torturing gay teenagers, and dropping bombs on brown people obviously are soulless monsters. The fundamental sickness in our society that leads to an utter lack of concern about real moral issues is one of several big issues that are off-limits in normal political discourse.
Actually, he cheated on his first wife with a mistress who eventually became his second wife. And then he cheated on his second wife with a mistress who eventually became his third wife.
IMHO, politicians are people who are able to sidestep morality, in favor “the big picture”. That is why a president like Kennedy could send men to their (certain) deaths (Bay of Pigs), and lanch a war in Vietnam, and have extra-marital sexual affairs-while pretending to be a principled family man.
THat is why I prefer politicians who are open about their immorality (guys like Nixon and Churchill).
What do you mean here exactly? Do you believe Governor Perry trampled on the rights of the citizens of Texas when he made them pay for the education of illegals?
Consies? Fischer? Schroder would indicate Germany though…
JFK didn’t do anything for civil rights, unlike Bush who incidentally renewed the Voting Rights Act.
It does require integrity and loyalty to the country,
Well I’d never vote for anyone who has had an abortion or incited an abortion “fundie” or not. And I’m amused your characterize fundies as that as one of the heroes of the Christian Right in this country is a woman-Michelle Bachmann and so is Sarah Palin.
Keep up with the jokes please.
Well, there’s the Equal Pay Act of 1963. And while the 1964 Civil Rights Act was finally passed during the Johnson administration, it has its roots in the Kennedy administration.