Oh, politicians and they things they say
Morally wrong or just politically stupid?
Last week The New York Times reported that Connecticut Attorney General and Democratic nominee for Senate, Richard Blumenthal, lied about his Vietnam service. He spoke about when he “served in Vietnam” and the national mood when he “returned”, though the closest he got to war was serving in the Marine Reserve, which it was known would never be deployed. Yesterday, it was revealed that Lucas Baumbach, a Republican candidate for state Senate in Idaho, plagiarized almost word for word from then-Senate candidate Obama’s 2004 DNC speech.
Leaving aside the obvious inquiry of why candidates say silly things, the public philosophical question is whether or not it is wrong. I don’t ask this question from an individual ethics point of view. There is plenty of literature on the morality of lying and plagiarism. I’m more interested in whether it is wrong for candidates, as candidates for political office, to lie and plagiarize.
The obvious analogy here is the standards to which we hold our politicians: we expect them to uphold higher standards than individuals. While we generally favor privacy for individuals in the community, we are OK with reporters investigating and publishing the good, the bad and the ugly about the lives of our politicians. We fan the flames of uproar with one minor fib; we call for a scalp if we catch them cheating or acting in ways unbecoming of a leader.
But do candidates for office fall in the same category as politicians or individual citizens? In some ways, candidates are similar to political representatives. By collecting signatures and donations and convincing people to volunteer for them, they have come to represent a segment of the voting population: their supporters. And these voters expect them (even in their private life) to do everything they can to win. Imagine donating one hundred hard earned dollars to a candidate only to find out the next day that he or she had previously broken the law, cheated on a spouse, etc. You would feel ripped off. Like if you had purchased something at a store with a no-return policy and the product broke the next day. In some sense there is an informal agreement between candidate and supporters that the candidate act in responsible ways. When candidates lie and plagiarize and cheat, they break this agreement, which makes it morally wrong, not just politically stupid.
Yet in the most obvious of ways, candidates are not political representatives. We impose high moral standards on political officials because of the formal and legal agreement they have with the people they represent. Their behavior, both in the political and personal arenas, has an impact on their role and ability as a political representative and, thus, is of concern to their constituents. Candidates don’t have a similar relationship to the voters. Investing in a candidate is more a kin to investing in a stock than buying a product at a store. You make a bet on someone. If they win, you win, because you want them to be your elected official. But if they lose, for whatever reason, you have no avenues for redress. You can’t reverse a stock purchase after it has lost value. You took a gamble. Sure, you’ll be upset if you lose, but you won’t feel wronged in the way you would if you purchased a faulty product.
Of course, there is no clear answer to the question of whether behavior by candidates like Blumenthal and Baumbach represents a moral fault or simply political stupidity. Which way you fall on this issue will depend on your beliefs about the moral relationship between candidate and supporter.
-Marc
Related posts:
- Politicians and Privacy
- Politicians and party
- When should politicians resign?
- Primaries as partisan purifiers
- Oh, I don’t know, I like all of them
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