The Importance of Character

I have expressed more than once in this space my reluctance to vote for Barack Obama, because of his inexperience.  John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate complicates the choice for me, since McCain, age 72 and a cancer survivor, might not make it through even a first term.  The carping back and forth between Obama and Palin partisans, about which of them is less prepared for the presidency, only underlined the inescapable fact that they are both neophytes on the world stage.
This week I re-read David McCullough’s 1992 biography of Harry Truman.  The book reminded me that character sometimes trumps experience as a criterion for national leadership.  If any president had character in spades, that president was Harry Truman.  His biography also reminded me of how little experience Truman brought to almost every new challenge of his career.
When he was elected the lieutenant of his artillery battery and, subsequently promoted to captain, led that battery through some hot action during the 1919 Battle of the Argonne, he rose to that challenge from a background spent almost exclusively down on the family farm.  A few years in Missouri’s National Guard marked his only prior military experience.  Prior to participating in this great WWI battle, as McCullough says in an essay called “Character Above All,” Truman “had never been in a fight in his life.  He was the little boy forbidden by his mother to play in roughhouse games because of his glasses.  He was a bookworm — a sissy, as he said himself later on, using the dreaded word.”
After the war, he and an Army buddy started a men’s wear shop that went bankrupt.  Only then did Harry enter politics, running for election to a modest county judgeship.  Although put forward by the notorious “Pendergast Machine,” he conducted himself honorably, later stating that he passed up the chance to line his pockets to the tune of a million or more dollars in construction contracts.  Remarkably, instead of dumping Truman for refusing to play along, the political bosses later put him up for the U.S. Senate.
Elected to Congress for the first time during the New Deal, Truman arrived in Washington tarred with the Pendergast brush.  Some Senate colleagues, according to McCullough, refused to speak to the junior Senator from Missouri.  Harry Truman won them over through straight talk and hard work.  Still, when he ran for reelection, most observers inside and outside the Senate wrote him off.  With few influential friends and little money, he barnstormed his state, sometimes sleeping in his car.  A combination of Truman pluck and sheer luck — his two primary opponents split the anti-Pendergast vote — returned him to the Senate in 1940.
During this second Senatorial term, Truman came of age in national politics.  The Truman Committee, his personal brainstorm, became the Congressional watchdog of wartime spending, arguably saving Uncle Sam billions of dollars by ferreting out waste and graft in defense contracts.  Truman’s face landed on the cover of Time Magazine for the first time.
In 1944 Senator Harry Truman became “the Missouri Compromise” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  After playing coy about his choice for a running mate for his fourth term, FDR dumped incumbent VP Henry Wallace and passed over other leading contenders for the slot in favor of the inoffensive Truman.  Truman was vice president for only 82 days, when FDR died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
As he had always been disparaged, his ascendancy to the presidency was no exception.  Critics — and there were many — considered him a nobody, a lightweight.  Truman himself said, “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”   No wonder: one of his first decisions was to drop the atom bomb on Japan.
He went on to lead America into the Marshall Plan, probably the most important step in saving Western Europe from Soviet domination, and perhaps the only time in history when the victor lifted the vanquished off their knees.  His reelection in 1948 was another instance of Truman pluck overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.  The famous photo of a victorious Harry, holding aloft the Chicago Tribune’s headline “Dewey Defeats Truman,” says it all.
As McCullough sums it up, “He was not without flaw….  [but] Principle mattered more than his own political hide.  His courage was the courage of his convictions….”  The question for November 2008 is: who among the candidates can make a similar claim? If I knew the answer to that, I’d know who should have my vote.
[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University.  A collection of his columns is available at http://www.lulu.com.]

In November, We Will Make History… Let’s Do It Right!

Barring the unforeseen, in January 2009 America will have either its first black president or its first female vice president. Either way we will have made history.
For this writer, the 2008 national election has the main qualities of a great rollercoaster ride. For me it feels both exciting and scary.
Making history is always exciting, unless one is an utter coward. Come on, admit it. As we mark the seventh anniversary of the Nine/Eleven terrorist attacks, can’t you recall at least a bit of excitement blended with the shock, fear and sadness the attacks engendered? That survivors of tragedies experience a mix of relief, elation and guilt is an historical cliché, so commonly has it been recorded.
But Obama and Palin scare me, too. I put the odds at 50-50 whether one or the other will be our chief executive. If Obama wins, well then he’s in the Oval Office. If McCain wins, then let’s hope that brave old heart keeps beating for at least four more years. If not, well then…
Palin contended in her unforgettable convention speech that being mayor was like being a community activist, only with real responsibilities. Awe, c’mon, Sarah. Neither you nor Barack bore much responsibility until you became a governor and he became a senator. You will both end 2008 with only about two years of meaningful experience. (I don’t count the past two years in Obama’s column, since he spent it all running for president.)
These two political neophytes have been firing off some real zingers, while the two grand old boys on the tickets, McCain and Biden, have conducted themselves in a more restrained, statesman-like manner. Palin’s comparison of a hockey mom to a pit bull with lipstick led Obama to repeat the old saw that a pig with lipstick is still a pig. Personally, I think Palin is kind of cute. But never mind that. What fascinates me most at this juncture is how close Barack and Sarah are on the issue of big oil.
Obama says he wants to impose a windfall profits tax on the oil barons. He says he would invest this revenue in researching alternative energy sources. McCain commented that this was Jimmy Carter’s idea during the first oil crisis, which occurred in the Seventies, implying the idea was bad then and is bad today.
Now get this. On September 12th, “USA Today” ran a front-page story on Palin’s gubernatorial record to date. If you missed it the first time around, read it now: “This year, she rebuffed religious conservatives who wanted her to add two abortion restriction measures to a special legislative session on oil and gas policy, even though she supported the bills. Former aide Larry Persily said she didn’t want to risk offending Democrats, whose votes she needed on energy legislation.”
The newspaper story continued, “In her 21 months as governor, Palin has taken few steps to advance culturally conservative causes. Instead,… Palin pursued a populist agenda that toughened ethics rules and raised taxes on oil and gas companies.” So who is Sarah Palin, really? We need to know.
In 1984 Geraldine Ferarro was Walter Mondale’s running mate. Before becoming a Congresswoman, Ferarro was a teacher, a lawyer and a district attorney. She was also the first Italian-American on a major party’s presidential ticket. Mondale’s choice gave the Democrats a short-lived bounce in the polls. The bounce lost its momentum well before November. Reagan and Bush buried the Dems, amidst some nasty sexist and ethnic slurs. Some sexists derided the Democratic ticket as “Fritz (Mondale’s nickname) and T___s” Others impugned Ferarro’s reputation, suggesting her husband had Mafia ties.
Whatever else happens during the next month and a half, here’s hoping that neither racism nor sexism is permitted to play a role in the remainder of this campaign cycle. Enough about lipstick on animals of any sort, thank you very much. We voters need to understand, as best we can, what are the leadership qualities and policy positions of these two mavericks. Since there’s a good chance one or the other will, sooner or later, occupy the Oval Office, we need to get as firm a fix on them as humanly possible.
And that’s never an easy trick from a seat on a roller coaster, in the midst of all the fright and excitement.
[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost and Associate Counsel at Rider University. A collection of his columns is available at http://www.lulu.com.]