Presidential "Character"

 I took a trip down memory lane this week by reading some old Gore Vidal essays from the early Bush years. Writing of the 2000 election—so dull in its campaigning, so lively in its result—Vidal reminds us that one of the Republican talking points at the time went something as follows: "sure, Bush may be a dope—but at least he has good character. At least he's not a liar."

This was meant overtly as a dig at Gore's (and yes, there is a relation) alleged tendency to embellish the truth. ("I invented the internet," anyone? Doesn't that take you back?) But it was also—Vidal reminds us—a subtle way of gesturing toward the character flaws of Gore's Democratic predecessor, Clinton—with his marital infidelities and his tendency to dodge touchy questions. 

And indeed—as I recall it—this became a theme throughout the Bush presidency. Whenever his war crimes, his torture policy, or his warmongering would be denounced, the response could always come back: at least he's a loyal husband. At least he has domestic virtue. At least he didn't lie to his family the way Clinton did (he may have lied to the American people, but that's another issue). 

I remember a conversation as late as my college years (during the first Obama term), when some College Republicans of my acquaintance (now executives of some nationwide retail chain or other), made an argument along these lines. I stood tall on my soapbox in response—crying, "well, if I have to choose, I care more about whether a president upholds the Bill of Rights than about their sex life." 

The dilemma as it was presented to us in the Bush years, in other words—the choice between Bush or Clinton, the Republicans or the Democrats—was that one of them stood for "family values" and the other for "civil liberties." One may have been a better husband. But at the same time, he got us into more wars, disappeared more people to CIA black sites, and eviscerated the Constitution. 

And then as a teenager—still in the Bush years—I remember when I first started to discover the joys of Byron's political verse—in particular his "Vision of Judgment"—and I found the lines that he wrote about another "George"—George III, in his case. And they seemed to fit our contemporary George to a T—whom people so often excused for Iraq because at least he wasn't unfaithful to his wife like Clinton:

"I grant his household abstinence; I grant/ His neutral virtues, which most monarchs want; / [...] I know he was a constant consort – own/ He was a decent Sire, and middling lord;/ All this is much, & most upon a throne – [...] / I grant him all the kindest can accord/ And this was well for him – but not for those/ Millions who found him what Oppression chose." 

The polar opposite contrast with Byron himself is interesting to note. His Lordship has often been accused of being lacking in "household abstinence" and other private virtues—but from all his writing that I've ever been able to see, he seems to have been irreproachable in his public virtues—taking the most humane and liberal stance on every theological or political issue that ever came before him. 

Now, of course, the whole debate can only strike us as quaint. The notion that there was some sort of choice to be made between private and public virtues—that one might have to allow a president to be deficient in the former so long as it was recompensed in the latter—belongs to an entirely different era—seeing as Trump is neither a "constant consort" nor a civil libertarian. 

Given that our current president habitually lies, has engaged in every sort of crooked personal behavior that was ever deemed disqualifying in a candidate for high office, and violates human rights and kidnaps and disappears people to secret prison camps abroad—it seems foolish in me ever to have bitten the bullet on the idea that one needs to choose between private continence and public virtue. 

Maybe, in hindsight, I should have demanded that the president be both privately and publicly virtuous. (Besides—it's not like Clinton was actually good on civil liberties, by the way—the "Effective Death Penalty Act," anyone? Or Ricky Ray Rector?) So maybe I never should have let the College Republicans frame the choice as between private and public decency. Maybe we have to right to expect both.