Julia Gillard here at home, David Petraeus in
the US; the political circus is putting on the Character Show again. Are we
being a little precious? Have popular perceptions of integrity always been
synonymous with leadership and ability?
I
know people who claim to have bribed one of our modern luminaries when he was
still a union leader. No suggestion that the future Prime Minister actually
pocketed the dough. He was just the point man in charge of greasing the skids;
it’s the way things were done – the price of a smooth ride in business.
Without
suggesting this is right, or should continue, it’s worth remembering: if this
man had been exposed and precluded from office, this country might still be
trapped in a 1950s mindset and a 1930s economy.
John
F Kennedy was not only a serial adulterer, but rode into office on his father’s
electoral corruption. Ditto Lyndon Johnson (although, he did his own bribery). In
fact, it was partly by virtue of his dubious associations that Johnson was able
to ram through the most far-reaching civil rights legislation since the
Emancipation Proclamation (on a related note, Martin Luther King Jr also had
trouble keeping his trousers on).
This
brings us to Kennedy and Johnson’s tragic successor: Nixon. He should have been
one of the truly great. As Vice-President he effectively ran the US for much of
the prosperous 1950s while Eisenhower was occupied having heart attacks.
Domestically, he was a “compassionate conservative” before it was a buzzword; on
the world stage, a true statesman.
Sadly,
in Nixon’s case, character was
destiny. He inherited a war and, in war as in politics, knew only one way to
fight – totally. Escalate; deal from strength; carpet-bomb anything that looks
like an enemy and sort out the collateral damage later. “Tricky Dick’s” major
flaw wasn’t dishonesty or corruption – it was paranoia.
And
so on throughout modern history; from Franklin Delano Roosevelt – adulterous product of the Tammany Hall Democratic Machine – who steered the US out of the
Great Depression, propped up Britain during the first years of World War II,
and provided the USSR with the money and materiel to defeat Nazi Germany; to
Thomas Jefferson, the spendthrift who fathered umpteen children on his slave,
Sally Hemmings; and, of course, his namesake, William Jefferson Clinton.
We
could mention one historical exception, a man whose private life was blameless
to the point of boredom; who neither drank nor smoked; and who set out a
political ideology early in his career and delivered on every word of it –
after becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
Our
Federal Opposition should be careful. The Character Show is a Pandora’s Box.
Any points are scored at the expense of the public’s respect for politics in
general.
Still,
the Prime Minister is in a spot: the scoundrels I’ve named had real
accomplishments to offset their faults. In trying to govern by sound bite, she
has largely avoided that encumbrance.
Her
real problem is that recent allegations fit squarely with a narrative she
herself created – that of a Machiavellian schemer who knifed her predecessor,
lied to the nation, and made a deal to retain government then welched on it.
She did this to herself.
Now
she’s doing it to the rest of us.
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