Character Flaws

Here’s a very interesting interview with journalist Philip Gourevitch of The New Yorker. He has many fine insights into the way the press covers politics and also the way the parties manipulate the press. But, he said one thing in particular that I think is important:

[Another] big mistake I think the press makes: They call anything that isn’t a strict policy issue “character,” when often it’s personality. There’s a big difference. Character has to do with things like honesty and integrity and honor. I don’t think anybody can, for instance, begin to look at both [candidates’] records and say Bush’s character, or let’s say his service during the Vietnam war, or his sobriety, his business record, his way of sort of being really quite indifferent about all sorts of things, that these are character issues where he comes off looking great. He has a winning personality, apparently, with a lot of people. Kerry, on the other had, his character may be conflicted in places but his problem is a personality problem.

Character is a very strong word. It suggests a kind of fundamental quality of the soul, of the sensibility, it’s almost like the stuff somebody’s made of. If you say this guy has a character problem, it doesn’t mean he’s hard to like. I’ve interviewed war criminals and mass murders, and they’re often exceedingly charming … So charm and character or personality and character are separate things, and I think the press probably conflates them in a way that is not useful or is misleading…

Actually, “character” is a patented GOP spin point that is used against Democrats and for Republicans. (As such, it is entirely unsurprising that the press has adopted it wholesale without ever giving it a second thought.) It is a central tenet of the GOP attack machine to disparage Democrats’ tolerance, openness to new ideas and our more complex worldview as showing a lack of character. We are shallow, cowardly, insubstantial, craven, lacking in integrity and morals. That’s what the flip-flop charge is all about. “John Kerry has no principles” — a character flaw.

As Gourevitch says, the idea of character goes to a “fundamental quality of the soul, the stuff’s somebody’s made of.” People take these things very seriously in evaluating others. Those words matter. And, unfortunately, we Democrats have often adopted the same exact language to goad our own politicians into action, which helps to validate their charge against us.

It also leads us astray. Very often what is merely a bad strategic call is seen as cowardice or a failed tactic is regarded as cravenness when, in fact, the politicians who supported them may have been ineffective, not for lack of character but for lack of good ideas or flawed execution. Brave people can fail. And more importantly, if you don’t deal with the actual problem you can’t properly correct it.

It is always fair to criticize our politicians when they make mistakes and when they fail. We aren’t a cult. But the least we can do is not blindly adopt Republican jargon and categorize every political failure as a lack of character when, in fact, the failure may stem from something else entirely.

I will say again for the thousandth time that whenever Democrats find themselves saying something about a fellow Democrat that they can imagine Rush or Hannity saying on their radio shows, they should stop and think again. They are playing on Republican turf and it does us absolutely no good.