Many Election Returns

For a partisan politico such as myself, it’s a tough confession to make, but there isn’t much to like about the way we evaluate presidential candidates in things called primaries, caucuses, and general elections.

Opposition campaign operations staffed for instant response to the slightest misstatement. Searing media scrutiny of every word uttered, stand taken, promise made, and relationship considered.

Cameras, tape recorders, and reporters’ notebooks witness much, and tell few lies. Hence, candidates’ long-forgotten, sometimes innocent and off-handed remarks, made with benign intent years ago, lie like shackled goblins, waiting for search engine liberation, so as to damage reputations, question sincerity, and, in the modern lingo, dominate the next few news cycles.

Consider Hillary Clinton’s recent run-in with herself over a trip to Bosnia she made as First Lady. At several campaign stops earlier this year she described the overseas landing as a harrowing experience, an encounter shrouded in the fog of civil war and the danger of significant sniper fire.... The problem for Senator Clinton was that it didn’t happen that way...at all. How do we know? Someone checked the video vault, and there found recorded images of a peaceful, serene setting, more like “The Sound of Music” than the sound of gunfire.

It was instant fodder for late night comedians and her political opponents. The controversy drowned out any conversation she may have planned to start about health care, the economy, or the war in Iraq. It was just about the dumbest political move a candidate has made in recent memory. Come on, didn’t anyone notice the snapshots they took of the sweet smiling, gift-bearing children who greeted the entourage? Weren’t the kids a bit of a hint?

It was false. It was stupid. But did it prove a flawed character? Did it show that she was so arrogantly conniving that she believed no one would notice if she just made something up to impress campaign crowds? You’d think so, given the tenor of the media’s attention. You’d think she was a pathetic, as well as a pathological, liar.

This example is not intended to advocate for Senator Clinton, for she, too, has contributed to the superficiality of modern campaigns: Witness the week she used earlier this year to call attention to the presidential aspirations Barack Obama announced...in fifth grade!

You are entitled to your own assessment of politicians’ statements, but those I’ve cited here alert me to the failure of modern political processes in which we judge prospective leaders on the basis a sound byte or a slip-up, rather than the clarity of their vision or the practicality of their ideas.

Why do we do it? Because it’s easy. Our work as loyal citizens is much less taxing if we can decide about a candidate on the basis the instant or the obvious. We don’t have time for, let alone interest in, reflective analyses or “in his/her shoes” sensitivity sessions. So, we take the easy road, which so often proves to be the low road.


You may doubt the following turn, but when I think about our scouring of candidates and the campaigns they wage, I think about the woman caught in adultery, whose execution – just moments away – is scuttled by Jesus’ gentle insistence that the executioners take a second look at the case; this time, at themselves.

The woman had broken the law – to society’s instant-read legal thermometer, she deserved death – but Jesus refused to allow such cursory examinations. He asked the judges to hear from one more witness – themselves – before passing sentence. Upon further review, the judges became the judged, complex and complicit characters who were at least equally condemnable. Stones and outrage dropped simultaneously as the jury of her “leers” abandoned the execution chamber. The surprise pardon permits Jesus to engage the person beneath the broken choices, and to point to the potential in spite of her past.

Consider Saul, the persecutor, the ambitious zealot against all things Christian, whom Jesus chose to plant some of the first churches on record. Upon initial review, no responsible authority would have deemed Saul worthy or capable of such a holy mission. But Jesus didn’t see his mistakes; he saw the man and his potential.

We need some form of this second chance, deeper look in our evaluation of political candidates. We have to expect more from those who seek our votes and donations, as well as from the managers who direct their campaigns and the media that cover them. We must refuse impulsive evaluations that depend on mistakes which are more casual than caustic, more benign than ballistic. Presidential candidates are human, let’s remember. As such, they will make ill-timed, ill-considered remarks; they will speak with lengthy, clumsy rhetoric that, when adroitly edited, can be made to say just about whatever an opponent wants it to say; and they will at times appear to contradict what they said at the last camera-ready campaign stop.

At the top of this piece I confessed my political partisanship. Make no mistake, as campaign 2008 unfolds, I will join with my allies in search of fodder for our battle against the other side. But as I hear the snippets and sound bytes, as I read the blog entries written by people who live on my side of the political fence, I trust I will remember the woman about to be stoned, whom accusers judged on first appearance, whom the crowd condemned without further review. I hope will assess ideas, not personalities, and value issues, not minutia. I pray I will carry only stones that have been polished and softened in the crucible of what actually matters.


Pray with me:
You have chosen me, God. That should be enough to convince me that first impressions aren’t always enough. In the name of Jesus, Amen.