I wouldn’t vote for him
This guy running for president is a straight talker. He’s an aging guy with a soft middle and frowsy hair. He’s going to fix the economic mess we’re in and stop losing money to Asia. He wants to take the lawyers down a peg, and he won’t let violent criminals go free. He’s a candidate who will stick up for the little guy—for working-class people in old industrial towns in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio, for people left behind by the big suits and the tech types.
He defends the people against congressmen swilling at the public trough, demands that “[h]ardships suffered by low- and middle-class Americans must include high government officials.” He warns against America’s ventures to remake the world and thinks we need to take care of our own first: “America’s frontier today is not beyond its borders. It is within those borders. We have got to pull ourselves together.”
I wouldn’t vote for the populist presidential candidate behind these words because I knew him personally. What he was like as a person nullified any merit his politics or proposals might have had.
A candidate of bad character does not deserve your vote even if you like his policies.
I knew this candidate personally—although, because my parents divorced when I was little, I didn’t know him well. I grew up in upstate New York with my family while he lived in rural Pennsylvania on a plot of empty land we called “the farm.” Once when the five of us were driving in Butler County near the farm, I shouted: “Hey! Look! Isn’t that a poster of Daddy? Running for president?” The car got silent then loud. What kind of a lie was I telling to get attention, out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere? But I did see a poster with my father’s face on it, tacked to a tree. My mother turned the car around and went back, and we got out of the car to stare. The poster really did say he was running for president.
At the time I could not have voted for him anyway—I was too young to vote in 1984. “The way I look at it,” my father told the Washington Post that year, “ninety percent of the people in this country have the potential to be as good or better a president than the two guys who have been nominated.” He thought he had that potential.
He kept at these campaigns and ran for the U.S. Senate too and kept filing cases in high courts. Had he made it past the New Hampshire primary in 1992, I could have voted for him then. He did not, so the country was spared that particular round of populist bluster.
My father could cause discomfort. He could have been called eccentric. He kept our family embroiled in court proceedings over custody and child support. It should be noted that he would say he resisted paying child support payments out of principle. He reasoned that judges had robbed him of his children and his fatherhood by making decisions on our behalf. His wrath burned hot against judges and corruptions of the American legal system. His political career came out of that furnace, from ire at judges he judged unaccountable and overpaid, the media outlets he thought were muzzling his protests about judges and fathers’ rights, and all the other things he thought had gone wrong in America. These facts are public record; I am not spilling family secrets, though I was glad that no one I knew paid attention.
Why dredge up this insignificant political detail, this personally discomfiting recollection, now?
Location, location, location. Like real estate, history demands attention to the particular and to the context surrounding it. Our context, this election season, invites parallels between then and now, between that man as a candidate and this current candidate. At first glance, there are few parallels. One man lacked institutional backing, the other co-opted party institutions to propel his onslaught. One man was pretty close economically to the people he was trying to rile up, the other is a billionaire. Two comparisons are telling, nevertheless. The first is most important: Character matters. If the candidate is questionable in person, you cannot act as though that doesn’t matter because you like his policies. That point—that character matters—was the reason the sign on the tree shocked me. I thought: You can’t be serious. He is the last person who should be president.
The personal was the political in my father’s case—his inspiration to run for office sprang from his personal experience. Similarly, the person, not a platform, is atop the Republican ticket this year. Not all character flaws are equally damning or equally pertinent to a political candidacy. But when a candidate offers himself as a moral champion, invites the aggrieved and marginal to lodge trust in him, then that moral profile determines eligibility for trust. When a candidate appeals to voters because he claims to see who they are, they absolutely should care who he is.
Thanks be to God that there was no social media then, that the internet was but a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye. My upstate New York friends never found out my father was running for president. Given the way information circulated in the late twentieth century, the brief echo of any single weirdo or huckster pounding a podium didn’t have to go viral. What damage could come from any bombastic buffoon could be limited to a small realm in the extended sphere of a big country.
The difference between media attention in my father’s campaigns and social media’s potential now, shows contrast rather than likeness between the two candidates. The contrast does not flatter the present. I was not proud that my father was running for president, but I am proud of American politics—that a candidacy like his would be possible. What a great democratic achievement it is that a man from a rural-delivery address could run alongside the wealthy and powerful—Cyril E. Sagan as “The Voice of the Voiceless,” as well as a candidate renamed Elijah the Prophet, or an advocate of prison reform waging his primary run from a correctional facility in Alabama. It’s a sign of a great country that those candidates could run but not run riot. When my father was in New Hampshire, knocking on doors and talking to voters about bad judges, the republic was safe enough.
Exactly because the present populist candidate burst past safeguards that political parties and clunky electoral processes strap around demagogues-in-the-making, his supporters, supporters of the kind my father would have wanted, should do some soul searching. Few voters rallied when my father was the face of the cause. When the champion is a self-promoting brand name with the prerogatives of wealth, his voters may have a harder time convincing others—and themselves—that what they are supporting is principle.
Agnes R. Howard teaches in Christ College, the honors college at Valparaiso University, and is author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us about Being Human. She is a Contributing Editor for Current.