This year’s United States presidential campaign season has not brought with it many out-of-the-ordinary surprises. From Donald Trump’s sexist and racist comments to Hillary Clinton’s email controversy, we all saw the attacks on personal character coming from miles away.
But these personal attacks have been notably worse for Republican candidate Ben Carson, who has faced a great deal of media scrutiny this week for allegedly lying about multiple aspects of his personal life and achievements. Jezebel alleges that Carson’s character, upon which he has built his entire campaign, may be shattered by accusations by Politico and The Wall Street Journal. The first claimed he had never actually received the full scholarship to the United States Military Academy he said in his book to have received, and the second claimed the “most honorable student award” he received while attending Yale University never actually existed. Jezebel also reminded us that Carson quite possibly fabricated the story that he stabbed someone as a 14-year-old boy in his biography, “Gifted Hands.”
It’s important for us to recognize that being a truthful and honest person is part of what makes a good presidential candidate, but it isn’t everything. According to Gallup, Bill Clinton was considered a president who “can get things done,” but a 1999 poll showed that “less than 50 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Bill Clinton ‘as a person’ just after the Monica Lewinsky scandal and his impeachment hearings.”
The Clinton example is a recycled one, but a good one nonetheless. Clearly, there are aspects of the American presidency that have nothing to do with one’s personal life. According to the same polls, 71 percent of Americans in 1999 said that the economy was the best it had been “in their lifetime,” and over 70 percent said that Clinton had been an “effective manager” during his presidency.
At the same time, it’s arguably much different to evaluate trust during election times versus trust during a candidate’s actual time in office. Even when looking all the way back to John F. Kennedy’s presidency, we can see that the public has always been interested in what our candidates were doing behind closed doors. But should the personal narrative even be part of a candidates campaign?
Obviously, we can see that it works in a candidate’s favor when he or she can make an emotional connection with an audience. And while we may want to focus on candidates’ policies and plans for when they take office, we arguably lose the balance between these policies and personality as election season thickens. We may be desensitized to the fact that candidates lie about their personal lives during campaigns, but we seem to forget that candidates lie just as often about what policies they intend to implement just to make it past the primaries. Whether we like it or not, these candidates’ personal lives are often what influence voters’ decisions in the primary and election process. And we care just as much about Marco Rubio’s credit in relation to his campaign funding as another candidate’s sexual history.
Even still, there are some aspects about being the president that require a certain caliber of responsibility. The fact is, a campaigning candidate has the potential to run this country in some capacity, and the American media and public is going to pick and prod at every single aspect of that candidate’s personal life, whether that be the color of his or her socks or the fact that he or she lied about having gotten a certain award in college. For this reason, it’s definitely problematic that candidates such as Ben Carson lie to such a significant extent as this.
Personality gives us a look into a person’s character. It seems a lot easier to accept a poor policy decision just because U.S. President Barack Obama seems like a “good guy” or because he gives charismatic speeches. We compromise and we make judgment calls based on personality because we are so inundated with stories about candidates personal lives it almost seems as though policy has taken a backseat.
These allegations against Carson may seem devastating for his campaign, which has been almost entirely based on his good character and relation to the people because he has never served in politics before. We like to imagine that Carson outwardly lying even before he was in politics will derail his campaign, but it seems unlikely considering the fact that he still leads the polls in states such as California and Tennessee as of Saturday.
