Ethics Newsline®

by Rushworth M. Kidder

Last week, conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh sought to skew the Democratic presidential primary in Indiana in favor of Hillary Clinton. What he did was perfectly legal. Why then did it strike so many people as unethical?

Here’s the background. As the nation headed into the latest primaries, it was well understood that Clinton could not lose both North Carolina and Indiana and still keep her campaign alive. Barack Obama was favored to win North Carolina, which he did. Clinton was favored in Indiana. She won, but only by 14,000 votes.

Well understood, too, was the need for Democrats to end the primary season quickly and focus on John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee. Every argument that Clinton and Obama lobbed at each other potentially could weaken one or the other of them later in the general election, so the Republicans were keen to see the Democratic primary continue as long as possible.

Into that mix stepped Mr. Limbaugh. He recognized that once John McCain had dispatched his competition, Republicans had no reason to vote in their own primaries. So he began urging them to do two things they probably found repugnant: vote in Democratic primaries and vote for Clinton. Prior to the March 4 Democratic primaries in Texas and Ohio, Republicans who crossed over to vote had strongly favored Obama. Had that trend continued, the Democratic primary might have ended much earlier with an Obama victory. Limbaugh’s strategy — he called it Operation Chaos — had the avowed purpose of messing up the Democratic primary by keeping Clinton’s campaign alive as long as possible.

Did it work? Nobody’s quite sure. Limbaugh congratulated himself roundly for bumping up Clinton’s numbers in Indiana and extending the Democrats’ travails. Obama’s campaign appeared to credit Limbaugh’s legions with delivering Clinton’s narrow margin of victory. Those who pore over exit polls, however, see too much complexity to be sure of the Limbaugh effect. But on one point all agree: The Indiana primary was a high-stakes venture that future historians may credit with partly determining the next president.

Who wins, however, doesn’t affect the legality of Limbaugh’s efforts. Nor does it change the ethics of the situation. Legally, he’s in the right: Like any of us, he can seek to influence citizens to vote his way. But ethics depends on motives. The motive behind a primary is to allow a party’s own voters to decide their nominee. In most primaries, voters participate in good faith, assuming that other voters are acting with equal integrity. They trust that voters who cast primary ballots probably are going to vote the same way in November if their candidate becomes the nominee. Since March, however, a significant block of Republicans apparently set out to game the system by infiltrating the Democratic decision-making process. Their motive, far from wanting to help the Democrats, was to tilt the results to their detriment. The tip-off in Indiana came from exit polls, which found strangely large numbers of voters who said, “I’m a Republican,” “I voted for Clinton just now,” but “in November I plan to vote for McCain.”

That a talk-show personality would seek to raise himself in popular approval by tinkering with the fundamentals of democracy in this way is, perhaps, not surprising. That so many Republicans would follow his lead, however, is saddening. Many of them are people who take pride in their integrity, their respect for the individuality of their fellows, and their strong sense of responsibility, transparency, and community. Many are real patriots with a deep love for the nation’s democratic processes. They are, in other words, ethical folks.

What led them astray? They simply fell for two unstated clichés that seemed to drive Limbaugh’s thinking. One is the old canard that if it ain’t illegal, it must be ethical — as though the world’s highest moral standard were “break no rule” rather than “live consistently with your ethical compass.” The other cliché is, Do whatever it takes — as though the end justifies the means, motives don’t matter, and manipulation and duplicity are fine as long as you win. Armed with that philosophy, even a wholesale abandonment of principled influencing can be made to sound plausible.

Which is why Operation Chaos struck so many people as unethical. Most voters, and most Limbaugh listeners, would never raise their own children under these two clichés. As rules for living, “if it ain’t illegal…” and “whatever it takes” fall at the first hurdle. But in the heat of an election, and under the influence of a talk-radio tradition that trades largely in clichés, it’s easy for voters to let down their guard. Failing to examine motives and duped by an excitable discourse that doesn’t always make its moral standards explicit, they allowed themselves to be subjected to manipulative clichés.

Good ethics cases don’t usually flow from high-decibel talk-radio shows, so at least credit Limbaugh for giving classrooms around the nation a lucid illustration that what’s legal isn’t always what’s ethical.

©2008 Institute for Global Ethics

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