by Rushworth M. Kidder
Whichever way it ends, McCain-Obama has been the stuff of campaign legend:
- The country’s oldest candidate ever to seek a first-term presidency pitted against the nation’s first black presidential candidate
- Record-breaking contributions, with Obama alone raising $640 million by October
- Huge volunteer engagement, especially among youth
- Top news billing, providing voters with a welcome respite from reports of financial decline, two wars, and ebbing national prestige overseas
This legacy, along with serious recalibrations of what it means to be a red or a blue state, could reshape campaigns for years to come. But what about the moral legacy? Whichever candidate wins will come face to face with three overarching ethical considerations. They’ll play a part in every decision he makes. And they’ll color, perhaps permanently, the public’s response to him.
First, he’ll have to address polarization. Much has been made by both candidates of the need for reaching across the aisle, building consensus, and reducing partisan divisiveness and antagonism. But with polls suggesting that McCain’s campaign, in particular, grew increasingly strident and negative toward the end — and with TV audiences witnessing a nasty and uncivil tone among audiences during some candidate rallies — the next president almost surely will encounter some battle-hardened animosities that weren’t there a year ago.
To be sure, America’s well-known centrism diminishes the polarizing distance between the political left and right: We measure in inches what Europeans measure in kilometers. And there’s evidence that even so harsh a primary-election rivalry as that between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can fade with time, leaving them to campaign together with little visible tension. Still, a CBS/New York Times poll from October 30 found that “intense feelings” surround this election: Among likely McCain voters, 57 percent said they were “scared” of Obama becoming president, while 47 percent of likely Obama voters felt that way about McCain.
Result? The next president steps into an atmosphere of polarization, incivility, and disrespect that has been strengthened, not diminished, by the campaign process itself. How rapidly he works to dissipate that atmosphere — how strongly he asserts an ethical tone and creates a culture of integrity in the White House — well may determine whether the rifts shrink to insignificance or widen into disunity during his presidency.
His second ethical consideration is a form of buyers’ remorse. In the days immediately following the election, voters may be tempted to regret their choice. The advertising juggernauts of the campaigns may have succeeded in creating mythical, larger-than-life figures. When the new president proves merely human, will voters feel they’ve been deceived by unethical tactics? Will they fall into a sort of post-purchase rationalization, trying to overcome their uneasiness by developing elaborate justifications for what they’ve just bought?
And will the president himself, staring down the barrel of a job that is filled with difficulties but lacks the daily adulation from adoring crowds, have misgivings about the job itself? If the campaign itself has kept the candidate from accurately assessing the grit rather than the glamour of his prospective office, is that nobody’s fault? Or does that failure raise issues of honesty and responsibility in the way the campaigns portrayed reality — perhaps raising questions about how the new administration will portray it? Here again, the new president will need to act quickly to dismantle the illusion of invincibility without betraying any lack of confidence or enthusiasm for the task ahead.
The third ethical issue concerns technology. In unprecedented ways, the cell phone and the Web shaped this campaign. These inventions communicated directly with millions of would-be supporters who in prior years would have depended on the media or the mail to learn where to go for rallies, how to volunteer, or how to spread the word. The Internet also turned campaign finance on its head: The Obama campaign appears to have raked in the bulk of its millions from small donations sent by online donors.
To the extent that these technologies build political awareness, energy, and commitment, they foster democracy. Along the way, however, they may raise unreasonable expectations about donor access, full transparency, and a “right to know” about a president’s every move. But the realities of the presidency sometimes require impersonal invisibility, privacy, and confidentiality — the exact opposite of the new media’s demand for personal visibility, accessibility, and sharing. Unless the next president finds ways to continue to dialogue with millions of former donors who suddenly have become expectant emailers, he may be branded as unethical for disrespecting his supporters.
Creating a climate of integrity is always the central task for the leader of any democracy, since without it nothing else works. This campaign has made that task a bit more complicated.
©2008 Institute for Global Ethics
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