by Rushworth M. Kidder

You’d think, by now, politicians would get the point. It’s not as though South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who last week admitted to marital infidelity, was breaking new ground. The week before, it was Republican senator John Ensign of Nevada stepping before the microphones to make a similar announcement. Last year it was New York governor Elliot Spitzer, along with North Carolina senator and erstwhile presidential candidate John Edwards. Last decade, of course, it was president Bill Clinton.

What keeps these dominoes falling? It’s not enough to fall back on the usual pat answers — that it’s all about lust, ego, power, or thrill seeking. It misstates history to presume deep flaws of character, as though from their earliest years these men were given to venery or adultery. And it certainly won’t do to blame it on their wives, as though these husbands all had been nagged into someone else’s arms by a harridan at home. No, I think what unites them is both simpler and less understood: It’s a failure of mental self-defense.

The reference here is, of course, to physical self-defense. As any soldier knows, there are things you do routinely, almost unthinkingly, to protect yourself in a war zone even when you don’t see any enemies. You wear your helmet, put on body armor, carry your weapon, establish a perimeter, post sentries, keep scanning the horizon, and so forth.

In the war zone of public office, self-defense is of a different sort. The weaponry isn’t physical, nor is it merely political and social, although attackers from opposing parties and commentators from the blogosphere will always be waiting to pounce. The most important weaponry is mental and moral. And the enemy? It’s the drumbeat of excitement and discouragement, praise and blame, success and failure that keeps suggesting, “Give it up. You’re missing out on life. You’re trying too hard to hold high standards in a corrupt world. Climb down a rung or two on the ladder of integrity — you deserve it.”

To their credit, many seasoned politicians I’ve met understand, almost unconsciously, that they need to defend themselves actively from whatever would attack their integrity. They knew, going into public office, that they would have to fend off bribers, alarmists, cynics, and extortionists. They knew they would be tempted not to speak truth to power, muster the moral courage to turn down a campaign contribution, or take stands for integrity in the face of howling constituents. They knew they would have to fight daily to define compromise as an essential ingredient of political accomplishment rather than as a surrender of principle for the sake of expediency. They identified those mental demons, built solid defenses against them, and plunged ahead in spite of them. They possessed a kind of moral futurism that foresaw these ethical challenges before they arose. It was a mental stance that almost expected such an attack and dismissed it with the mental retort, “Oh, that again!”

But the Sanford saga reminds us that, for too many politicians, there’s a hole in the defensive network. It’s almost as though, just outside the politician’s firewall, something wants to plant a virus in the system. It’s called the anti-family virus. It seeks to wreck the one relationship that, for most people, is the key to continuity and success. Destroy that, says this enemy, and everything goes down with it.

How best to destroy it? Not by a direct attack on the family. For most public figures, that would only make them stronger. Best to do it by suggesting an alternative — a little infidelity, a capricious fling, an idle experiment. You can even do it, as in Sanford’s case, by proposing a real love interest — “alienation of affections,” as it was once defined in common law. You then need to insinuate that suggestion into the mind of the political figure. Let him think it’s his own idea, something he thought up and really wants to do. Along the way, blind him to the downside risks, perhaps by puffing up his sense of invincibility — a version of Wall Street’s “too big to fail” syndrome. But most importantly, don’t define it as anti-family. That way, like antiviral software lacking the latest definition of a particular worm, the politician’s mental network won’t pick up on this deadly threat — won’t even know he’s under attack until it’s too late.

What if politicians routinely recognized this potential attacker in their self-defense? What if public figures took it as read that the infidelity ploy would sooner or later appear? What if they saw it as just another trap along the way — as brazen as a scoundrel offering a suitcase of cash, and just as obvious? What if, when the illicit relationship proffered itself, they learned to say, “Oh, that again!” and to dismiss it out of hand?

This kind of self-defense won’t end public infidelity, but I suspect it will diminish it. Along the way, it will help us explain one of life’s anomalies: How it is that so many decent — I would say good — men fall victim to this kind of career-ending move just when the public needs them to continue.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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