Op-Ed Columnist - Department of Childish Errors
How far back in a candidate’s history do we want to travel?
It’s pretty clear that kindergarten behavior is off-limits, although there are several people running for important offices this year who remind me of a preschooler I once knew who hated sharing so much that whenever other children came to play he’d pile everything he could get his hands on, down to large pieces of lint, in one huge mound and sit on it all afternoon.
College years are more problematic. In Delaware, Chris Coons, the Democratic candidate for Senate, has been haunted by an essay he wrote for the Amherst College student newspaper, in which he light-heartedly referred to himself as a “bearded Marxist.” During a debate this week, Coons and his opponent, Christine O’Donnell, tangled over whether the line, which he wrote in 1985, was more damning than the multitude of strange things O’Donnell “said on a comedy show 10 years ago.”
It was arguments like this that made the Delaware debate by far the most interesting encounter between Senate candidates so far this year. When it was over, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer named O’Donnell the narrow winner because “she didn’t come across as just a weirdo or anything like that.” The bar for debate victory this year has become unacceptably low.
Also, I’m not sure that O’Donnell won by any standard. She went absolutely blank when she was asked to name a recent Supreme Court decision with which she disagrees — even though she was prepped by some advisers to Sarah Palin, and that was a question that brought Palin to grief in 2008.
I used to watch a cooking show in which contestants always screwed up the Beef Wellington Challenge. You’d think after a season or two they’d have begun to practice it in advance. But, no, every year it was soggy pastry and undercooked meat. For a Palin-wannabe preparing for a big national TV debate, the Supreme Court question is Beef Wellington. Not having an answer is unacceptable, even if you follow up with: “I’m sorry. I’ll put it on my Web site. I promise.”
But I digress. Candidates deserve to be able to throw a cloak of invisibility over youthful indiscretion, but what’s the limit?
First of all, nothing anyone did in college short of a felony should count against them. I feel strongly about this as a person who went to college and does not want to have any discussion whatsoever about the fact that I got an incomplete in Ethics of Journalism.
Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Kentucky, is currently getting heat for his membership in a college secret society that was banned from the Baylor University campus for making fun of organized religion. And you may remember that earlier this year a woman who went to Baylor with Paul claimed that he and his friends “took me out to this creek and made me worship Aqua Buddha.”
This is exactly the kind of information we ought to ignore. The whole point of college is to experiment with different kinds of rebellion, and we do not want the next generation to embrace premature conformity just because they nurture a dream of one day serving with Max Baucus on the Senate Finance Committee.
Although we still would really like to hear more about the Aqua Buddha thing.
In the Delaware debate, O’Donnell claimed her opponent had broken an agreement that no one would mention anything the other candidate did in their 20s. (She made the famous “dabbled in witchcraft” remark at age 30, but that would at least have excised her condemnations of masturbation, evolution and the theory of separation of church and state.) She might have a point. Social scientists have proposed that the entire 20-30 decade be redefined as “emerging adulthood,” in which young Americans stay in school, live at home or hitchhike through Europe while their emotion-controlling prefrontal cortexes ripen like fine wine.
However, it is definitely not fair to demand that the all-clear zone extend to your 40th birthday, even if, like O’Donnell, you take two decades to actually finish your college degree.
And I think we have the right to expect that candidates will take their previous behavior into account when making up rules to apply to the rest of us. The Republican Senate candidate in Alaska, Joe Miller, seems to have had some trouble earning a living as a lawyer and nobody would criticize the fact that his family once got health care through a program for low-income Alaskans or that his wife applied for and received unemployment compensation. However, you would expect him to consider that before he denounced government health care plans and concluded that unemployment compensation was unconstitutional.
When we last heard from Miller, he was announcing that he would no longer answer any questions about his personal life. “We’ve drawn a line in the sand,” he said.
Last rule: Lines in the sand cannot be drawn retroactively.
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