When young politicians ask for my advice, the first thing I give them is a quote from Luther Price: “Be what you is, not what you ain’t; ’cause if you ain’t what you is, you is what you ain’t.”
In other words, a fake or a hypocrite. It’s far easier to be who you are than to live a lie. Tuesday’s election results demonstrated just how much voters agree with that. Tired of deception and dissembling in Republican-dominated Washington, they voted Democrats into office across the country.
This election season has had its share of hypocrisy. We can start with Republican Congressman Mark Foley, who touted his strong religious values and tapped out sexually explicit e-mails to 16-year- old male pages. And then there’s the Rev. Ted Haggard, founder of Colorado Springs’ huge New Life Church, who strongly condemns gays and gay marriage yet dallies with a male prostitute himself.
Haggard turned his anti-gay views into the credentials to move into political power in the Christian evangelical movement and, in a small way, the Bush White House. Part of this effort involved denouncing gay rights and sex, one of the hallmarks of Christian-right rhetoric. While it may have lifted him to personal heights of influence in his movement, it also made for a crash landing when he was forced to admit to “sexual immorality” with a gay prostitute. Above all, it demonstrated a remarkable hypocrisy in a man who claimed to be a moral leader of his flock.
I understand why he wanted to hide his trysts with a gay man, given the teachings of his brand of Christianity. What I don’t understand is why he didn’t preach the love and tolerance side of Christianity rather than the anti-gay dogma, given his own desires and behavior. Despite all his efforts, he can no longer be the man he “ain’t,” but instead must be the human being he is.
Moving to another realm of hypocrisy this election year, I find the mea culpas of the hard-line neoconservatives who galvanized President Bush’s ill-planned war effort to be equally disingenuous. Gung ho on toppling Saddam Hussein, the likes of Richard Perle and Ken Adelman – both former Pentagon and White House insiders – are now denouncing the administration for failing to plan for the war’s aftermath and for crushing their dreams of a tough-minded foreign policy based on their own interpretation of morality. Those who initially claimed that anyone who disagreed with them and the president were “unpatriotic” are now furiously claiming they were betrayed by that president.
When you call on young Americans to stand up and take responsibility for our country but you run for cover when your plans go wrong, that is hypocrisy at its worst. In a recent Vanity Fair article, David Rose quoted Perle as saying, “I underestimated the brutality.” Adelman told The Washington Post in 2002 that liberating Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” Today, Rose quotes him as saying about the president’s national security advisers, “They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era.”
Blaming an admittedly incompetent national security team for the disaster in Iraq when that very war was one of the hallmarks of your own political ideology is pure deceit. At least Donald Rumsfeld, the master of sanctimony, finally had the good grace to resign in the face of his own abject failure.
What all this comes down to is the need to take responsibility for who we are and for our failures of judgment. When you have certain personal qualities, don’t promote bigotry against those who share those qualities just to wield power and hide who you really are.
As a new set of leaders takes over on both state and national scenes, it’s a good time to reflect on the fact that even those whose lifestyles and views you dislike may have much to offer and should not be dismissed out of hand. It’s also a good time to forgo the arrogance of power and deal honestly with the voters.
Gail Schoettler (gailschoettler@email.msn.com) is a former U.S. ambassador, Colorado lieutenant governor and treasurer, Democratic nominee for governor and Douglas County school board member.
