Why Focus on Personal Quirks?

Terry H. Schwadron

Feb. 24, 2019

Even this early in the presidential sweepstakes, fans, critics and news reporters seem to be going well out of their way to focus on some of the weirdest aspects of individual personalities as if those peccadilloes define what the candidate would do as president.

At every newsroom where I worked or visited, serious journalists would take part in conversations to say that good political contests were not beauty contests or horse race reports on who is momentarily ahead, but rather a chance to aggressively report on the state of thinking in different parts of the country. Sure, part of the job was to go after in-depth reviews of candidates’ lives, in part out of curiosity and in part to see how those biographies compared with the candidate’s own.

For my taste, what is going on already is pretty depressing.

Rather than examining what has happened with opioid treatment in various communities where candidates in the last go-around promised change, we have reports of how petty Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Mn, can be in treating her Senate office staffers. Instead of looking at reports of progress or lack of it in race relations in various quarters, we have actual reporting time being used to ask Sen. Kamala Harris, D-CA, about the racial background of her husband or father. Do we think that Klobuchar will start throwing binders at her Secretary of Education? Or that Harris will be mixing up her rap artists in conversations at NATO?

Instead of probing the lack of economic hope of inner-city neighborhoods, there are articles about how Sen. Cory Booker, D-NJ, would fare as a bachelor in the White House. And rather than focus on the economic inequities at the heart of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, obvious media concern repeatedly revisits her apologies for over-association with family stories of Cherokee heritage.

In a country where a majority of electoral college votes went to Donald Trump, for whom assaulting women seemed not to be a disqualification, for whom stiffing contractors for development projects was common, running into bankruptcy four times was within bounds and whose daily lies towards promotion of a better, if false, public image is part of the wallpaper, it seems remarkable that these personal trait stories are gaining any traction at all. As a candidate for reelection, Trump will carry all of that baggage with him again, as well as the ups and downs of his presidency and the possibilities of impending criminal charges from multiple investigations involving him, his family and his businesses.

In fact, Klobuchar has owned up to being overly demanding of staff, Harris says yes, she is married to a white man, Booker says he actually has a girlfriend about whom he increasingly is serious, and Warren has made herself as transparent as humanly possible about overplaying her native family roots.

It was refreshing to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, say in his opening salvos last week that he understands he is the oldest of the candidates, but could we please discuss how the kind of issues he has been promoting for economic equality have moved from “extreme” to “mainstream” in the three years since he campaigned on them.

How about this: If you’re human and living in the real world, you’re probably not perfect. There will be various aspects of your personal story that may appear as snags.

It was striking that the first reporter question to Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, D-NY, upon making her candidacy public was about how she saw her own “likeability” as compared with other candidates, a question dripping in anti-woman bias. Fox News decided it had caught Kamala Harris in a tremendous personal lie after Harris said in answer to a question that she had listened to Snoop and Tupac while she was high on marijuana in college four years before they had made records. Fox might have been better off noting that Harris had offered an answer to those questions at all.

I am not pleased to hear that Klobuchar has been demeaning at isolated time to some of her staff members. I’d prefer to think that her public appeal as a Midwestern bridge among conflicting sides would extend to how she leads her Senate office. But I’m stuck wondering what I am supposed to conclude about her snapping on some long night when she hadn’t eaten and was depending on a staffer to come up with a fork. Does this disqualify her to be president? Does it mean that she won’t know how to deal with a foreign leader or to come up with a workable health plan?

We had a president in Jimmy Carter who was meticulous about carrying his own luggage and such, but who proved generally unable across his four years in bringing unified actions across the government. Actually, his successes post-president, based exactly on his personal qualities, prove his greatness as a historic figure. So, too, do George W. Bush and Barack Obama look better in retrospect as people of very personal ethical behavior than they did as effective presidents.

So, those personal qualities may be a part of the picture, but should not substitute for exploration about issues, solutions and the ability to bring people together, those qualities that we have insisted are necessary to serve as president.

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