A Further Note: On Moral Qualifications for the Presidency

Doug Brady has highlighted Doctor Zero’s masterful demolition of David Frum, which I encourage you to read; it won't be much longer, I think, before Doctor Zero’s going to have to come out from behind that pen name and take his seat with the ranks of the great pundits on the Right. I wanted, though, to draw your attention to a different section of the good Doctor’s work:

Palin has developed a remarkable knack for saying all the things President Obama should be saying, at any given moment. While Obama was serving as the warm-up act for anti-American and anti-Semitic nutjobs at the United Nations, Palin spoke of her country’s proud tradition of liberty and capitalism in Hong Kong. While Obama pondered whether the ruins of the Berlin Wall would make a suitable backdrop for his magnificence, Palin wrote of the twilight struggle between Ronald Reagan’s America and the Evil Empire . . . and wasn’t shy about naming both the heroes and villains.

Palin’s qualifications are not merely academic. She’s been a lonely pair of boots on the ground, in conflicts where most of her presumptive rivals have been content to either sit on the sidelines or follow her lead. She’s demonstrated a willingness to take risks, and stand her ground under fire. Those are qualities Republican voters will be looking for, if they want a President who can do more than just negotiate lower monthly payments on the lethally overdrawn American Distress card.

My only complaint with what Doc Zero has to say here is that I think he actually understates the importance of his point; he doesn’t draw out the deeper significance of Gov. Palin’s willingness to lead under fire, and so I think he misses the fact that her statements do not in fact merely demonstrate “a remarkable knack.” Rather, all these things together illustrate her moral qualifications for the office of the presidency—and, I believe, the fact that she’s more qualified in that respect than its current occupant.

To understand where I’m going with this, let’s reflect for a moment on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 was, and remains to this day, the most astounding thing I’ve seen in my lifetime. The entire wall didn’t physically come down on that day twenty years ago, of course, but psychologically, that was the day East Germans forced their way through. It was an amazing victory for the forces of democracy over the forces of tyranny, and a vindication of Ronald Reagan’s belief that the Eastern Bloc could in fact be beaten, and was not simply a fact of life which must be accommodated. It may have been the greatest triumph for human rights that the world has seen in the last half century; I can’t say for sure, but I'm not thinking of anything to top it at the moment.

It was of course a victory won by many; in the West, as John O’Sullivan has pointed out, President Reagan was in fact the last of the three great leaders in the fight, joining Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. I think, though, that the psychological moment was President Reagan’s, coming in June of 1987 when he stood at the Brandenburg Gate and threw down a challenge to the leader of the Soviet world: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Later on in his speech, he declared, “Across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.” For his words, he was mocked by many, and ignored by many more; but in the end, the truth of his words was proved when the wall was torn down, not by Mr. Gorbachev, but by the combined weight of the East German people.

And as all Germany celebrated the twentieth anniversary of this wondrous liberation, our president didn’t go. I know there are many in this country who think that the inauguration of Barack Obama was the greatest event of their lifetime, but Barack Obama shouldn’t be one of them. The President of the United States should be someone who understands more than most people the transcendent importance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of the many, many sacrifices made by American soldiers, sailors, diplomats, and spies, and by West Germans and East Germans, and by many others, that made that day possible; he should be someone who understands how important it is for him to be there to honor their sacrifice—to honor their hope.

And yet, German Chancellor Angela Merkel invited him, and he said no. He didn’t hesitate to go to Berlin to celebrate himself when he was merely running for president; why would he not go when he is the president to celebrate this great victory for the cause of freedom and human rights?

Unfortunately, I think Rich Lowry nailed it:

Wouldn’t Obama at least want to take the occasion to celebrate freedom and human rights—those most cherished liberal values? Not necessarily. He has mostly jettisoned them as foreign-policy goals in favor of a misbegotten realism that soft-pedals the crimes of nasty regimes around the world. During the Cold War, we undermined our enemies by shining a bright light on their repression. In Berlin, JFK called out the Communists on their “offense against humanity.” Obama would utter such a phrase only with the greatest trepidation, lest it undermine a future opportunity for dialogue.

Pres. Ronald Reagan realized we could meet with the Soviets without conceding the legitimacy of their system. He always spoke up for the dissidents—even when it irked his negotiating partner, Mikhail Gorbachev. Whatever the hardheaded imperatives of geopolitics, we’d remain a beacon of liberty in the world.

Obama has relegated this aspirational aspect of American power to the back seat. For him, we are less an exceptional power than one among many, seeking deals with our peers in Beijing and Moscow. Why would Obama want to celebrate the refuseniks of the Eastern Bloc, when he won’t even meet with the Dalai Lama in advance of his trip to China?

Now, as I’ve noted before, I’m a preacher, and I think like one; and one of the things that years of preaching the word of God given through such hard-headed types as Paul and James has taught me is that “out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks.” In other words, what we say (and also what we do) proceeds out of our beliefs, our attitudes, and our moral commitments. The willingness to set aside the moral crimes of foreign governments and just “do bidness” with them Chicago style cannot be judged or regarded merely as an intellectual approach; it is a moral act, it is an expression of the faith of our president, and must be understood as such. The same is true of his remarks following the Fort Hood shooting.

Similarly, the fact that Gov. Palin persists in addressing such events as the shooting at Fort Hood and the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that she was willing to take a stand amidst the chaos of the NY-23 special election, cannot be interpreted merely in terms of political calculation; this, too, speaks to her moral qualifications for leadership. Her statements give us indications as to whether she has the strength of character to lead without flinching from the task, and the wisdom to lead well; they also tell us much about what she believes at the core of her being, and how those beliefs drive and shape her as a leader. As such, while most have been parsing her statements for what they say about her intellectual qualifications (for, in particular, the top job)—and while this is not insignificant—what they say about her moral qualifications is, in my view, more important.

You see, from a biblical point of view, the most basic part of leadership isn’t decision-making or setting the agenda or casting the vision or knowing the issues; rather, the most basic part is providing a model for people to follow. The most basic statement of Christian leadership is offered by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:1: “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ.” Now, obviously, this doesn’t transfer directly to political leadership (though for those who claim to be Christians, the correspondence is a lot closer than you might think), but the basic principle holds: leadership is mimetic, which is to say, it’s about imitation.

To be specific, it’s about taking your faith—the principles you believe in, the truths you understand to be primary, the values you see as of first importance—and incarnating it, making it real in your life, so that others can look at you and see what it means to live, in the real world, according to those beliefs. For most people, that’s the only way they’ll be able to go and do likewise. Most people need more than just to have it explained, they need to see it in action—and that is the heartbeat of leadership. This necessitates a deep commitment to one’s faith, a staunch consistency in adhering to it, and the courage to stand to it even when that seems to be the harder, riskier or more dangerous path; it requires leaders to choose what they believe to be right over what is popular or expedient or safe, trusting that their vindication will come in due time.

The question that is raised, then, by our president’s decision not to go to Berlin (especially when he’s already gone to Copenhagen) and by his remarks on Thursday, as well as by his refusal to meet with the Dalai Lama, his appeasement of the Iranian mullahs, and various other acts of his government, is whether he’s up to that challenge. Whatever his intellectual qualifications for his present eminence, is he morally qualified to lead? I don’t just mean on this scale, either—is he morally qualified to lead at all? At the present, I have to say, I don’t see any reason to think so.

Nor is this a new conclusion; I didn’t see any during the campaign, either. This was, I think, the root of all the conservative complaints about Sen. Obama’s lack of accomplishments, practical qualifications, etc. He was (and is) good at casting a vision, but it’s a vision entirely in the future; which is to say, it’s all about where he wants to send us, not about inviting us to come along with him where he’s already going. It was not already realized in an effective way in his own life and actions; we couldn’t point to his life and say, “This is what his vision looks like when it’s lived out—this is what he’s calling us to be and do.” Obviously, there were many in this country who didn’t mind that fact, either because what he was saying supported their own plans, or because it supported what they wanted to believe about themselves; but for others, that kind of formless vision only created the suspicion that Barack Obama wanted to send Americans somewhere rather than to lead us there, and thus to have others do the work for which he could then take the credit.

As for Gov. Palin? To be sure, one cannot simply do a straight-line comparison, since she’s currently leading from the sidelines, and while she faced some significant leadership challenges during her time in Juneau, they were different from those faced by the inhabitant of the White House. That said, she has consistently risen to the challenges she has faced—even when that challenge meant accepting that she was no longer the best person to fulfill the duties she had been given, and the act leadership demanded of her was abdication. As Doctor Zero has noted, she has been consistently saying the things that need to be said in this moment that our national administration has not been saying; and she had the courage to stand up for her principles in the race in upstate New York, when to that point the only conservative leaders who had done so were those with nothing to lose.

Beyond that, though, look at how Sarah Louise Heath Palin has lived her life. She has consistently identified things that need to be done and found ways to get them done. She did it on the basketball court in high school—it wasn’t her talent that got her the nickname “Sarah Barracuda,” after all. She was never the most talented player on the hardwood, but she understood how to lead a team, and how to drive it to victory, and she did just that. She did it with her beauty-pageant participation, using that as a way to help pay for college. She did it in raising a large family and running a family business.

And here, I think, is the critical point: that same drive is what got her into politics. She identified issues in her hometown that needed to be addressed, so she ran for city council. When she got there, she saw problems with the ways things were run, and a mayor who was (among other things) trying to evade term limits that had been approved by the voters, so she ran for mayor. That pattern, of identifying problems and going after them to solve them, has marked her throughout her political career; it’s why she ran for governor, and it’s how she operated as governor. The consistent theme of her career has not been seizing opportunities, but rather trying to create solutions.

This is not to say that Sarah Palin isn’t an ambitious woman; if she weren’t, she couldn’t have kept going this long, this far, through this much. Clearly, she is seeking power and influence and authority, and it seems pretty certain that she believes she can do a better job with them than most. (Personally, I wouldn’t argue.) No doubt she has high goals for herself, and things she wants, and no doubt they aren’t all pure and admirable, because none of us could make that claim for ourselves. But this is to say that for a politician, her career looks a lot less like blind ladder-climbing than usual, and a lot more like it’s driven by the desire to address problems and serve the public; which is to say, she appears to be one of that all-too-rare breed of politician who sees public service as less an opportunity than a calling.

Taken all in all, from what Gov. Palin has said and done so far, I have no hesitation in saying that she is as morally qualified as anyone could reasonably expect to be the President of the United States. In point of fact, I would say that she shows more evidence of such qualifications for the job than anyone elected to it since the first President Bush—and honestly, it isn’t even close. (Whether you consider that to be more a statement about Sarah Palin or more a statement about presidents 42-44 is up to you.)