Does it make sense to evaluate the personal morality of politicians while judging their suitability for high office?
Should a candidate's pattern of ethical—or unethical—behavior, influence our choices in a fiercely contested election?
Consider a brief but telling 1901 encounter between the vacationing President William McKinley and a photographer who had scheduled a session with the chief executive at his home in Canton, Ohio. As the journalist approached, the president hurried to hide his half-finished cigar and made a memorable declaration."We must not let the young men of this country see their president smoking," he emphatically proclaimed, displaying conscious concern for his position as a public role model.
To embrace the idea that elected leaders should be honored exclusively for their policy achievements and that questions of character mean nothing to the quality of their leadership is to reduce their jobs and their impact to a bloodless, almost mechanistic two dimensions. Historians often cite James K.
Which brings us to the leader generally recognized as the greatest of them all: Abraham Lincoln, or"Honest Abe" as his appreciative contemporaries consistently anointed him, even as a very young man. Richard Carwardine, a Lincoln biographer at, wrote:"The nickname 'honest Abe' was not the fabrication of party publicists but a mark of the universal respect in which he was held as a lawyer of scrupulous honesty.
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