By MARSHA MERCER
On the holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday,
you’ll likely hear people quote from King’s inspiring “I Have a Dream” speech.
“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of
their character,” King declared at the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. We
aren’t there yet.
Today, King, who won the Nobel peace prize a year later and was assassinated
in 1968, is revered for his leadership of the civil rights movement and his advocacy
of nonviolence. He is an unalloyed American hero and a role model for children.
Role models are rare in public life, and, during the run-up to elections,
character can become weaponized. In 2016, Hillary Clinton charged Donald Trump
was morally unfit to be president, and he attacked her as “crooked Hillary.”
In 2020, “character is on the ballot,” Joe Biden said Tuesday at
the Democratic presidential debate.
We may despair about the country’s direction, but character still
counts. President Trump was impeached and faces a trial in the Senate starting Tuesday
because integrity still matters.
The House voted last month along party lines to impeach Trump for
abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, accusing him of attempting to force
a foreign power to do his political dirty work, to investigate Biden and his
son Hunter.
Trump used the powers of the presidency to benefit his own political
campaign. He tried to pressure the president of Ukraine to announce an
investigation into the Bidens by withholding nearly $400 million in military
aid and denying him a White House meeting. Trump released the aid only after
news outlets reported on the scheme.
Trump
and his Republican supporters claim he did nothing wrong and have repeatedly
slammed impeachment as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.”
Where people stand politically colors their view of impeachment,
but nearly three in four Americans think Trump is not a good role model for
children, a Quinnipiac University poll also reported last March. Almost all
Democrats – 97% -- said he isn’t a good role model, and nearly 40% of
Republicans agreed.
Telling the truth is a sign of character, but this is the president
of “alternative facts.” As of Dec. 10, Trump had made more than 15,413 false or
misleading claims since he took office, according to fact checkers at The
Washington Post.
Democratic presidential candidates have generally avoided getting into
the liar-calling business, until now. Elizabeth Warren claimed Bernie Sanders told
her in a 2018 conversation a woman could not beat Trump. Asked about it in the
last debate, Sanders denied he’d ever said such a thing. After the debate, a
live mic onstage caught Warren telling Sanders twice, “I think you called me a
liar on national TV.” She refused to shake his hand.
He replied, “You know, let’s not do it right now,” adding, “You
called me a liar.”
What’s sad and mystifying is how Trump has normalized abnormal
behavior. Many people no longer care if he tells the truth as long as he
appoints conservative judges, cuts their taxes and unleashes business from regulations.
If, as expected, the Republican-controlled Senate acquits Trump and leaves him
in office, he will falsely claim he’s been exonerated, firing up his base for
November.
But not all Republicans are sanguine. Sen. James Lankford, a
conservative Republican of Oklahoma who directed the large Baptist youth camp there,
looked for a role model candidate during the 2016 GOP presidential primaries –
and Trump wasn’t, he said on “Face the Nation” last month. He wishes Trump “was
more of a role model,” he said, explaining, “I don’t like the way he tweets,
some of the things he says.”
But voters, not he, choose who he works with in Washington, Lankford
said.
No candidate is perfect, of course, but we can make character decisive
when we vote.
As Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1900 when he was running for vice
president on the Republican ticket: “Alike for the nation and the individual,
the one indispensable requisite is character.”
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