Herman in the Lion's Den

Herman Cain, we hardly got to emotionally ravage ye.

The Tea Party darling, the Right’s Obama, Cain was, only a few weeks ago, the leading contender for the center spotlight in next November’s presidential election. But in a decision that should have surprised no one, Herman Cain suspended his presidential campaign last week after his meteoric rise did what meteorites do: burned up on entering the atmosphere of modern media attention.

A successful businessman and small-government advocate, Cain burst onto the scene with presidential charisma. He had the smile, the connections, the voice, the ideas for change. Experience? None, but that appealed to his everyman persona. Intelligence? More common than academic, but everyone agrees we need a good dose of that in Washington. Viability? A black man with Southern roots and national contacts who advocated for all the right issues. He was the poster boy for the GOP’s diversity and had the “it” factor. He even looked presidential.

But just as quickly as Cain became the favorite, the tide turned. Rumors of inappropriate touching and sexual harassment, lawsuits and a longtime affair with a Georgia woman surfaced. Cain returned to Atlanta, his campaign all but concluded, and took his ideas with him.

Cain’s demise is all too common in modern American politics. In an era of round-the-clock news, amateur-turned-professional bloggers, and investigative journalism, a presidential race (or really any political election above the local level) has become more a gantlet of unevenly judged morality than an ideological contest. It is a crucible of ironic proportions: we save the trash – the missteps, political and societal  – and throw out the purified metal, the true value of a candidate.

To be clear, this is our fault, mine and yours. We watch Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and all of their splinter channels. We follow pundits from day to day as they try to find filler for three hours of talk time. We believe their reports and their commentary, trusting them to do the thinking for us. We choose sides (and networks) and only listen to our perspective spun twenty different ways.

We are the lions who crave the flesh of our candidates, who devour the fatty morsels of their personal lives and leave the marrow-filled bones of their ideas behind. The twenty-four hour media is only the zookeeper, cutting apart the public servant and tossing out what they know we will consume.

And by cannibalizing our candidates we limit our political choices. Consider Winston Churchill, perhaps the most beloved British pol of the twentieth century. Would he have a chance at election in modern America as a hard drinker with a face only a bulldog’s mother could love? His caustic wit was so biting it would today be media gold, his quips so politically incorrect they would derail even the most promising of campaigns.

Or Thomas Jefferson, described by some as the smartest man who ever held the office president. Would he survive an MSNBC investigative report into his illicit relationship with slave Sally Hemmings, especially if he were discovered to have fathered children with her out of wedlock? Would we elect John F. Kennedy with Fox News digging into his love life? What about Abraham Lincoln after a CNN report on his repeated failures as a businessman?

In actuality, today these men likely would be smart enough to stay far away from political arena, lest their lives be dissected and the darkest corners of their histories probed.

And there is the real trouble. Imagine all of the would-be leaders who have shuttered their political ambitions in lieu of the scrutiny they would face. Think of nameless, faceless men and women with brilliant ideas for our country’s direction who will not or cannot allow their pasts to be two-week’s fodder for the news networks.

Where are the modern Washingtons and Jeffersons, Lincolns and Roosevelts? Where are our statesmen? They are heading up think tanks in D.C. and serving as political science professors in the Ivy League, unwilling to represent and serve the masses if the masses demand destroyed privacy in return.

Please understand, news organizations play a vital role in creating an informed electorate. We need to vet candidates for their emotional, intellectual, and moral aptitude. We need to know candidates’ positions versus their voting records, their altruistic promises versus their scandals. We need journalists who will fight and dig and publish with impunity. The free press is the cornerstone of a functioning republic. The world is a better place because of Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation into the Watergate break-in.

However, sometimes we need to protect our candidates from the media. In a perfect world, we would look to news outlets and see unbiased anchors, not a troop of analysts who tell us what to think. We would listen to balanced reports, not politically slanted talk radio. And our news consumption would look proportionately much like this paper, heavy on reporting, light on editorials. 

In that world, Herman Cain still may not have been the right choice for Republicans (I was not a fan) but he would have been defeated on the basis of his ideas, not his private life. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world.

Someone get the next slab of meat ready. The lions are hungry.