By Terry Manning
I was driving to work a few weeks ago and stumbled across a podcast interview talk-show host Conan O’Brien was having with President Joe Biden.
As the two shared anecdotes about the similarities in their Irish-Catholic upbringings, the president spoke about how his mother helped him cope with having a stutter. In addition to telling him his speech impediment didn’t define him as a person, his mother added the stutter was a reminder of how to show grace to others.
“In our family,” Biden said, “we were never allowed to make fun of anyone, no matter how mean they were to us, if they had something they couldn’t overcome. … If you did, you got your rear end kicked when you got home. It taught me that a lot of people are dealing with dilemmas that take away their pride, their dignity.”
O’Brien continued the thought by talking about how suffering personal shortcomings can help develop what he called the “superpower” of empathy.
I caught myself tearing up. These were two men talking about life, about loving their parents, about overcoming obstacles, about being decent human beings.
That basic decency is what I want in people who have the power to lead, to effect change in the lives of others. Some characteristics are prerequisites for me, that have less to do with policy than with the essence of the candidate seeking my vote. I think the country deserves that.
One of the things I liked about former Arizona Sen. John McCain was reading about how when he was captured during the Vietnam War, he refused early release, a benefit his captors would have extended him after his father was named Pacific commander of the U.S. Navy. Years of torture he endured — time he sacrificed for his fellow prisoners of war — left him with permanent physical disabilities.
I was just as impressed when, during a 2008 campaign stop during his presidential campaign against then-candidate Barack Obama, he corrected a woman who expressed fear of Obama being an Arab. “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues,” McCain said.
He could have taken the easy course of action and gone along with the baseless fear-mongering. That might have won him support from constituents who were trying to give themselves an easy excuse for voting against the man who would become the first Black president, but McCain chose the truth.
I am old enough to remember Jimmy Carter’s presidency. I remember price inflation. The Iranian hostage crisis. His brother, Billy. Peanuts. The “killer rabbit.” And I remember the Playboy interview.
Carter, generally considered a paragon of Christian service, told the men’s magazine in 1976 for one of its definitive interviews that he “looked on a lot of women with lust” and “committed adultery in his heart many times.” He was still Georgia’s governor when he gave the interview, but that’s pretty spicy stuff.
Reading the interview years later I find Carter’s comments in the context of a thoughtful look at one man and his views of his faith journey. (Refreshing when so much of today’s discussion of faith in the public realm gets boiled down to “God, guns and ’Merica! Git you some!”) Carter had to know his answers might get him in trouble, but he chose transparency. He shared his genuine personal faith over a fake public performative one.
I’ll end by saying I was giddy when I learned Obama was a fellow Trekkie. He told Wired magazine in 2016 the low-budget sets of the first Star Trek series “didn’t matter because [Trek] was really talking about a notion of a common humanity and a confidence in our ability to solve problems.”
People working together and overcoming their differences to solve problems. Imagine that.
Decent. Honest. Self-sacrificing. Authentic. A consensus-builder. A problem-solver. These are traits we want and need in our leaders and our role models.
I don’t find any of these traits in the lying, cheating, self-aggrandizing convicted rapist currently leading the campaign to become the next presidential nominee for the Republican Party.
But if you think the country you claim to love deserves that kind of leader, knock yourself out. Please.
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate and worked for 20 years as a journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
