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What I can gather from his Wikipedia page is that Kennedy, like Clinton was a good politician but a consummate womaniser. I have always wondered why citizens e
by muriithi 17y ago
What I can gather from his Wikipedia page is that Kennedy, like Clinton was a good politician but a consummate womaniser.
I have always wondered why citizens expect politicians to be 'moral' and whether 'immoral' politicians are necessarily bad leaders?
- unalone 17y agoAmerica's got a fucked-up sense of morality. Everybody's messed up in one way or another romantically. We have a distorted sense of expectation, mixed with a bunch of weird ideas about what's appropriate and what isn't. There've been many perfect gentlemen politicians that were terrible. I hope one day we start judging politicians the way we would businessmen, wherein personal life matters less than performance.
- nandemo 17y agoJust a minor quibble, not meant to detract your point: it's curious that even as you criticize America's sense of morality, you seem to use "gentlemen" as opposed to "womanizer".
- roundsquare 17y ago> I have always wondered why citizens expect politicians to be 'moral' and whether 'immoral' politicians are necessarily bad leader I think its the need to relate it to something easier to understand. Policy positions can be complex and subtle, but for a lot of people, "don't cheat on your wife/husband" is an absolute and a convenient/simple (albeit horribly inaccurate) metric.
- hughprime 17y agoPoliticians have a lot of power, and that power can easily be misused. All other things being equal, I'd much prefer to elect an honest politician with strong moral fibre to a dishonest one with few scruples. If a guy can't resist the temptation to break a promise he made to his wife for the sake of a few cheap kicks, it's less likely that he can resist the temptation to, say, hand out political favours to his favourite campaign donors.