I just read another denunciation of Portland mayor Sam Adams, this one by Timothy Egan in the New York Times. Mr. Egan is outraged that Adams lied about his affair with an 18 year old in 2005. Lots of people are riding that bandwagon with him. I’m on a hill with a different perspective.
What is the frame of the discussion? George Lakoff, UC Berkeley professor, political analyst and author of “Don’t Think of an Elephant” among other books, points out that the frame, composed of underlying assumptions, is the all-important definer of a conversation, especially a public, political one. An assumption that I’m seeing the bandwagon make in evaluating Sam Adams is this one: a person gets defined by a single fact about them.
Think of the worst several things you have ever done. All of them are facts about you. If the people around you then defined you by any one of those facts, does that create an accurate evaluation of you? Does it illustrate your overall job performance? Should it override every other fact about you that is equally true? How rational is it for a single negative fact to define you?
There’s a bumper sticker making the rounds: “When Clinton lied, no one died.” Everyone can agree President Clinton was wrong to lie. At the same time, he is widely believed to have been an effective president overall. President Bush is widely believed to have provided poor leadership — despite a shining absence of sexual misdeeds or lies about sexual misdeeds. The latter is a fact about him, but does not define the man, nor his presidency. The measure of a person cannot be contained by a single fact.
The emotional bandwagon around Mayor Adams’ lie is irrational. But more than that, it’s easy. It costs a citizen nothing to be indignant over another citizen’s sex life or his lie about his sex life. It’s easier to fixate on that single fact, and react to it, than to evaluate a broad range of facts. I’m not willing to be a single-fact citizen.
Mayor Adams has logged twenty years of public service in Portland. That’s a fact, too. He is a great advocate of sustainability. If you string a whole lot of facts together about his work history, he has possibly created more momentum around sustainability in our city than any other single leader. If he were as mayor, for example, to create 200 green jobs that wouldn’t have existed without his efforts, and put 200 unemployed people back to work, able to feed their families, would that be a less important fact than the fact he lied about an affair? I’d say it would be a more important fact. I’d like him to keep working in the direction he has started.
And of course, he also needs to never lie again.
What is the real problem? Clinton’s ultimate crime was that he lied. If every politician is forced to leave office because they lied; we would have a lot of open positions within our government.
Rob, I see your point. . . . telling the truth and not lying is important . . . . . while many other things are also important. Even leaving politicians out of the discussion altogether, I don’t know anyone who has never told a lie. I’m not condoning lying in the least, just putting it into perspective.