Politics: Patience isn't overrated but loyalty may be

In politics, patience isn't overrated – but loyalty often is from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

He also prized loyalty

Over on the Metro page, my Boston Globe colleague Yvonne Abraham coaxed the Massachusetts gubernatorial hopefuls into taking the Proust Questionnaire, a survey of personality and values regularly featured in Vanity Fair magazine.

The responses she received from Republican Charlie Baker, Democrat Martha Coakley, and independents Evan Falchuk and Jeff McCormick weren't as daring as those of some of the luminaries who have submitted to the questionnaire over the years, but they were more revealing than you might have expected from political candidates with an election scant weeks away.

The whole series is worth reading, but I was particularly struck by the fact that three of the candidates gave essentially identical answers to two important questions. Asked what they consider "the most overrated virtue," Baker, Coakley, and Falchuk all nominated patience. And when asked "what quality do you most value" in friends, all three replied: Loyalty. (McCormick's very different answers: Physical appearance is most overrated, and honesty is what he values most in others.)

I wouldn't want to make too much of what candidates say in brief responses on questionnaires. Yet I can't help thinking that in singling out patience as the most overrated quality and loyalty as the most valuable, Baker, Coakley, and Falchuk get it exactly backward. At least in the realm of politics and public life, it seems to me that patience is a virtue in desperately short supply, whereas the loyalty of politicians to their friends — and the loyalty they expect in return — is prized altogether too highly.

Patience overrated? In today's political arena, it's more likely to be nonexistent. By "patience" I don't mean ignoring pressing problems or finding excuses for endless delay in rectifying injustice. I mean the willingness to hear out an opposing argument with an open mind, instead of instantly branding it racist or sexist or extremist. I mean the inclination to give the benefit of the doubt even to those you vehemently disagree with. I mean the forbearance not to treat every failing as a hanging offense.

On the campaign trail and in the halls of government, there is constant pressure not to patiently reflect and understand, but to instantly react — to fire off a press release, post a tweet, cut a campaign spot, deploy the "truth squad." The cut-and-thrust of politics is nothing new, but the digital and cable revolutions have placed an unhealthy premium on speed. Political attacks come faster and more intense than ever. A slip of the tongue at 10 a.m. is rocketing around the internet by noon — and featured in a new political ad or fundraising appeal before the day is out. The iron is always hot; it's always time to strike.

No, patience isn't an overrated virtue. But loyalty is a different story.

Of course we all want loyal friends and allies, but should that be the quality any of us most values in those we're close to? More than kindness? Than decency? Than integrity?

'I did it for a friend.' James Michael Curley,
the crooked legend of Boston politics, was an
example of what happens when loyalty
trumps integrity.

Loyalty is a fine quality in the abstract. But when a would-be governor — or president or senator or mayor, for that matter — puts loyalty first in his hierarchy of values, it's hard not to wonder how far that loyalty is expected to go.

"I did it for a friend," James Michael Curley defiantly explained in 1903, when it emerged that he had corruptly taken the Civil Service exam for an illiterate constituent who wanted a job in the Post Office. More than a century later, Massachusetts politicos are still corruptly pulling strings and dealing from the bottom of the deck to place friends and supporters in government jobs. The recent convictions in the Probation Department scandal are only a recent example of what happens when loyalty trumps integrity.

In "The Best and the Brightest," his 1972 account of the origins of the Vietnam War, David Halberstam quotes Lyndon Johnson's earthy formulation of what he expected in an aide. "I don't want loyalty. I want loyalty! I want him to kiss my ass in Macy's window at high noon and tell me it smells like roses. I want his pecker in my pocket."

The desire to be surrounded by fervent loyalists is not unique to political figures, but they more than most should resist the temptation. It is too easy for those in high office to be drawn into vindictiveness and abuse of power, to treat constructive criticism as treachery — or to protect loyal but incompetent lieutenants long past the point when they ought to have been ejected.

Loyalty in friends is a splendid trait, but loyalty above all? That isn't the mark of good character, it's a danger sign. Candidates beware.

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A logic gap on the 'gender gap'

A Logic Gap on the 'Gender Gap' from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Read the Jacoby Files at the Boston Globe

Are you voting for Charlie Baker for governor, sweetheart? He's been trying hard to win your support, in part through the familiar technique of highlighting those who support him already.

For if there's one thing the Republican gubernatorial candidate wants you to know, it's that plenty of women do indeed support him.

There is a "Women for Charlie" Facebook page and a "Women for Charlie" photo gallery. There was a "Women for Charlie" reception in West Roxbury last night, and a "Women for Charlie" fundraiser in the South End last month.

"Women for Charlie" phone banks organize call centers every Wednesday night.

There was even a recent drawing for "a basket of W4C goodies," complete with "Women for Charlie" T-shirts and earrings. Needless to say, there is a "Women for Charlie" link atop every page of the Baker campaign website.

All of which makes good sense — assuming you believe that biology is political destiny, and that a candidate who loses the women's vote loses the election.

But biology isn't destiny, and it's patronizing or cynical to act as if it were. Candidates win elections all the time without winning a majority of women. Even Republican candidates. Even in Massachusetts.

For decades, pundits and politicos have harped on the "gender gap" in American politics, which is widely understood to mean that Republicans are crippled on Election Day by their lack of appeal to women. It is true enough that women (especially unmarried women) are more likely to vote for Democrats.

But it's also true that men are more likely to vote for Republicans — a counter-gap that has spelled defeat for any number of Democratic hopefuls. At the presidential level, Democratic candidates have attracted more women's votes than their GOP opponents in each election since 1980, yet Republicans have won the White House in five of those nine races

The gender gap hasn't been fatal to GOP hopes at the state level, either.

"In every governor's race of the 1990s, the male vote for the Republican candidate exceeded the female vote for the Democratic candidate, thus producing a net GOP advantage," wrote Elaine Kamarck, a former senior staffer in the Clinton White House, in a 2003 CommonWealth magazine analysis of Massachusetts politics.

A Boston Globe story in September on how Baker and Martha Coakley are waging a "war for women's votes this fall" was accompanied by a bar graph that usefully broke down the vote by candidate and gender in six hard-fought marquee Massachusetts races since 1998. In four of those statewide races, the candidate who won more men's votes won the election — and three of the four were Republicans.

Only twice did a Democrat win without a majority of male voters: when Governor Deval Patrick turned back Baker's challenge in 2010, and when Elizabeth Warren successfully ousted Senator Scott Brown in 2012.

So why the obsessive focus on the GOP's need to do better among women? If the goal is to win elections, Republicans would presumably do just as well to play to their strength, concentrating on boosting their share of men's votes even higher.

Alternatively, Democrats should be fretting about their man problem at least as much as the other team keeps agonizing over its woman problem. Where is the "Men for Martha" Facebook page? Why isn't the attorney general grabbing every opportunity to explain why a Coakley administration will be a boon for Massachusetts men?

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley
campaigning with former President Bill Clinton during
 a rally at Clark University in Worcester.

Barbara Anderson, the intrepid director of Citizens for Limited Taxation and a battle-scarred veteran of Massachusetts politics going back to the fight for Proposition 2½, strongly backs Baker for governor. But she refused to attend a recent "Women for Charlie" event, she writes in the Salem News, "because I don't do events that begin 'Women for' anyone."

Anderson doesn't want politicians to see her first and foremost as a member of her sex, or to be pandered to on that account.

Why would anyone? She and Coakley agree on nothing and have little in common "other than the reproductive system," Anderson writes. "So why would political consultants assume other women would support either one of us as if we were interchangeable?"

Exactly right. The gender gap is real, and it's likely to be a feature of American politics for years to come. It is one of many discrepancies that make the sexes interesting, maddening, or perplexing to each other.

But it is only a tendency, not even a rule of thumb. Plenty of women vote Republican; plenty of men vote Democratic. There are far stronger influences on voting choices than the presence or absence of a 'Y' chromosome — political ideology, religion, and marital status, to name just three.

Your gender is a silly reason to vote for any candidate. It's an even worse reason for any candidate to ask for your vote.

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