A telling test of character in American politics

Tim Murphy’s downfall is a consequence of his own moral failings. But it also begs the question: do we value character in politics?

In her speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama offered a telling insight into the presidency: “Being president doesn’t change who you are,” she warned. “It reveals who you are.”

More than four years later, the disturbing allegations that forced the resignation of Pennsylvania Congressman Tim Murphy are a reminder that Obama’s prescient warning of the revealing power of elected office applies to more than just the nation’s highest office. It’s just as true for any person who suddenly finds himself or herself in a position of power and influence.

Such is the case for many members of Congress, whose swearing in endows them with not just the power to write laws for the most powerful nation on earth, but also extraordinary perks that can rapidly inflate the ego past the point of recognition: Visits to the White House. Police escorts. Taxpayer-funded flights to and from Washington every week, and to foreign capitals every recess. The authority to question witnesses and compel information. A fully-funded, full-time staff of dozens. Distinguished titles like “The Honorable” and “Congressman.” Multimillion-dollar operations, in the form of political parties, that exist solely to help them keep their jobs.

Serving as a member of Congress isn’t an easy job, and many of trappings of the office exist for good reason. But is it any wonder that, taken together, the cumulative effect of such a radically privileged lifestyle can be toxic?

Tim Murphy’s saga is only the most recent reminder of what happens when power-encrusted political identity decays past the point of recognition.

Murphy, an eight-term family values Republican from Pennsylvania who prides himself on his anti-abortion record in Congress, wasn’t just caught pressuring a woman with whom he was having an affair to have an abortion. He was also accused in a leaked memo as demonstrating “hostile, erratic, unstable, angry, aggressive and abusive behavior” toward staff, creating a brutal work environment that led to “near 100 percent turnover” in the past year.

In describing the memo, reportedly authored by his chief of staff, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cites an instance in which Murphy berates and abuses his legislative director in ways that show a complete disregard for the basic humanity of his staff. Murphy, according to the memo, “verbally abused him, harassed him, chastised him and criticized all his work products.” The Congressman “pushed other documents off the table onto the floor” and then “got angry and demanded we find the documents that [he] had just thrown on the ground.”

As Politico and HuffPost have reported, this behavior wasn’t limited to Murphy, but appears also to reflect the demeanor of his chief of staff, who reportedly “regularly engaged in brutal verbal abuse of lower-ranking aides, from calling aides ‘worthless’ and their work ‘garbage,’” and going as far as to keep “white noise machines throughout Murphy’s congressional office so constituents waiting in the front room couldn’t hear her screaming.”

The Murphy memo follows an August memo from the office of Indiana Congressman Todd Rokita, which spends eight pages outlining in painfully micromanaged detail how to chauffeur Rokita around his district. While the Rokita memo is more embarrassing than incriminating, it nonetheless exhibits the same symptoms of an elected official who sees his staff as a perk of the office rather than an ally in serving a public agenda.

The toxic effects of power don’t observe partisan constraints. Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee, for example, reportedly churned through through 11 chiefs of staff in 11 years and was named by Washingtonian Magazine the “meanest” Democrat in the House in 2014. Now-disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner had a notorious reputation for being harsh to his staff.

There’s no doubt that serving in Congress is a relentlessly demanding, and often thankless, job. At the end of the day, it’s the elected official — not his or her staff — who face public scrutiny and take the fall for mistakes. Those realities, along with their accomplishments in public life, are why we forgive some of history’s most iconic public servants who were demanding, impulsive, and even cruel to their staff.

But that doesn’t address the issue of what we, as participants in a democracy who are represented in government by fellow human beings, should make of stories like Murphy’s.

It’s far too easy to hear these anecdotes and simply condemn his behavior as just another example of an entire system that’s corrupt, out-of-touch, and broken beyond repair. Only the most naive observers of the political process take our elected leaders entirely at face value, but that doesn’t make hopeless cynics of those of us who acknowledge the behavioral race to the bottom that our politics seems to encourage.

This truth applies at a larger level. You can believe government can act as a force for the public good while criticizing the many ways in which it falls short. You can trust the democratic process without trusting everyone who participates in it. You can call public service an honorable line of work while still recognizing that some participants in it hold definitions of public service that are a lot closer to “House of Cards” than “The West Wing.” For a complex democracy to function, we have to be able to acknowledge the reality and aspire to a better future at the same time.

That politics is beyond saving is also a futile response to stories like Murphy’s in large part because there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Most members of Congress don’t lose their head or their humanity upon finding themselves in elected office. I had the privilege of working my entire political career for members who fit the category of kind, decent, humanistic people who care deeply about public service and value highly the people who work for them.

You can tell a lot about a person in power by how they treat their staff. That’s especially true for elected officials, who rarely have much to gain by being kind to people who work quietly behind the scenes for them. That’s why it’s such a revealing measure of character.

But you can also tell a lot about a democracy, and its electorate, by the character and value of those chosen to lead it. The behavior of people like Tim Murphy, who served more than 15 years in Congress, begs the question: Why are kindness, decency, and humility so rarely rewarded in public life?

Another way to ask that question is by turning the mirror on ourselves. Can we, as voters, as an electorate, demonstrate that the character of our elected officials matters? Does it matter? Has it ever?

It’s not clear that Murphy’s poor treatment of his staff would’ve forced him from office if the memo describing that behavior weren’t accompanied by made-for-cable-news headlines of hypocrisy following the abortion revelations. Earlier this month, Politico reported that “fears among senior Republicans about a potential wave of negative stories on how Murphy ran his congressional office were what ultimately pushed him out the door,” but it’s worth nothing that it was the negative stories — not the behavior itself — that made them nervous. And it’s unclear whether those stories even would’ve mattered to anyone other than his political opponents. (It didn’t seem to matter to his colleagues, who surely had at least some idea of Murphy’s behavior before the story broke.)

It was similarly well-reported that Anthony Weiner treated his staff poorly, but it wasn’t until the first iteration of his sexting scandal that he was forced to resign from Congress.

One could, of course, spend a lifetime listing the shortcomings of elected officials throughout U.S. history. Yet the question of whether private character matters in public life seems particularly relevant today, given the acrimony and animosity that define modern American discourse.

In The Road to Character, David Brooks writes of a pattern he observed in a series of historical figures who, in his opinion, came to epitomize the highest ideals of moral character. As Brooks notes, what unites this diverse cast is that, at some point, they all “had to go down to go up. They had to descend into the valley of humility to climb to the heights of character.”

We should hope that Tim Murphy follows a path from his present valley towards his own moral redemption, but whether he does so is less relevant than what his story — and the base state of our politics today — says about us.

Few could plausibly claim that our political debate, as a whole, is today characterized by either humility or character. It does seem possible that we’re in what Brooks called the valley of humility, the low point before we begin to redeem ourselves. But it’s unclear whether we’re humbled by the consequences of what our democracy has become and determined to rebuild it, or simply resigned to its brokenness.

To paraphrase Michelle Obama’s 2012 warning, elections don’t change who we are; they reveal who we are. Time will tell what, if any, lessons we take from this one.