August 20, 2007

Giuliani? Thompson? No President Will Lead a Moral Revival

A friend recently indicated his strong preference for Fred Thompson over Rudy Giuliani in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. The issue, he said, is morality. Giuliani’s past marital infidelity, fractured relationships with his children and support for abortion rights and gay rights call his moral judgment into question.

That, say this friend and many other social conservatives, is not the kind of man we want to elect to lead a moral nation.

Any defense of Giuliani on these points can wait for another day. But a look at statistical indicators of Americans’ morality over the past 30 years shows an interesting lack of correlation between moral trends and the moral character of the person sitting in the White House.

In the mid-1960s, out-of-wedlock births were one out of every 10 live births in America. Today they are one in three. The upward trend has been relatively consistent regardless of the moral character of those in the White House at any given time.

In 1979, during the administration of born-again Baptist Jimmy Carter, 17.5 percent of Americans reported having used illicit drugs during the previous year. By 1985, during the “Just Say No” Reagan days, the number had declined only slightly to 16.3 percent. During the 1990s, under famous non-inhaling pot smoker Bill Clinton, the number stayed steady at around 10 percent. Since conservative George W. Bush has been in office, the number has crept back up to between 12 percent and 13 percent.

Of course, statistics on people who admit drug use will not necessarily reflect how many are actually doing it, but the trends are probably fairly similar.

Abortion statistics show a similar trend and lack of presidential correlation.

So, America’s moral behavior is little impacted by the moral character of the person in the White House. And while many of the moral trends themselves are troubling, perhaps the disconnect is a good thing.

The federal government is poorly equipped to take on the role of moral leadership. While the bully pulpit of the presidency can be a powerful tool for moral pronouncements, a president who uses it in that way is invariably expected to come up with policies that back up his rhetorical moral leadership. Most such policies cannot and do not achieve what they set out to do.

I do not object to the notion of “legislating morality” – so troubling to liberals and libertarians – but the mistake of many conservatives is to think that the passage of morality-friendly legislation strikes some sort of death blow against immorality. It usually does little more than engage the barbarians at the gates. The barbarians are still up for the fight.

Many social conservatives cite the emergence of no-fault divorce laws as a cause of the descent of the marriage institution – and want to elect those who would make it harder to get a divorce. What such laws would not do, of course, is make any given couple any less likely to want a divorce, because regardless of how easy or hard it is to get divorced, it is just as easy to screw up your marriage.

Americans are making their own decisions about their moral directions. They may be following the lead of moral teachers, preachers or other example-setters, but they do not follow the lead of their president. That is no surprise. Those who choose a president on the basis of his or her moral fortitude – either because they want a highly moral president or because they don’t want to hear about it – have likely already determined their own moral leanings.

Those whose presidential vote is unaffected by the candidates’ moral standing are simply concerned about other things. They may or may not be morally ambiguous, but they don’t think the president’s morality is important enough to be a deciding factor.

The message for social conservatives is this: If you want a more moral nation, you would be wise not to expect the president to lead the revival. It needs to happen at the local level, one neighborhood, one church, synagogue or nonprofit organization at a time.

This is not to say the president’s morality is irrelevant. We don’t want a person who lies, makes insincere promises or has no philosophical core. But social conservatives delude themselves when they think they have elected a president who is the right person to lead the great moral crusades they consider so vital to the nation’s future.

The president can’t do it, and will fail if he or she tries. If you want it done, you have to do it yourself.