Some Political Advice

Every few years, there’s some Hollywood movie about some normal guy who goes to Washington and straightens things out, mostly by virtue of his being normal. Dave is probably the preeminent example for our generation. Such movies are reassuring and make us feel good, but I don’t buy into the general premise. The U.S. is a big and complicated country, and our government is big and complicated, so why should anyone expect that a person with no background could just waltz in and have much of a positive impact on things.

That being said, I do know about one skill that many politicians could stand to learn – the ability to admit to inconsequential flaws and move on. Case in point, Colorado’s own Bob Beauprez, running for governor against Bill Ritter, former Denver D.A. The campaign heated up last week with revelations that the Beauprez campaign received information, subsequently used in an attack ad against Ritter, that was illegally obtained from a confidential government database. The individual who accessed the database is not related to the campaign, and there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing by Beauprez or his people.

It should have been easy for Beauprez to come clean, say he didn’t know the information was ill-gotten and that he doesn’t condone breaking the law, all while keeping the anti-Ritter point of the information alive. And leave it at that. Nobody would have held it against him, at least nobody who has not already made up their mind. But no, he had to take the offensive, holding a press conference where he called his source a courageous man trying to reveal terrible misdoings by Ritter, and now Ritter is trying to destroy that man.

The statement Beauprez put out is funny, in a sad way of course. To see the text, google “My campaign is cooperating fully”. So let me get this straight – you had evidence of some “dirty little secret” of Ritter that has made Denver significantly less safe … and the best thing you could do with the information was to sit on it for a few months and then package it up into a TV ad. Bob, you’re a Congressman! You have influence; people listen to you; why didn’t you take advantage of that?

I’m getting off track. His statement was on the hysterical side, but didn’t reassure anyone that he respected the law. Instead, it raised questions about his judgment, and about how he handles mistakes in public. It was not a reassuring performance. Worse, it kept an embarrassing (for him) incident in the public eye. Ritter has already come out with ads flogging Beauprez for his handling of the incident. Of course, I’m not sure I’d want to play the hand too far if I were Ritter, as it also keeps the substance of Beauprez’s original complaint alive.

This happens more time than it should, someone getting tripped up over some small fault. A simple apology could have dealt with the matter, but for some reason it’s political Rule Number One to never admit anything. So you divert attention, or out-and-out lie and deny the fault. Then the story becomes your evasion and is bigger than the original issue ever could have been. The all-time example of this, of course, is Bill and Monica, but it keeps happening over and over again. It just kills me that people who are that smart, and have tons of smart advisors, do this.

I want a leader who is honest, is smart enough to admit mistakes (and then try to correct them), and do the right thing in general. Campaigns usually don’t tell you much, but Beauprez sure is stumbling this time.