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How Opportunists Give Ambition a Bad Name

Paul Waldman wonders why opportunists and technocrats are often seen as inferior to conviction politicians (via Bernstein). He responds to Sahil Kapur’s review of the documentary Mitt: Nothing that Kapur says is false in terms of how people read Romney’s ambition, but I have to ask why we assume there is something morally superior about […]

Paul Waldman wonders why opportunists and technocrats are often seen as inferior to conviction politicians (via Bernstein). He responds to Sahil Kapur’s review of the documentary Mitt:

Nothing that Kapur says is false in terms of how people read Romney’s ambition, but I have to ask why we assume there is something morally superior about the “conviction politician” like Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater, and something morally inferior about the guy who just thinks he’d like to be president and would do the job well. No matter how firm their ideology, conviction politicians are just as ambitious as people like Romney or Bill Clinton who knew they would one day run for president from the time they got to middle school.

The easy answer is that many of the people that pay the closest attention to politics make this assumption about politicians because they have very firm and strongly-held political convictions. They take an interest in election campaigns because they want someone holding as many of their convictions as possible to prevail, and so they tend to view conviction politicians more sympathetically than opportunists or technocratic managers. Many activists and pundits also tend to be more interested in conviction politicians because they want to be able to identify with a candidate because of what he professes to believe, and for the same reason they will usually be harder on candidates whose convictions are easily changed or cast aside. The opportunist is viewed with suspicion because he appears to be (may indeed be) unprincipled and is therefore potentially unscrupulous and untrustworthy, and the manager type is perceived as dull, bloodless, and excessively calculating. When the manager and opportunist types are combined in one person, as they were in Romney, they reinforce the worst stereotypes of both. The same people that look down on the opportunists and the managers might even agree that those candidates are qualified and competent, but for many of them that simply isn’t good enough.

Kapur mentions something else he noticed in the documentary:

Notably, [Romney] expressed befuddlement with the premise, as he perceived it, that leaders shouldn’t be able to alter their views and adapt to the changing world around them.

This sums up very well why opportunists tend to be viewed so harshly: they can’t or won’t even acknowledge that they are willing to say or do just about anything for the sake of their ambition. As everyone knew by 2011-12, Romney had altered his views and adapted to the “changing world” only in the sense that he knew he had to create an entirely new and phony political persona if he was ever going to become his party’s nominee. It worked up to a point, but whatever credibility he had at the start was completely gone by the end of the process. Politicians can and should change their views if those views have been discredited or if they learn something about an issue that forces them to reevaluate their old assumptions, but this was obviously not what Romney was doing. He was trying to tell people what they wanted to hear, but it was also clear that he would have been prepared to tell them the exact opposite on almost every issue if he thought it was to his advantage. This is why some ambitious politicians are faulted for ambition more than others, because for some of them there appears to be nothing else driving them except their pursuit of power. Since it is a given that all politicians are ambitious, those that can at least mix their ambition with a more or less genuine interest in at least one or two issues are less obnoxious. It may not make them morally superior, but it does make them easier to tolerate.

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