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travis

Travis Cantrell
Penn, Paper, Farce

Credit: Travis Cantrell

Everybody makes mistakes. No one is perfect. Beef, its what’s for dinner.

I’m not sure if these are universal truths, but — in my experience — they seem to be pretty accurate.

This makes me raise the question: Why are we so hard on our presidential candidates? If no one is perfect, why do we vilify our candidates for their past errors? We should focus on the worth of candidates’ proposed policies, not the ins and outs of their personal lives.

We’ve all said or done things we’re not proud of, but — for the most part — these things do not define us as individuals. That same understanding and forgiveness should be applied to public figures.

The past several presidential elections have been saturated with personal attacks and unearthed uncomfortable truths from decades past. Alarmingly few of these issues are relevant to assessing a candidate’s ability to potentially run the country. And what’s worse is that, in many cases, these issues completely eclipse coverage of relevant material.

The past week has seen the total destruction of Herman Cain’s presidential campaign following several allegations of sexual assault and adultery.

I can’t help but ask: What in the world? What does any of this have to do with the presidency? Would Cain’s fondness of extra-marital affairs really affect his ability to make decisions and craft policy? Sure, his taxation proposal and his approach to foreign relations were both childishly simplistic and — what some would call — utterly incompetent. But no, it was the extra coitus that did him in. (Oddly enough, all the American voters I know love the stuff.)

I can’t help but wonder: What if the average person had to deal with the unforgiving, unrelenting and unrelated criticisms that are so commonly leveled toward presidential hopefuls? Society would lie in ruins. Let us imagine that fate.

Imagine a job interview where, suddenly, all of your past acquaintances, ex-friends, ex-classmates, ex-professors and ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends burst in.

“Hey, Mr. Interviewer, do you really want to hire a guy who wears his bathrobe all day if he doesn’t have class? Do you really want to hire another snobby, lying, elitist Ivy League scumbag?”

“After all, in September 2010, he did tell a homeless man that he didn’t have any change when, in fact, he really did!”

“Does this company really want a guy who got a C in his fourth grade handwriting class? A guy that pooped in his bed and bathtub during childhood? If he can’t control his bowel movements, how do you expect him to control multiple accounts?”

“This guy knows where you can find a video of pterodactyls having sex! Does that sound like someone you want on your payroll?”

Everyone would be unemployed.

Or maybe you meet a nice girl and want to take her out on a date. Impossible.

“Hello, miss. You’re quite lovely and I was wondering if —”

“Aren’t you that guy who thought the G-spot was a nightclub downtown? Didn’t you give your previous girlfriend a dust-buster for her birthday? I heard you like feet. Like, really like feet. I heard you drool in your sleep and can’t dance — is that true? Didn’t you call your ex-girlfriend’s grandmother a GILF at Thanksgiving dinner?”

Maybe you want a permit for a cool class and you email the professor in question. Your roommate from freshman year had already come forward. The professor already knows that you increase the font size of all punctuation in your papers to meet the page-length requirement. And that you leave your dishes in the sink and cried during the Kardashian wedding. And that all of your grandparents play tennis twice a week in a gated community in West Palm Beach, so those funerals you’re going to every other Friday — well, they don’t exist.

Fortunately, we are afforded a private and forgiving environment that allows mistakes, oddities and unconventionality. All of which enable a functioning society. Why shouldn’t we extend this faith to our public figures? Why do the intricacies of our candidates’ private lives take precedence over their policies? I don’t know why, but they shouldn’t.

Travis Cantrell is a College junior from Glenmoore, Pa. His email address is tcant@sas.upenn.edu. Penn, Paper, Farce appears every other Tuesday.

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