The High Cost of Principle in Politics

SACRAMENTO — Keeping promises, fulfilling obligations, fighting for beliefs--these are bedrocks of civilization, virtues celebrated throughout our culture. But not necessarily in politics.

In politics, such traits of good character can be condemned as opportunistic, selfish and showboating.

That’s one reason politician is such a dirty word in the public lexicon. You can’t believe anything they say. They’ll say one thing and do another.

Gov. Pete Wilson is the latest victim of our political system’s twisted set of values.

Last year, Wilson was continually castigated--pounded to a political pulp--for breaking his promise not to run for president. I took a few whacks at him myself. Now, it’s only right that he be commended for bucking party pressure and tenaciously keeping another promise--to fight for abortion rights at the Republican National Convention.

Regardless of your view on abortion or your politics, it just seems that in an era when acute public cynicism is corroding democracy, any politician who sticks to his word should be applauded. At the very least, he should not be attacked.

*

Instead, the line on Wilson at the convention was that he had self-centeredly damaged Bob Dole by grandstanding.

The convention was dominated by antiabortion delegates, the argument went, so Wilson had no hope of killing the platform plank calling for a constitutional amendment to ban abortions. He should have waged a token fight in the platform committee and meekly surrendered in the interest of party unity, especially since he was Dole’s state chairman.

In other words, principle should not have gotten in the way of practical politics.

Wilson’s attention-getting commotion, it was charged, embarrassed Dole and knocked his tax cut plan off the front page. So punishment was necessary. The governor’s prime time speaking invitation was withdrawn.

“That was a little disappointing,” Wilson conceded to me last Thursday. But he blamed the candidate’s strategists, not the candidate. “I happen to know he was unhappy” after hearing of the retribution, the governor said. When Dole, trying to sooth the wound, asked him to introduce his wife Elizabeth to the convention, Wilson said he was “frankly touched and honored.”

In the hotel lobbies and bars, party leaders and delegates accused Wilson of being motivated by self-interest. The governor was trying to reestablish his centrist roots and rekindle enthusiasm among abortion rights activists, it was said. Perhaps he was planning a 1998 Senate race. Certainly he still had presidential ambitions.

But Wilson told me flatly he would not run for the Senate: “I don’t want the obligation [to serve]. I’ve done that.” And while the governor said “it’s possible” he may run again for president, a top aide acknowledged he realizes that’s a very distant long shot.

Anyway, so what? Personal motives are interesting, but irrelevant to public policy. In a democracy, politicians are supposed to represent their constituents’ interests. If they do, the reward can be promotion to higher office.

*

In this case, Wilson’s main motive seems simple. He already had broken one recent promise and did not want to break another.

At the 1992 GOP convention, he had urged California delegates to back off from an abortion rights fight. But he pledged--in a commitment that far preceded any obligation to Dole--that “I fully expect and intend this will be the last Republican platform that contains this plank.”

Said Wilson Thursday of the plank: “I couldn’t just come to this convention and kiss it off.” Quashing debate, he added, would have made the party look intolerant.

“In time, this issue is going to go away,” he predicted. “An amendment that seeks to criminalize a woman’s right to reproductive choice is never going to pass, and it’s monumentally unpopular. It’s total delusion to think you’re going to stop one abortion with a ‘human life amendment.’ ”

Actually, Wilson did help avoid a divisive floor fight by negotiating a compromise that allowed the rejected abortion rights language to be printed in a platform appendix.

There’s probably no way he could have emerged from the convention unscathed. If he had been a party loyalist and taken a dive, abortion rights advocates and we pundits would have denounced him for breaking another promise. Instead, he kept his promise and was attacked by party leaders as a selfish troublemaker.

But by keeping his word, Wilson did the right thing. And listening to his GOP critics, you’ve got to wonder just how much they really believe in those old-fashioned values the party keeps talking about.