Can You Be in Politics and Keep Your Integrity?

I’ve traveled from Minnesota to New York, Georgia to Colorado, helping my team at The White House Project inspire, inform, and equip a diverse array of women to take the political lead. Of the nearly 1,500 women we have trained thus far, many invariably ask the above question, and it seems to me a particular injustice that they have to consider it. These women are passionate and intelligent; they have the brains and the brawn to make real change in their communities and our world. But they are cautious—they don’t want to sell their souls in the process.

What a week to consider the premise. Eliot Spitzer’s unfortunate and unfettered fall from grace has certainly brought issues of integrity to the foreground—but his story is, by some measure, the easier one to dismiss when it comes to the challenge of keeping our political house in order. The issue that has me more concerned, frankly, relates to some presidential campaign tactics of late and what they say to the leaders of the future about what a life in politics might mean.

As much as it has in any election to date, integrity matters this time around. At its core, political integrity is about touting policies and practices not because they are politically expedient, but because of the inherent good such policies visit upon the communities they touch. And when it comes to this question of integrity, women candidates have a particular tightrope to walk: as pollster Celinda Lake has shown us, because the traits of integrity and honesty generally have been allied with women candidates, a male opponent can almost always gain ground against a female opponent by showing a crack in her armor of so-called “goodness.”

In the current race for the presidency, for instance, the criticism of Clinton for her votes, particularly on the war in Iraq, is a continual stab at her integrity. And those hits have hurt. But, in this race, it’s not just Clinton who is susceptible to chinks in her integrity armor. With Obama cast as the “woman” candidate he, too, runs the risk that fissures in his perceived goodness, his integrity, will impact him in ways other male candidates (those not cast as female in quite the same way) would not face.

That fact is that one will be picked up on in the general election without a doubt. But in Newsweek, Eleanor Clift spoke so openly and eloquently about her admiration for Clinton alongside worries about her recent campaign tactics vis-à-vis Obama, it stirred up for me some worries of my own. Because while I believe that it is Clinton’s competence and courage that account for her resurrection, I also fear that the campaign’s attacks on Obama’s armor are working to Clinton’s benefit in a way that those of us who care about the integrity of our political system should not be thrilled about.