Character v. Agenda
Another post written by our guest writer, Elizabeth Moon.
Everyone has an agenda–a plan of action to accomplish a goal. They want to lower or raise taxes. They want to favor labor or management, public health or economic health. Having an agenda is not evil: it’s normal. We gather with people who have the same or similar political agendas.
Everyone has a character, too. Character determines how someone attempts to carry out their agenda. Someone who has the same overt agenda as you may go at it in a way that damages the values of that agenda. They may hide their real agenda to make use of your resources. They may threaten violence or promise faerie gold. Or just lie.
Forty years ago, when we moved to Williamson County, in midsummer 1979, it was a Democratic stronghold just beginning to fray with the influx of high-tech Californians and New Yorkers. Our county government was all Democrats, including the highly regarded District Attorney. Over the next few years, the GOP took aim at one office after another, from school boards to county commissioners, sheriff and the D.A. The D.A. had a pretty normal DA agenda: lower the crime rate, get the really bad guys indicted and into jail, and do it economically. He had another agenda, which he didn’t mention: stay D.A. and then run for judge and then become the power broker in the county.
As the Republican tide rose, he chose his moment to switch parties very carefully. He ran as a Democrat when he would have a narrow win, and then–once sworn in–declared in a “more in sorrow than in anger” voice that his conscience made him become a Republican…and had two years to make more Republican friends and win as a Republican. Good politics, if staying elected is your primary agenda…not the agenda of either party. Democratic voters, like me, who had voted for him because he was a Democrat, were blindsided (and in my case furious) when he thumbed his nose at us by changing parties.
This D.A. pleased Republicans by constantly emphasizing that he was “tough on crime.” And he could be just as underhanded in his prosecutorial duties as in an election. A man’s wife was brutally murdered, and the police (understandably) looked at him. The D.A. needed a quick conviction on this one and despite contrary evidence, he pushed hard to get the trial and then–figuring he’d never be caught–withheld exculpatory evidence from everybody–the defense, the jurors, the judge. (Some of you have suddenly perked up–you know about this fellow.) His victim spent 25 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, losing his son as well as his dead wife, and the D.A. prospered and indeed became a respected (for awhile) judge.
It wasn’t just a mistake, either. I was on a grand jury when this D.A. was still a D.A., and realized partway through the process of indicting and not indicting various people that the D.A. was herding us like cattle through a squeeze chute with all the skills he had and we didn’t. He controlled what evidence we heard about (in one case I knew it wasn’t everything.) His skillful use of voice and facial expression and gesture cut out the one or two mavericks and convinced the rest we were just too idealistic, poor little innocents.
And later, after he was found out and and “punished” (10 days in jail with 5 of them waived, losing his law license) he came to a book fair in Georgetown I also attended, and I watched him lie like a rug about the KKK’s current activities. That was in 2015, or early 2016, when those who follow such things knew the KKK had been growing again in importance. He’d written a book on the KKK in Williamson County: he had to know he was lying.
Character and agenda are on two different axes of behavior. A candidate for office, a person in office, may say all the right things where your political agenda and theirs run side by side…but if their character is bad, you better deal with them with a very long-handled spoon.
