It’s very easy to imagine that someone could be an incompetent driver and still become a good governor. It is impossible, for me, to imagine that someone could be a total jerkwad driver and still become a good governor.
Maryland’s Democratic Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler is apparently a total jerkwad driver. He wants to be governor. If he really drives the way a bunch of Maryland state troopers say he does, then the people of Maryland shouldn’t allow that to happen. (Gansler, for the record, says these accusations are overblown — the result of a personal dispute with the officer in charge of his security detail.)
Remember the firestorm when President Obama commended Sonia Sotomayor for empathy? He was right: empathy is essential. One cannot be a good judge, or a good public servant, without it. The kind of aggressive, screw-everybody-else driving Gansler has apparently exhibited shows he doesn’t have the empathy — the ability to consider and to account for others — that leadership requires.
A lack of empathy fosters a sense of entitlement, and the last thing we want to be doing is giving more power or authority to people who believe they’re entitled to something more, something special, with no consideration for other people.
I appreciate that driving in traffic doesn’t bring out the best in most people, and maybe it seems like I’m inflating the significance of Gansler’s apparent risky self-centeredness behind the wheel — after all, he hasn’t killed anybody, yet. But driving like that all the time I think reveals something about character that warns against giving such a person any more power or responsibility that they might abuse, because it strongly suggests that they will abuse it.
The problem with That Guy who cuts to the front in a traffic jam by driving on the shoulder then forcing his way back in farther up the line isn’t just that he’s being unfair to everyone else and putting others at risk. It’s also that he seems to think he’s being smarter than all those suckers waiting their turn. It’s a kind of delusion — as a lack of empathy always is. He doesn’t seem to understand that he’s not being exceptionally clever — that he wasn’t the only driver who recognized it was physically possible to cut in line. He doesn’t understand that what keeps everyone else from doing what he’s doing isn’t their inferior lack of cleverness, but their superior (to him) sense of basic human decency.
And again, giving more power or more authority to That Guy — to a person incapable of recognizing basic decency while indulging the fantasy that he’s smarter than everyone else — is a really bad idea.
For a darker, more serious look at what a lack of empathy and its consequent sense of entitlement can produce among the powerful, consider the case of former Democratic state Rep. John Arnold of Kentucky or of former Democratic Mayor of San Diego, Bob Filner. The persistent sexual harassment both men are accused of is another form of that same self-centered sense of entitlement.
You may have noticed that all three of the officials I’ve named here are Democrats. That’s intentional, because I’m trying to discuss an aspect of personal character here, not policy. Policy is partisan, but character transcends party lines. It’s true that any elected official can do a lot more damage by pursuing a policy agenda that’s based on a lack of empathy and a sense of entitled superiority, but I can’t trust a person to oppose such an agenda when that person, as an individual, displays those very traits — regardless of whether that individual has a D or an R after their name.
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