Morals in Washington? Really?

Last Wednesday, a strong gust of morality blew into a political system often characterized by wafting principles and airy promises. When Mary Jo Bane and Peter Edelman resigned their posts as assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, it was not because the pollsters said they should, because the lobbyists said they should, or even because Dick Morris said they should. It was because they refused to abandon their personal principles in order to enact a welfare bill that would--by estimates reported by their own office--impoverish an additional one million children.

Most of us aren't used to Washington as a source of morality and ethics. In the last four years especially, the notion of using principle and conviction as a basis for political action has diminished. President Clinton has demonstrated time and again that his declared beliefs have little to do with his realized deeds. Having campaigned for child welfare in 1992, he has proceeded to sign a bill that will thrust more children into poverty while at the same time denying services to the nearly one-quarter of American youth already trapped there. Having promoted job training as essential to ending welfare dependency, he then approved a bill providing none. Clearly there has been little cohesion of principle and action here.

Though he may serve as a prime example, Bill Clinton is certainly not the only one to display a dwindling sense of political morality. The lack of leadership often lamented by the press and public alike appears to stem in part from a tendency to service the latest polls rather than democratic values and principles. Nowadays, opinion polls exist for almost everything, from esoteric social and economic issues to candidates' personal and even physical traits. Not only do the polls fluctuate, sometimes wildly from week to week, but they also greatly differ depending upon where and by whom the poll was taken. Such measures are an unstable source upon which to rely when sculpting national policy decisions.

When we speak of leadership, do we not speak of those who--as the term implies--lead? Who lay down the path toward the next millennium with some kind of moral vision? By acting according to pollsters' percentages, a politician represents only the public's ever-changing notions. Such vacillation chips away at the resolve of the statesman's own true policies. A true leader serves the public by maintaining those principles and ideals for which he was elected in the first place and by acting in accordance with those visions to which the majority of the people gave its mandate.

Mary Jo Bane and Peter Edelman were not the first to put principle before politics. Just last month, Wendell Primus, deputy assistant secretary of health and human services, also resigned, stating that "to remain would be to disavow all the analysis my office has produced regarding the impact of the [welfare] bill." And while the resignations of these three individuals muffle the moral voice of Washington, they also sustain hope--a hope that other people in the political theater have not been depleted by the Washington rat-race and filled by poll percentages and dollar signs. They also leave us with further hope that these acts of morality will not sweep quickly out, but rather harbor the beginning of a stronger wind.