Once upon a time, the rules of politics were fairly clear. When you got caught in a scandal, you resigned, as gracefully as possible.
That is, unless it happened to be in Japan, where you were expected to kill yourself.
There was also an extremely quaint idea that the cause and your party was more important than you were.
Thirty years ago, I interviewed a candidate for the U.S. Senate who had no realistic chance to win. He wasn’t just a name on the ballot; he was reasonably qualified. I asked him why he was running.
Speaking off the record, he told me he knew he had no chance, unless his opponent were to die. But he was running because he believed the voters deserved a decent choice between ideas. His party had asked him to run. Now, there was the mostly unspoken understanding that if he did this, and did a credible job, they later would see that he was put up for a race he could win.
That, or perhaps appoint him to something. These days, however, we live in a different world. Ayn Rand, once one of Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s political heroes, once wrote a book called “The Virtue of Selfishness.”
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