When You’re Right
The problem with your private life contradicting your public message.

By Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradition.
February 8, 2002 8:50 a.m.

mong Washington State conservatives, there is no joy this week. Our hero, Tim Eyman, has struck out, gone down, imploded. Mr. Eyman is the locally famous author of several state anti-tax initiatives, whose efforts inspired anti-tax activists around the country. Of interest beyond the borders of our state is that he has imploded in the style of many another conservative hero. This troubling pattern needs to be explained.

Eyman's story has already crossed the continent, showing up in the New York Times. He humbly sold wristwatches in Mukilteo till he launched the crusade that he called Permanent Offense. He kept his business and claimed that, as a citizen warrior, he drew no salary from his political endeavors

His first initiative, I-695, knocked down the state's outrageously pricey vehicle licensing fee to $30. Two others, I-722 and I-747, limited tax growth, including property taxes, which are to be held to a growth rate of 1 percent a year. His latest would reduce car-tab taxes to $30 per year, but it seems likely that the present scandal will slow if it does not entirely stop the push for I-776.

It turns out that Eyman indeed drew funds, contributed by other anti-tax Washingtonians, for personal use. In the year 2000 he paid himself $45,000 — not a fortune. Later he diverted another $165,000, of which he expected to keep — again, under the table — $157,000. In a somewhat peculiar verge-of-tears press conference held at the Mukilteo post office, Eyman has now apologized.

So then here is the pattern. Every year, it seems, another public conservative has his career dashed to pieces when it is revealed that he has been embroiled in unworthy activities, often, but not always, sexual in nature. Newt Gingrich comes to mind. So might Rudy Giuliani, who suffered mightily for his own affair of the heart and would have left office as a much-reduced figure had it not been for September 11.

Meanwhile public figures committed to liberalism may be exposed as adulterers — Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton — and suffer no permanent negative consequences at all. The contradiction is evident.

With this pattern in mind, conservative commentators sometimes grasp the mantle of victimhood. The hostile media are to blame for the destroyed lives, they say.

Perhaps we can learn a more important lesson. Again, take Mr. Eyman by way of illustration. He has said, "The initiatives were always about ideas, not about me." However, one of the ideas they were about, as with so many conservative proposals and positions, had to do with moral responsibility.

For what is the purpose of reducing taxes or halting their growth? Eyman's opponents charged that his initiatives would reduce services to the public, especially to citizens in need. But Washington voters embraced I-695 and the rest not because we peevishly wanted to see library hours reduced or teachers' salaries capped. We embraced them because we share a vision of the public good that has as its focus private individuals doing useful things with their own money, rather than the government seizing that money and doing things that may or may not be useful.

In other words, even an issue like taxes that seems purely pragmatic poses the most serious question that divides conservatism from liberalism: Is the individual morally responsible, or is the state?

The lesson is that conservatives are vulnerable to being destroyed by unethical behavior because we emphasize personal moral responsibility. A conservative with significant moral failings is shocking because individual responsibility is the point of most everything we fight for. After all, our way of seeing the world is derived ultimately from Scripture. And the Bible phrases its commandments in the second-person singular. Individuals, not states, are commanded to do right.

By contrast, liberalism emphasizes state moral responsibility. In the liberal understanding, it is the state that, for example, cares for the needy. This, incidentally, has the attraction of letting individual moral actors off the hook. Thus when a Clinton or a Jackson is discovered to have cavorted with a mistress, the public cannot claim to be shocked.

Just wait; there will be other Tim Eymans, other conservatives ruined. Rather than protest liberal media bias, however, when our heroes are brought down by doubtful deeds we should accept the sad event as the cost of believing what we do — of being right. That is, finally, the morally responsible thing to do.