arthur brooks : well, the producers of the sensational show <u+201c>the election<u+201d> have really outdone themselves, haven<u+2019>t they? granted, the plot twists are implausible <u+2014> a candidate has a sex scandal four weeks before the election, is abandoned by his party<u+2019>s leadership and then goes rogue! <u+2014> but you gotta give the writers points for creativity. gail collins : sorry, if this had shown up on netflix, i<u+2019>d have turned it off after 15 minutes. totally improbable. who has a main character bragging about sexual assaults with a microphone on his lapel? arthur : that actually was a scene from <u+201c>the naked gun,<u+201d> where leslie nielsen leaves his lapel mike on and goes into the bathroom, sharing the sounds with an auditorium full of people. that was just a comedy. gail : we<u+2019>ve never really talked about issues of morality much, arthur. here<u+2019>s my first question: would you regard bad sexual behavior as disqualifying if the candidate was otherwise totally fit to be president? not that that<u+2019>s quite our problem now. arthur : i think character matters for the presidency, and there are a lot of ways to show you don<u+2019>t have it. sexual assault would definitely fall into that category, if the accusations are true. meanwhile, while we wait for the truth, trump did himself no favors by offering up this exculpatory argument in the case of one of the women: <u+201c>believe me, she would not be my first choice.<u+201d> gail : as you know, i believe american voters are at heart deeply transactional. you<u+2019>ll notice there hasn<u+2019>t been any mass rejection of trump on the part of the evangelicals, who you<u+2019>d expect to be the first to jump ship. that<u+2019>s because they believe he<u+2019>ll come through on the issues they care about, particularly the supreme court and a ban on abortion. arthur : there is an interesting divide within the evangelical movement this election. some of trump<u+2019>s fiercest critics are evangelical leaders, and so are some of his staunchest defenders. i suspect the latter is mostly a function of the contempt they perceive coming from clinton. after all, what we know as the <u+201c>christian right<u+201d> began as a defensive movement in the 1970s in response to attacks on their beliefs by the federal government. gail : have to point out that the attacks on their beliefs involved things like abortion. some might see it as an uprising against giving women reproductive rights. arthur : yes, evangelical christians see reducing abortions as a key priority. but this phenomenon goes beyond the big policy differences. even on a political and stylistic level, liberals underestimate the offense evangelicals have taken from small slights throughout the obama years, from his remarks about people who <u+201c>cling<u+201d> to their guns and religion to the h.h.s.-obamacare mandates, which many christians feel imperiled religious liberty and showed contempt for their beliefs. gail : on obamacare once again we<u+2019>re talking about people being furious about the government protecting women<u+2019>s rights. but the other is interesting. i<u+2019>d pretty much forgotten about that <u+201c>guns or religion<u+201d> comment. yet another example of the fact that there is no longer any such thing as a private fund-raiser. arthur : of course, many evangelical and catholic women, such as the little sisters of the poor, felt it was the mandates that infringed on their rights <u+2014> their first amendment rights and their liberty of conscience. but again, it<u+2019>s not the serious policy differences on their own that cause all the acrimony and division. it<u+2019>s the little slights, even those that liberals shrug off as insignificant, that really play right into this narrative. for example, the recent dump of hacked emails revealed jennifer palmieri (communications director for the clinton campaign!) writing to john podesta, the clinton campaign chairman, with this little masterpiece of contempt: <u+201c>i imagine [conservatives] think [catholicism] is the most socially acceptable politically conservative religion. their rich friends wouldn<u+2019>t understand if they became evangelicals.<u+201d> gail : have to point out, just in passing, that jennifer palmieri is a catholic. as am i, historically speaking, and i actually think that<u+2019>s a very interesting observation. arthur : so to answer your question, why is trump still holding a 50-point lead among evangelicals after all the scandal? simply put, regardless of his personal behavior, many believe he will defend their communities and not treat them with contempt. gail : he doesn<u+2019>t treat them with contempt because he thinks they love him. if the evangelical leadership suddenly announced that they had concerns about trump<u+2019>s historical inconsistencies on all the issues they hold dear, you would hear a totally different trumpian attitude very early the next morning. but i understand your point. it is true that the left has a great suspicion of any group that defines themselves mainly in terms of their religion. except possibly those nuns on the bus . arthur : our conversation so far is making me want to dig in a bit more on something i<u+2019>ve been thinking about. it drives people crazy that conservatives and liberals are often held to different moral standards. for example, lots of liberals are freaking out about trump<u+2019>s groping, but they sort of shrugged about bill clinton<u+2019>s predation in the 1990s. some people chalk this up to pure hypocrisy, but i think it<u+2019>s more than that. i have this friend who teaches at george washington university named danny hayes. (we used to work together at syracuse.) he is a political science professor and does research on political traits <u+2014> the qualities and characteristics people assume you possess because you are a conservative or a liberal. he finds that if you are a liberal, people overwhelmingly assume you are empathetic and compassionate. for conservatives, the traits people assume are good morals and strong leadership. gail : that sort of presumes compassion and morals aren<u+2019>t in the same boat. arthur : well, at least not as defined here. anyway, danny<u+2019>s research suggests an explanation to me for the moral double standard the public seems to hold. it appears people are especially hard on politicians who betray the traits they<u+2019>ve already ascribed to them. people would probably be more outraged if a liberal politician were a jerk to his interns than if a conservative politician did the same thing. and they get madder at conservatives than liberals when they are sexually immoral. so it might be unfair, but as a self-declared conservative, trump might actually be held to a higher moral standard on matters of sex than ol<u+2019> bill. gail : not sure it<u+2019>s unfair. everybody merges politics with morality on some level, but social conservatives are the only ones who include a strict sexual code that bans sex outside of heterosexual marriage. which means that if a right-wing politician gets caught with his pants down, he<u+2019>s accused of hypocrisy as well as misbehavior. tough on the right-wing pols, but that<u+2019>s life. arthur : i think we are making the same point, actually, although i said it in social science and you said it in english. gail : i have no sympathy, however, with the people who backed trump and now find they<u+2019>re stuck in a swamp of sexual misbehavior. i worked for the daily news back when trump was leaving his first wife for his second <u+2014> the era of the fabled <u+201c>best sex i<u+2019>ve ever had<u+201d> headline. anybody who didn<u+2019>t figure this was coming was not doing their due diligence. arthur : due diligence? no way! it<u+2019>s way more fun to live on the edge. this election is like driving 90 m.p.h. at night without headlights. while drunk. gail : we<u+2019>re certainly in a very peculiar political place this year. everywhere you look there<u+2019>s a sex scandal <u+2014> where<u+2019>s mitt romney when we really need him? arthur : agree totally. very notable, however, that many voices on the left dismissed romney in 2012 as a misogynist. they held up an awkwardly worded comment about recruiting more women into public service (<u+201c>binders full of women<u+201d>) as clear proof of secret chauvinism. of course, this was at total variance with common sense, and this is one reason ordinary people, who don<u+2019>t spend all their time thinking about politics, dismissed so much of the rhetoric about trump in 2016 until it was too late. in other words, i think one important 2016 takeaway is a harsh lesson for commentators on both sides: if we go to defcon-5 on every candidate we disagree with, criticisms will start falling on deaf ears. gail : well i do remember criticizing mitt for his sudden u-turn on reproductive rights. on the clinton side, i<u+2019>ve admitted that i<u+2019>m uncomfortable with bill<u+2019>s role in the campaign. but i don<u+2019>t think hillary can be held accountable for his bad behavior <u+2014> which seems to me to include at minimum both adultery and sexual harassment in the workplace. the four women who trump dragged into the last debate were a mixed bag of cases, some tragic. but none of them involved actual wrongdoing on hillary<u+2019>s part. it<u+2019>s true she blasted the lewinsky accusers as part of a right-wing conspiracy, but that was at a time when both bill and monica were denying the affair took place. arthur : it<u+2019>s certainly true that, since bill is not running for president, his sexual misdeeds are not relevant, like trump<u+2019>s. but the salient critique of hillary here is not that she needed to run a tighter ship at home. it<u+2019>s that her role in marginalizing her husband<u+2019>s accusers violated all decent standards about how to support women who have suffered abuse. gail : this is the part of this campaign i find the absolute weirdest <u+2014> you may have a point, but right now none of it matters anyway! we have one candidate who<u+2019>s demonstrated over and over that he<u+2019>s a man we absolutely can<u+2019>t trust with control of nuclear weapons. that<u+2019>s pretty much a bottom line. arthur : whether you grab women<u+2019>s genitals without permission is now a proxy for whether you should have the nuclear codes. what a world. gail : you know it<u+2019>s more than just the grabbing. trump has demonstrated over and over that he doesn<u+2019>t have the minimal personal attributes needed for the job. under normal circumstances we could have great arguments about bill clinton<u+2019>s sex life, hillary clinton<u+2019>s emails, the clinton foundation donors, and so on. then we<u+2019>d get to veer into a rewarding discussion of who has the best tax policy. but this year, it<u+2019>s all beside the point. we cannot give donald trump the power to blow up the planet. arthur : i guess we<u+2019>ll see in three weeks if the country agrees, gail. follow the new york times opinion section on facebook and twitter (@nytopinion), and sign up for the opinion today newsletter .
is the election a morality play or just reality tv?
arthur c. brooks and gail collins