Moral doughnuts, backbone, and you

This month, a politician showed backbone, something many of us believe no longer exists in politics. Ask Americans how they feel about politicians, and most will use words like "sleazy," "corrupt," and "liars." In the discussions that follow, an idea eventually emerges that captures it all: "They will say or do anything to get elected." Heads then nod agreement.

Maryland Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr. fired an aide this month for spreading apparently unfounded - certainly mean-spirited - rumors about a political rival and possible 2006 Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley. In firing Joseph Steffen, who'd been with him since his days in Congress, Governor Ehrlich cut to the chase: "I don't put up with this, and I will not put up with this. Bottom line."

While Mayor O'Malley and his supporters may say the move doesn't go far enough (they want an apology directly from the governor as well as an independent investigation), it goes light-years beyond the norm. Typically, wagons would be circled, denials issued, and there would be a statement amounting to, "Well, where there's smoke there's fire - there must have been something to hide in the first place." But, standing on principle, Ehrlich made the point that, in fact, there are principles left to stand on. This is news that may come as a shock to an inured public.

On the same day O'Malley made his accusations of gossip, he delivered an address in the capital opposing the president's latest budget proposal, which appears to contain a $2 billion cut in aid to metro areas. O'Malley said the cuts are "attacking our metropolitan core," just as "back on Sept. 11, terrorists attacked our metropolitan cores, two of America's great cities."

Alarm bells went off in people's minds, and O'Malley was asked to explain himself. His fellow Democratic mayors distanced themselves from the rhetoric; the opposition engaged in chortling shock. O'Malley issued a clarification, saying he "in no way intended to equate these budget cuts, however bad, to a terrorist attack." In other words, he circled the wagons and issued a denial, even striking a version of the "where there's smoke there's fire" theme by repeating that two US cities had "already been attacked in this war."

There's a notion in moral philosophy called the "moral perimeter" - an imaginary circle within which we owe people ethical behavior. Outside that circle, our behavior doesn't matter so much, and we are free to behave badly. In war, for example, the enemy is outside the moral perimeter, so we're free to do to him what we wouldn't do to our own kin.

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