Daily Herald opinion: Considering character: Despite the overt impressions of the 2024 presidential campaign, it still counts

We have seen images and read reports of the jubilation and the dismay at the results of the presidential election of 2024. There will be much more. In the days and weeks ahead, we will learn more about what the prospects of a second Donald Trump administration, backed by his party’s control of both houses of Congress, will actually mean for the country, beyond the hyperbole and theater of campaign speeches and promises.

We will read, hear and see the assessments of pundits and prognosticators. The claims of what political mistakes were made, and what led to successes. Examinations of what the results mean for the victors, and how the losers must respond, strategically as well as philosophically.

But we at the Daily Herald Editorial Board today are most drawn to thoughts about character, specifically the national Character Counts movement that has been a staple of suburban education programs for more than two decades. What, we wonder, is the message of this election regarding that movement and its values?

For, whatever the qualities that attracted a majority of the nation’s voters and its states to select Trump as their leader, strong moral character was not high on many lists. Voters knew the shortcomings of the former president’s character from long experience. They had heard the evidence with their own ears and watched it with their own eyes, and yet they voted for him anyway.

Is the lesson, then, that the tenets of Character Counts are a sham? Do our children studying the pillars of trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship (T.R.R.F.C.C., as the program refers to them) now find that how they behave toward each other and their communities is irrelevant, that even achieving the highest office in the land has no use for these qualities? Indeed, that success can come amid open derision of those who would make them a priority?

We refuse to believe that. We accept that many, likely most, of the voters who propelled the Trump they knew so well to a second term acknowledge his personal flaws. We believe so many of them who said those flaws were secondary to what they considered to be stronger goals for the good of the nation. Many, no doubt, believe that he respects their moral values and is better suited to protect them, perhaps because they distrust his opponents' pronouncements about decency and appreciate Trump’s blunt refusal to be anything other than who he is.

We know many consider much of his bluster to be an act, an excess of expression that doesn’t reflect his true intentions.

But we do not accept the notion that character does not count. In 2016, then-first lady Michelle Obama famously vowed “When they go low, we go high.” We saw what that got them. So, in 2024, she and her party sounded a different tone, and the Democratic presidential campaign, although including some nods to positivity and inclusiveness, often promoted fear-mongering and name calling above specific policy objectives. Today, we see where that got them, too, politically.

Where it leaves the resut of us in our daily lives, though, is with ourselves, and the values on which we are going to build our own and our families’ daily lives. The T.R.R.F.C.C. pillars of Character Counts still guide most of us, regardless of the box we checked for president or any other office on our ballots. We may not be able to rely on our political leaders to demonstrate the qualities that help us live together in harmony and respect, but we know very well that without those qualities in our own neighborhoods and communities, we face a future of disdain and conflict.

To that end, then, character still counts — and perhaps more than ever.

It may not always win elections or success in business, but it can and sometimes does. More important, it always produces in individuals a level of self-respect that enables us to build better, happier lives regardless of who our political leaders are or how they behave. Amid the bounty of practical and theoretical punditry to come, that is an especially important point to remember.