Stand for Something

by John Kasich

  I don’t wish to be the voice of doom here, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest that Western civilization is lost and hopeless. Not at all. There’s an awful lot that’s right and good about the way we live and work. It’s like there’s a hole in the dam, and if we don’t tend to it the dam is going to burst. Think once again of our young people and you’ll get what I mean. Think of the images and impulses that have been raining down on them for as long as they can remember. Think of the world we’ve made for them and the one they’re about to sustain. Somehow, they’ve gotten the message that it’s okay for professional athletes to climb into the stands and pummel unruly fans, for gangster rappers to denigrate women and celebrate violence in the name of sales, and for the bottom line to measure the sum total of how we live. It’s no wonder they’re jaded, and confused. You would be, too, if all you knew was that Paris Hilton is rich and famous for no good reason but the confluence of birth and reality television, and that baseball player Rafael Furcal is allowed to drive under the influence without immediate punishment because his team is in a pennant race and a judge allows himself to be persuaded in the court of public opinion to let his sentencing slide until the end of the season, and that politicians can purposefully mislead their constituents on the staggering public debt that threatens our nation’s financial security and still be reelected.

  THE (AGONIZING) THRILL OF VICTORY

  Like I said, our priorities are out of whack, and we need look no further than the hopeful exceptions to this truth to see how far we’ve actually strayed. You’ll find as you read along that I sometimes look to the world of sports to help me make a point—probably because there’s no richer, more illustrative arena for stories involving good guys and bad guys. It’s all about winning and losing, and in that context it’s easy to spot the tension between bending or breaking the rules and upholding them. It’s clear-cut. In sports, the space between honor and dishonor is sometimes measured in fractions of a second, or a couple of inches, and as cultural indicators go there’s no better gauge on who we are, what we do, how we live, and why it all matters. Take golf. Goodness, what a beautiful game. In golf, you can find all kinds of useful life lessons. Every golfer lives and dies by the same set of rules, I don’t care if you’re Tiger Woods or a weekend duffer on your local public course. And yet within those rules there’s some wiggle room, and that’s where we get ourselves into trouble.

  Davis Love III offered a compelling lesson when he was competing for our country in the Ryder Cup. For a golfer, that’s the closest thing to heaven. There he was, battling it out on the 18th hole, even up, and what did he do? Well, as bad luck would have it, he drove the ball into the rough, and this is where some of that wiggle room entered into it. In golf, there are rules that allow you to reposition yourself or your ball by a club length in certain circumstances, and here Davis Love III was legitimately allowed to stretch out and hit the ball with his feet positioned on a drainage pipe and thereby move his ball from the heavy rough to the lighter rough, giving him an easier shot. But he didn’t do it. Understand, he was playing for the honor of his country. It was the 18th hole. The Cup was on the line. The match was tied. Each stroke was huge. But Davis Love III chose not to stretch out and take advantage of the rule because he thought it violated the spirit of sportsmanship. It would have given him an edge he didn’t feel he deserved, so he played the ball where it lay and hoped for the best. (How about that!) As it happened, Love made par and tied the hole, and I looked on at home and thought, Man, isn’t this something! To give up an edge just because it wasn’t sporting and to still hold on under tremendous pressure, with your entire country pulling for you . . . it was a selfless, noble act. Wonderful. Pure. Maybe even a little bit heroic. And it made a giant impression on me.

  Another golf story. Tom Lehman is one of the best golfers on the tour, and a Christian man. In June 1996, playing the U.S. Open at the Oakland Hills Country Club, he found himself in the final round of play, walking the 17th fairway with his good friend Steve Jones, another Christian man. Both were among the leaders. It was the second consecutive year that Lehman played in the final pair at the U.S. Open, itself a significant accomplishment, and he would go on to play in the finals in the next two Opens as well, and here he famously cited Bible verses about strength and character and purpose to the man he was battling for the tournament. Imagine: You’re Steve Jones, chasing your first major, and you’re just back from a dirt-bike injury that cost you three years on the tour; your tournament is on the line, and your opponent is lifting you up with a verse from Joshua 1:9:

  “Be strong and courageous. Do not be discouraged or afraid, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”

  Pretty amazing, right? And yet that’s precisely what Tom Lehman was doing, sharing these inspiring words. So what did he do? Well, he hit his ball into the bunker, while Steve Jones, the man on the receiving end of Lehman’s good counsel, drove the green and captured the championship. Think for a moment how incredible that must have been, for Tom Lehman to share those powerful words with Steve Jones, just as Moses once shared them with Joshua. At the time, I would have probably been saying a silent prayer that Steve Jones would drive his ball into the drink, but I’ve tried to learn from Tom Lehman on this one, because he was able to put the competition into perspective. He was able to communicate by his actions that sportsmanship matters, that fellowship matters, that character matters. Really, that’s what it comes down to.

  And the story didn’t end there, because a couple months later, Jones found himself paired with another active Christian, Paul Stankowski, in the final round at the Kapalua International, and on the 17th tee he started quoting Joshua 1:9 to his opponent. (I’m telling you, this virus concept is catching, don’t you think?) Fittingly, this time it was Stankowski who was lifted to victory, and he later told a reporter it was “a neat deal, that someone under the gun, trying to beat my brains in, is trying to offer me courage.”

  A neat deal? Man oh man, you better believe it! And here’s the capper. Later that same year, Lehman found himself battling it out for the British Open and this time found the strength and courage in himself to take the title, and I’d like to think he deserved the victory—but of course he’d have probably said that his actions at Oakland Hills had nothing to do with his British Open win, even as it spoke volumes about the man and the kind of competitor he was.

  I know it pains most duffers to admit it, but there’s more to life than golf—and there’s more to sports than just winning. Just ask Steve Jones, the guy who took Tom Lehman’s generosity and generously passed it on. “I’ve never prayed to win,” Jones said after his victory. “Tom Lehman hasn’t either. I think that’s the totally wrong attitude. What Christians should be praying for is to glorify God, no matter what happens.”

  Amen.

  One final golf story—this one from my old congressional district, at Ohio’s Mount Gilead High School. Adam Van Houten, a sixteen-year-old sophomore, was in position to win a Division II state golf championship when he realized that his playing partner had reported an incorrect score for Van Houten on the 10th hole on the second day of play. Van Houten usually kept his unofficial score on a slip of paper, but there were high winds on this second day of play and the paper was carried off by a breeze at some midpoint in the round. Without his own scorecard as corroboration, Van Houten signed his partner’s scorecard, and it wasn’t until later, as he was replaying the round in his mind, that he realized he had shot a 6 on the 10th hole instead of the 5 his partner had noted, giving him a 74 for the round instead of the 75 he deserved. Even so, the 75 would have combined with his 70 from the opening round to place him comfortably in the lead, so it appeared the “honest” mistake would have no impact on the championship.

  But Van Houten knew he had to report the correct score, even though by doing so he would be disqualified. “I knew I was going to win,” he said later, “and I knew what would happen when they found out. But I never considered not te
lling them. I could never live with myself.”

  He went to his coach with his dilemma, and together they approached the on-site representatives of the Ohio High School Athletic Association. As expected, Van Houten was disqualified, although the tournament officials offered high praise for his integrity. “As a teacher and a coach for twenty years, I’ve never seen a situation remotely close to anyone showing this much character,” Van Houten’s coach later told reporters. “He knew he was going to lose the state championship. It makes me so proud he’s on my golf team. I’ll never look at the kid the same way again.”

  The kicker here is that Van Houten would have won the tournament by six strokes—even without the extra stroke saved on his partner’s scorecard. He could have kept quiet and still known in good conscience that he didn’t gain any advantage by the error. And no one would have known. But that wasn’t how this kid was cut.

  It all comes back to character, don’t you think? It’s key. In my first book, Courage Is Contagious, I celebrated the under-the-radar accomplishments of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to change the face of America, and here I might suggest that character is contagious as well. After all, it’s not just our negatives that can spread like a virus, but we can catch each other’s virtues as well. Let’s hope character is contagious, because we would all do well to catch a good dose of it and pass it on—like Tom Lehman to Steve Jones to Paul Stankowski. Sadly, it strikes us as extraordinary when we come across a person of character these days, but it should be the norm, and I don’t want to lower the bar so much that we start celebrating what is merely expected of us.

  The problem with character is that we’ve allowed our popular culture to redefine it for us. What’s held out as an ideal for one generation is rejected by the next, and those of us looking to toe some sort of line are left scratching our heads and wondering how those lines keep getting redrawn. But I choose to believe that character—true character—is written on our souls. It’s timeless. It’s in our bones. How else to explain how we know what we know? The Bible tells us not to kill, and not to covet our neighbor’s wife, and not to take the Lord’s name in vain, but there’s a whole lot more that we know without being told. The difference between right and wrong, justice and injustice, honor and dishonor, virtue and vice. We don’t need to be told these things, or to read it in the Good Book, to know them for ourselves, instinctively, and yet more and more I see otherwise well-intentioned folks looking the other way from what they know to be right and good and true.

  A STUDY IN CHARACTER

  On a societal level, it sometimes seems we don’t have the first idea how to stem the flow of bad behavior. Government regulators climb all over each other to install tougher rules and regulations to curb the greed and malevolence of some of our corporate leaders, but rules can never be a substitute for character. That’s a line I stole from former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who cautioned that excessive regulation risks ancillary damage by discouraging risk taking. He’s right, it will. We can’t legislate character any more than we can require a creative spirit of entrepreneurship among our business leaders. You’ve either got it, or you don’t, and no law or regulation is going to help you on this one. We can’t fix corporate America or cure the ills in any other aspect of our society simply by drafting a new set of rules to tell us what we should already know for ourselves. We know the difference between ethical behavior and unethical behavior, even as there are some among us who seem intent on blurring the lines. We know we shouldn’t be skimming monies from our employees’ pension accounts, or subverting shareholder interests for short-term personal gain. We know not to inject ourselves with banned substances to gain a competitive advantage on the playing field. We know that our fiduciary responsibilities are inviolate and that to shrink from them is unconscionable. We know that our commitment to marriage and family should supersede any selfish impulses in pursuit of some other happiness. And yet we stray from what we know, from time to time—not all the time, mind you, but often enough to suggest an alarming trend.

  Most alarming of all, perhaps, is what has happened in our political arena. For me, after nine terms in Congress and a stalled bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, this hits especially close to home. What troubles me here is the way we’ve developed an us-versus-them mentality in government. There no longer appears to be any room for healthy debate or considered differences of opinion. I don’t know whether to pin this one on talk radio, or twenty-four-hour cable news channels, or bloggers passing themselves off as political pundits, or on the politicians themselves. Or maybe it’s because of our disturbingly short national attention span. Whatever it is, we have poisoned our political system to where it’s all about what uniform you’re wearing. Perhaps this trend can be traced to a lack of leadership that might encourage dialogue across party lines. What we lack are statesmen who put country first and party second, leaders who stand on principle, who can reach agreement when possible and fight with dignity and compassion when necessary. And yet we’ve been reduced to thinking that everything the opposing party does is suspect and that everything our own party does is honorable, and we have lost the ability to build consensus or to seek middle ground.

  In Washington today, it’s all about finding and maintaining some type of edge and forging alliances that cut only along party lines—and the same holds true in politics at the state level. It’s all black-and-white, with no shades of gray. And, lately, it’s become personal. Good people allow themselves to be chased from office because they don’t want the opposition to come gunning for them, and at the other end there’s little incentive for men and women of character to seek public office when doing so puts them in such a vitriolic line of fire.

  I served in Congress for eighteen years, and I could rail against our present political system for eighteen more—and yet it’s only with perspective that I have come to understand the deep-seated resentment and frustration that people feel toward their elected officials, and to recognize that a good deal of it is justified. Frankly, I share some of that frustration. I shudder when Democrats and Republicans attempt to deal with the coming generational crises that threaten American stability by adhering to their own party platforms. I cringe when my good friend checks into the hospital on an outpatient basis for a partial knee replacement and is presented with a $31,000 bill, because our health care costs have run so far away from any kind of sensible economic scale that no partisan approach could ever confront the problem. And I bristle when well-read, educated people reach out to me after one of my speeches and wonder how America will survive the next four years if their presidential candidate doesn’t get elected, because our campaigns have lately been painted with such broad, do-or-die strokes that even well-read, educated folks are moved to think the future of their unborn grandchildren hangs in the balance.

  I can remember being in the Congress in 1994, sitting on the House floor as Pat Schroeder walked by. Pat was a liberal Democrat from Colorado whom I happened to like. I haven’t seen much of her lately, but I like her, because I have regard for people who don’t think the way I think. Just so you think, that’s all I ask. Take a stand. I don’t care what you stand for, but stand for something. Believe in it, and work toward it, and talk me into it if you can. That’s how it was with Pat Schroeder and me, as it was with me and many of my Democratic colleagues throughout my political career. Remember, the Democrats were in the majority at that time, and right or wrong it was seen as somewhat unusual for politicians of different stripes to have a friendly conversation on the House floor, but that’s precisely what we did. Pat had just had a hearing on one of my bills and passed it out of her committee, so we had a few things to kick around, and after we’d parted a few freshman Republicans came up to me and wondered what that was all about.

  “How could you talk to that woman?” one of them asked.

  It was as if I’d been found guilty of treason—or, at least, caught with my hand in some partisan cookie jar. I co
uldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What’s wrong with you?” I shot back. “Pat Schroeder is not the enemy. This isn’t war. She’s one of your colleagues.”

  “But she’s a liberal Democrat,” came the sheepish reply.

  These newly minted Republican congressmen couldn’t even grasp what I was trying to say to them, that’s how foreign it was to their way of thinking, and I didn’t fault them as much as I did the system they were about to enter. They were perhaps too green to know any better—but how to explain the veteran congressmen who felt the same way? And furthermore, how to explain that it’s gotten worse, in the dozen or so years since this exchange took place?

  I’ll tell you another strange-bedfellows-type story, as long as we’re on it. Long before he became governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger called me up toward the end of Bill Clinton’s second term as president, and asked me to meet with a friend of his named Bono. He said he doubted I would have heard of this guy, even though the CD carousel in my car was filled with his music. I laughed at Arnold, but agreed to meet with Bono, even though I was always wary of so-called celebrity experts on public policy issues. Bono wanted my help on debt relief for Africa, which was a big issue for him at the time and had always been a big issue for me. So we met, and I agreed to help him, and I took Bono to Capitol Hill, where one of his greatest champions became Jesse Helms. What a coalition we put together: Chris Dodd, Pat Leahy, Jesse Helms, Rick Santorum, and myself, and many others, basically covering the waterfront on the political spectrum.

  In the course of working on this issue, I helped put together a meeting with religious leaders over at the White House. I invited Pat Robertson to attend. Pat told me he had not visited the White House since Clinton became president, and I soon learned that Clinton’s staff wanted to keep it that way. At one point, they actually asked me to disinvite Robertson, who had been highly critical of Clinton, to which I said, “Well, then I won’t show up.” The staffer went in and cautiously advised the President that Pat Robertson was scheduled to attend the meeting, and the President looked at him hopefully and said, “Do you think he might come?”