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Comment by muriithi | Hacker News Reader

What I can gather from his Wikipedia page is that Kennedy, like Clinton was a good politician but a consummate womaniser.

I have always wondered why citizens expect politicians to be 'moral' and whether 'immoral' politicians are necessarily bad leaders?

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America's got a fucked-up sense of morality. Everybody's messed up in one way or another romantically. We have a distorted sense of expectation, mixed with a bunch of weird ideas about what's appropriate and what isn't.

There've been many perfect gentlemen politicians that were terrible. I hope one day we start judging politicians the way we would businessmen, wherein personal life matters less than performance.

Just a minor quibble, not meant to detract your point: it's curious that even as you criticize America's sense of morality, you seem to use "gentlemen" as opposed to "womanizer".

Politicians have a lot of power, and that power can easily be misused. All other things being equal, I'd much prefer to elect an honest politician with strong moral fibre to a dishonest one with few scruples.

If a guy can't resist the temptation to break a promise he made to his wife for the sake of a few cheap kicks, it's less likely that he can resist the temptation to, say, hand out political favours to his favourite campaign donors.

> I have always wondered why citizens expect politicians to be 'moral' and whether 'immoral' politicians are necessarily bad leader

I think its the need to relate it to something easier to understand. Policy positions can be complex and subtle, but for a lot of people, "don't cheat on your wife/husband" is an absolute and a convenient/simple (albeit horribly inaccurate) metric.

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