WAS HIS VOTE WORTH IT?

I campaigned for Tony Trout. It was the first and only time I campaigned for a local candidate. I sent emails and signed petitions. I wrote him letters of encouragement throughout his rocky runs and runoffs.

Being outside his district, I could not vote for him, but I spoke, wrote, and cajoled about his worthiness and the necessity of his victory. Tony had become, even for the right-minded, the quintessential single-issue candidate. What we knew about him was that his vote would ensure that the birthday of Dr. King would be celebrated in Greenville County.

His opponent, Steve Selby, saw everything wrong, we said, and maybe weren’t far from mistaken. Little is it known, but I spent two hours in the smoke-cloying Denny’s lobbying him on the holiday issue, to no avail. His argument, as you would expect, was built around how decent people knew that Dr. King was a “womanizing communist,” as though more than a few of his own role-models were not unreconstructed sinners.

By the way, our conversation ended with him pronouncing, “Marc, I’ll miss you in heaven.” In a moment of rare genius, I responded, “Frankly, Steve, I’ve seen enough of you here on earth.”
But yes, we said, Tony was OK. Some of us knew that his motives may have been less than kosher, but for the vast majority of us, motives did not matter. We lauded him for his guts and one promise of progressivism. We got our holiday . . . and we got our Tony Trout.

Tony turned out to be the creep, after all. We snuck him into office on a single issue. Save the Dr. King issue, at least Steve Selby wasn’t a cowardly crook. Choke on the words as I may, Steve was a real straight arrow, a law-enforcement official and family man who was whistle-clean. In all, Steve may have represented by as man of ill-begotten attitude, but all be told he was honest.

How close must the ends be to the means to justify them? Reducing it to the absurd, remember the canard, that “At least he (Hitler) could get the trains to run on time.” Tony Trout is not Hitler, God forbid, but did one issue, however noble, justify not even to do a sniff-test to assess his politics, positions, and most of all, his ethical posture? Worse yet, discovering the negative, would it have even mattered? I count myself among the latter, and in retrospect, I am not proud.

This remains the dilemma: Had we to do it over again, would we have chosen the moral rectitude of a Steve Selby over a morally-bankrupt one-trick-pony? More succinctly, did one vote of a sneak and a scoundrel justify his ascent to civic leadership? Yet more succinctly, what would Dr. King have done?

I don’t know. I don’t know. If you think you do, I’ll miss you in heaven.