Let’s say you’re planning on running for office. Your party thinks you’re the perfect candidate: you’re the right demographic for the riding, you’re photogenic enough, you’re young and full of energy. So you’re announced as the local candidate, you’re on the hustings, and everything’s going well, when all of a sudden . . .

. . . some enterprising reporter finds a picture of you on Facebook, and you’re most emphatically not doing political things. To put it lightly. In fact, in that photo you’re doing things that might cause the more — er — puritan-minded among your party’s elders to draw a quick breath.

Well, what do you do?

Most people would say that decent thing to do would be to resign (and the members of your rival party would say it with an exclamation point), because obviously you’re no longer qualified as a candidate. Which is what Ray Lam did.

Which proves that Mr. Lam really isn’t cut out for politics. But what would another candidate do, in a similar situation, to prove that he or she is cut out for politics?

Brazen it out.

The basic rule of Facebook, for its users (and not its viewers), is simple: don’t put anything up on your site that you’re not actually able to defend. And I suspect that a more politically-minded person would have been able to defend his or her appearance in that photo. The words “young and drunk” are usually accompanied with the word “stupid,” and that’s never been a bar on keeping someone out of politics. Just ask Tom Lukiwski.

The thing is, if you’re able to defend your own less-than-exemplary behaviour, then it proves a few things: it proves you have a healthy enough ego to withstand the insults, negative remarks and other general impoliteness that characterizes contemporary Canadian politics. It also proves that history should not be a bar for anyone willing to participate in public life; we’re electing human beings, not saints.

And the final thing: if you can defend your behaviour, it means you have an understanding of human weakness. And that makes you more qualified, not less, to help your constituents: you can relate to their problems, because in essence you are them.

And that’s important for a healthy government. Parliaments are of The People, not the elites. And The People have a better grasp of Facebook than the Establishment does — including knowing how to handle the embarrassing photos which were only put up in memory of a weird time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 07:17 and is filed under Blogging, Politics, The Provinces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.