Democrats Have to Choose Between Character and Power

The Maine Senate race is far from the first time that an American political party has had to choose between character and power.In 2017, Alabama Republicans nominated a state supreme court judge named Roy Moore for U.S. Senate. A month before election day, The Washington Post published a report that when Moore was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney, he initiated sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl. Three other women alleged that Moore had also pursued them while they, too, were underage. Asked on Sean Hannity’s radio show whether he had ever dated underage girls, Moore replied, “Not generally, no.” Then a fifth woman stepped forward to accuse Moore of sexually assaulting her in her teens. Four days after the Post story broke, local Alabama media reported that it was common knowledge in the area that Moore stalked teenage girls—so flagrantly that a local mall banned him from setting foot on their property. By Moore’s own account, he had become interested in the woman he subsequently married when she was in her mid-teens and he was in his early 30s.The allegations created a quandary for Republicans. They had emerged from the 2016 elections with a slim majority in the U.S. Senate, just 52 seats. If they lost in Alabama, they would be reduced to 51—meaning that Republican Senate leadership would be utterly dependent on the shifting moods of the Senate mavericks John McCain, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins.On the other hand, Moore’s reported sexual misconduct not only embarrassed his party colleagues but also threatened to discredit them. The Jeffrey Epstein story was not yet the firestorm it would later become. But newly elected President Trump had already been scorched by allegations of unseemly interest in underage girls. In October 2016, five women told BuzzFeed News that Trump walked unannounced into their changing room during the Miss Teen USA pageant. Trump had told a variant of that story to Howard Stern in 2005. (In Trump’s version, he entered an adu