Reputation and Character

Andrew Coyne makes several good points in his Macleans piece on the Liberal's current round of negative advertising.

He suggests that many ads (including the current round is his implicit suggestion) fail because like the boy who cried wolf, repeated over the top allegations after a while cause the public to tune out. The net result is a profession on autopilot that is increasingly making itself irrelevant.

What no one seems to want to consider is this: maybe people in politics don’t know anything, either. Maybe they keep churning out the same stale ads, with the same hackneyed scripts—“Stephen Harper. What’s his real agenda?”—not because they work, but because they can’t think of anything else.

Is it possible that an entire profession could get it wrong? Happens all the time. One of the “revelations” to come out of the financial crisis is how many people on Wall Street were operating on autopilot. They made their millions doing the same thing, in the same way, until they discovered that what they were doing was crazy. The same is true of doctors: studies show incidence patterns for many procedures, such as C-sections, bear no relationship to therapeutic value or need. It’s all just habit, custom and fad.

He concludes about the importance of reputation.

Suppose Air Canada ran ads that said: here’s how many of our planes were late yesterday. And here’s what we’re doing to improve on that performance. Would that hurt their credibility, or help it? And if political parties did the same?

Reading it reminded me of a quote I have heard (a quick google search attributes it H. Jackson Brown Jr.) that reputation is what you do when others are looking while character is what you do when no one is looking. Mr. Coyne laments that our politics is so debased that even reputation is being abandoned in the pursuit of brand and wedge issues. I wonder if we ought to go one step further. Is this abandonment of reputation related to a diminishing of our collective character?