Do People Want an Honest President?

Ann Althouse has recently thrown aside her vow of cruel neutrality and stated, with 89% probability, that she is voting for Obama. Althouse has always been accomplished at stirring things up (it is one of the reasons I check her blog regularly) and this case is no exception.

But she wrote something recently I flat out disagree with and had to make a note of it. She quote the following from a Wall Street Journal article about Obama and ACORN.

The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it's disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you're shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he's on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties.

And she had this to say in response:

So Obama uses things/people to the extent that they are useful. Don't you want a pragmatist President?

Pragmatic? Try at best disingenuous and at worst manipulative and deceitful. Yes Obama uses people to the extent they are useful. One such group of people might be middle-class voters. Use them for their votes and then, once elected, disregard their well-being and enact policies that he favors for ideological reasons.

Ann tempers her response with:

I mean... if he's duly elected. Election fraud should be ferreted out. Is there time to do that? If Obama wins, but not by a wide margin, and the accusations of fraud are big enough to put the outcome in question, it will tear us apart.

While her acknowledgment that election fraud is bad is a sign of sanity, it makes me think of a more general question.

Do you want an honest President? Or do you want an effective politician whose words have no more permanency than the political climate of the moment?

I know my answer. In three weeks, it appears that a majority of Americans are going to disagree with me.