By Bailey Hosfelt 

Being a first time voter in an election that is interesting to say the least, I have found myself combing through both a career politician and business mogul’s history in pursuit of the good, bad and ugly. From Benghazi to the Access Hollywood bus and everywhere in between, there is much to read up on and form an opinion about.

I am doing my best to be cognizant of past controversies, differentiating their implications to see if they will continue to play a relevant role in today’s public sphere. Where locker room talk is easy to understand, legislation is not. At times, it becomes challenging to fully comprehend chunks of history and executive agreements that occurred before I was old enough to tell the difference between a Democrat and Republican. Unlike my elders who lived through and remember candidates’ past political decisions like it was yesterday, I have to make judgment calls based on the information that is available to me, compiling secondary sources from previous decades into a self-assured position.

Throughout this process, I seem to have reached a crossroads, where, after educating myself on politicians’ most significant behaviors from the past, I can either choose to focus on their current platforms or fixate on the changes they have made in response to past policies. On the whole, I have chosen to do the former, which has resulted in more than one baby boomer quibbling about the misguided nature of millennials like myself. But my grounding principle for doing so is simple: people can change their minds, so why can’t politicians?

I understand that this justification may seem irresponsible at the onset. People you encounter in the average day are not held to the same standard as this nation’s political leaders. If your coworker was strongly against Roe v. Wade in 1973 but thought differently ten years later, he likely would not receive criticism. Politicians, on the other hand, have positions of power in the United States and are held to a higher standard.

Their word is expected to be their bond. However, I suggest that we should not stick to such black and white interpretations of their actions. The buzz word “flip-flop” is thrown around a lot when it comes to politics, but the card is often dealt so quickly that it overlooks the factors that can cause the change.

Take Hillary Clinton as a primary example. After being a public figure and politician for over thirty years, it is only natural for Clinton’s policies to be the product of her personal evolution. In fact, I find it naïve for people to expect an individual who has been involved in the government since graduating from law school to not have her share of scandals. Did she stand beside her husband as First Lady and support his 1994 Crime Bill? Yes. But she has since formally acknowledged and apologized that her support for the bill – specifically in using the word “superpredator” in a decade old speech – went too far.

No politician can escape the cutthroat arena that is the underbelly of United States government unscathed, especially if the individual has been involved in the world for quite some time in different capacities. A politician changing his or her mind can be situational based on pressure from outside influences within the party, reactionary due to current problems facing the country or simply due to something that was previously expected to work.

Conservative political writer Jim Geraghty has spoken out in the past about how United States citizens should allow politicians some leeway to change their minds in order to acknowledge and react to changing conditions. He feels that, as long as a politician is honest about his or her shift in opinion, he or she should be able to change positions to accommodate a changing political environment.

While I do not stand behind politicians who explicitly change their minds to manipulate the American public, I can understand the potential reasons that result in more realistic shifts to a candidate’s platform. If a politician is constantly unable to ground his or her beliefs, proving to no consistency whatsoever, that is a problem. But if a politician has remained consistent with some changes over time, he or she is simply a human.

I believe that it is better for politicians to acknowledge that their former position was perhaps wrong and accommodate accordingly by moving ahead rather than sticking with what was previously promised. We cannot predict what the world will look like in the future and frankly it is counterproductive to lament over past political blunders. Situations change and so do people. Politicians should be no exception.