Politics & Power Quote by Roger Mudd

Character is the one topic in politics that reporters can’t outsource to policy papers, and Roger Mudd is staking out that turf with the certainty of someone who spent a career watching candidates perform. His line is an argument for journalism’s most contested instinct: to treat a person’s temperament, honesty, and judgment not as gossip, but as usable civic data.

The phrasing does quiet work. “No matter what name we give it” anticipates the newsroom’s euphemisms and the public’s eye-rolls: “electability,” “authenticity,” “likability,” “trust.” Mudd concedes the slipperiness, then refuses to let that slipperiness become an excuse. The second clause, “or how we judge it,” admits how subjective character assessments are - and still insists they’re unavoidable. That’s the subtext: you can critique the metrics, but you can’t pretend voters aren’t making the call anyway.

Context matters. Mudd came up in an era when broadcast news tried to police a boundary between “hard” facts and “soft” impressions, even as televised campaigns made image and demeanor inseparable from governance. After Watergate, after the rise of made-for-TV candidates, “character” becomes shorthand for the fear that institutions alone can’t contain a bad actor.

The intent isn’t to elevate morality plays; it’s to justify scrutiny. Policies can be triangulated, rewritten, abandoned. Character - the habits under pressure - is what’s left when the script breaks. Mudd is defending political reporting as a proxy audit of power.