Should a candidate's funding affect my vote?

“Should you vote for a candidate who has big money backing her and might be able to get things done even though you don’t agree with everything on her platform?” asks a reader from Boston we’re calling Polly.

Polly emailed me shortly after Boston’s mayoral primary election in which voters were charged with narrowing the field of five candidates to two. After the votes were counted, Michelle Wu and Anissa Essaibi George were the top vote-getters who will face off in November to become Boston’s first elected woman mayor. Kim Janey was Boston’s first woman mayor, but she wasn’t elected to the position. She assumed the seat vacated by Marty Walsh when he was picked as Labor Secretary by President Joe Biden.

It’s neither my place nor my job to tell someone how to vote. I do have strong feelings, however, that everyone who is eligible to vote should vote. Too often elections are decided by embarrassingly low turnouts. In the mayoral primary election in Boston, one in which an incumbent wasn’t running, only 24.58% of eligible voters, 107,592 people, showed up. The city had set up early voting polling stations and permitted mail-in voting to enable those who couldn’t get to the polls on a Tuesday to vote at their convenience. Still, few showed up to help decide who would run their city and affect their day-to-day lives for the next several years. Voters show up a bit better during presidential elections. In 2020, almost two-thirds of eligible voters voted. Still, one-third of eligible voters decided not to.

But Polly asks an interesting question. Increasingly if the thinking is that a politician needs substantial financial backing to get anything done, does it make sense to go with the better funded candidate over the one you truly would like to see hold office? Some, of course, depends on what things Polly doesn’t agree with on the better-funded candidate’s platform. If Polly is adamantly opposed to some views or policy proposals, whether that candidate has more money backing her shouldn’t sway her vote.

Some of Polly’s question, however, points to a distinction between running for an office and governing once in office. Granted, the shift from campaigning to governing might often seem not to happen when some politicians increasingly are in full campaign mode even while holding office. But the money behind a candidate’s campaign does not necessarily translate into that candidate being more likely to get things done once she is elected.

A lack of funding might lessen a candidate’s ability to get word out about her campaign or to build a strong campaign staff. Whether one candidate is better funded than another doesn’t change how strongly that candidate’s views align with Polly or other voters.

The right thing is for Polly to decide which candidate she believes can do the best job in office, fight for the same issues Polly holds dear, and seems best to represent the values Polly finds important. Then, even more importantly, Polly should show up to vote in November, and so should the rest of the eligible voters in her city.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Can I ask if my medical professional has been vaccinated?

Is it OK to ask if a medical service provider’s staff has been vaccinated before making an appointment for an office visit?

Five months ago, a reader we’re calling Keith visited his dentist for the first time in a year. He had skipped his regular six-month teeth cleaning because of the pandemic, but after he received his second dose of the COVID vaccine, he felt more comfortable going to his dentist’s office. The receptionist made clear that face masks had to be worn at all times except when the patient was in the dentist’s chair. Keith was all set to go.

Keith had been working remotely and, aside from his immediate family and customers and clerks who happened to be at the grocery store when he was, he hadn’t been in close physical contact with other people. He was a bit nervous about going to the dentist. Nevertheless, he persisted.

When he arrived, he was somewhat reassured that the dentist’s staff had taken precautions to try to make the office as safe as possible for everyone. Partitions had been installed in front of the receptionist. Hand sanitizer was available on the front desk. Chairs in the waiting area were widely set apart. Everyone was wearing a mask.

The dentist greeted Keith and they caught up a bit on both his dental health and their respective families. The dental hygienist was setting up to begin the exam and teeth cleaning.

Keith knew the hygienist from previous visits. As is their custom, they chatted while she worked. She did most of the chatting because Keith’s mouth was occupied with a dental pick or a motorized toothbrush.

The topic of vaccinations came up. Keith had become eligible to receive his fairly late in his state’s rollout based on age. He knew the hygienist was younger than he is so he assumed she’d been eligible well before him, which she confirmed she had.

But, she said, she still hadn’t gone to receive the vaccination.

“Why not?” Keith said he asked.

“I’m too nervous,” she replied.

Keith was surprised and a bit disappointed to learn that his hygienist had not been vaccinated and no one had told him as much when he made his appointment. Granted, he didn’t ask if everyone had been vaccinated. “But it’s a medical office,” he wrote. “Wouldn’t it have been a fair assumption that the staff had gotten vaccinated if they could?”

Keith is coming up on his next six-month teeth cleaning appointment. He wrote to ask if there is anything wrong with him calling to ask the dentist if the hygienist who will be working on his teeth has been vaccinated.

Unless we work someplace where everyone is required to show proof of vaccination, it is not safe to assume we know who has and who hasn’t been vaccinated. If Keith would feel safe knowing that his hygienist has been vaccinated, the right thing is indeed for him to call and ask. If he is told that she has not been vaccinated, he can ask if another hygienist who has been vaccinated can work on his teeth instead. If they refuse to give him the information, Keith might be wise to start shopping around for a new dentist.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Is realtor responsible for error in her marketing materials?

A reader with a sharp eye wants to know whether a local realtor who sends postcards to prospective customers is responsible for typographical errors on the cards even if the passage in question was lifted from another source.

The reader we’re calling Annie receives cards from local realtors all the time either featuring houses for sale or houses just sold along with a solicitation for the reader’s business should she be buying or selling a home sometime soon. The most recent card, however, featured something that was a bit of a departure, a review of a local restaurant presumably written by one of the restaurant’s satisfied customers.

“Beautiful photos of houses and very detailed descriptions of houses and then a restaurant review that referred to the place as great for ‘causal’ dining when they clearly meant ‘casual,’ or at least I think they did,” Annie wrote. She joked that if it wasn’t a typo she was a bit concerned about what the dining at this place “caused.”

The text on the rest of the card contained no typos. Only the restaurant review written by someone else.

“If the error was in something the realtor wrote, I would think twice about doing business with someone who didn’t take the time to proofread her own work,” wrote Annie.

Given the volume of marketing materials many of us receive, I suppose ruling out consideration of those featuring typos is a way of winnowing the herd. In pre-internet days my son ruled out at least one prospective college when the brochure it sent him contained several typos. It didn’t hurt that he had never heard of the school so it remains unclear to me what he would have done had the brochure been from one of his top choices, but you get the point.

In the case of the realtor’s card, however, she did not write the passage that contains the typos so Annie wants to know if it’s wrong to hold her responsible for the mistake. “Her name is on the card,” Annie wrote. “Shouldn’t she have taken the time to make sure everything on the card was correct even if she didn’t write it?”

The realtor’s motivation for including the restaurant review might have been to send a message to prospective customers that local eateries were attempting to get back to some sense of normal after a long period of limited business during the pandemic. She might be applauded for wanting to do something to drive business to some of those establishments trying to get back on their feet.

Annie is correct, however. The realtor is responsible for the accuracy of everything on her marketing materials. The right thing would have been for her to ask the writer of the review if it was OK to correct the “causal” spelling when she sought permission to use the quote.

Is the mistake enough to refuse to do business with the realtor? That’s up to Annie. Were it me, I’d look at her track record of selling and buying houses, give her some points for her kindness, and then decide whether sometimes it’s OK to recognize people’s fallibility and overlook a rare error.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Is it ever too late to return a borrowed item?

Many of us have found ourselves in need of something — a tool, a book, a baking dish — that we likely only need for a short time and for which we don’t want to lay out the cash. I’ve borrowed a portable chop saw when I grew tired of sawing planks of wood by hand to repair an aging deck. A friend or two has borrowed my car when theirs was in the shop and their insurance didn’t cover a rental. My luck has been pretty good in terms of stuff being returned.

Not everyone is so fortunate. Two questions arise regularly from readers. If a borrower has not returned an item for quite some time, is it OK to ask for it back? And is it ever too late to return an item if a great deal of time has passed?

It would be unlikely for someone to keep a car or truck for a year rather than a week. But with items like garden tools or books, the urgency of return might not feel as great.

Nevertheless, the right thing is to always return the stuff we borrow.

If a lender would like his or her item returned, there’s nothing rude about asking if the borrower can return it. Granted, you shouldn’t have to ask. If a friend or colleague is kind enough to lend you something, it should fall upon the borrower to return it in a timely matter. But if it’s not returned, go ahead and ask.

Sometimes, borrowers simply forget they have borrowed something. And occasionally, the lender has forgotten the loan has been made so no request for return has been issued.

While I mentioned I have been fortunate over the years to have items I’ve lent out returned, the one area where this has not always been the case has been in the loan of books. Most books I lend out are returned in a timely fashion. Some are not. I probably should, but I don’t keep a list of the books I’ve loaned out and I often forget what I’ve loaned to whom, leaving me to consider some books lost for good.

But a while back, I received an email from a student who had taken a class with me at the college where I used to teach. She had tracked me down at my new school and asked if she could pay me a visit. Such requests aren’t unusual. Sometimes a student wants a recommendation and sometimes he or she just wants to catch up.

After she arrived at my office, the student pulled out a long book of dance criticism I apparently had loaned her six or seven years earlier. Embarrassed, she told me that she had meant to return it for years, but with moving around so much for graduate school and jobs, she had never gotten around to it.

She did the right thing even though so much time had passed and I appreciated the return even though I had forgotten about the book which after telling her to keep it she now owns without any obligation to return. The student reminded me that it’s never too late to do what’s right.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.