David McElroy

I was an ambitious teen-ager. I later became an ambitious adult.

I wanted power and material success, but more than anything else, I wanted approval. I wanted praise. I needed people to be impressed with what I did and with what I achieved.

By the time I was about 15 or 16 years old, I wanted to be president of the United States. That wasn’t just an idle daydream. I had a written plan for each step of the way. John F. Kennedy had become president at the age of 43. My goal was to beat that — to become president even younger.

In my 20s, I wanted to build a media empire. No matter where I worked in the newspaper business, my mind was looking ahead to the day when I would own a massive media conglomerate — newspapers, television, movies and more.

The truth is that I didn’t want any of these things. Although I enjoyed publishing newspapers, I didn’t want to run a big business. And I didn’t want to do the deals and fundraising that would get me somewhere powerful as a politician.

I just wanted praise. I wanted applause. My ego was begging for approval.

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There was a time — not so long ago — when Americans at least pretended to care deeply about character. We argued about politics, yes, but we also insisted that the people entrusted with power possess some basic moral grounding.

Honesty mattered. Decency mattered. The idea that private conduct revealed public truth was widely understood.

Somewhere along the way, that expectation collapsed.

What replaced it was not a better philosophy or deeper compassion. It was tribalism. We began to judge leaders less by who they were and more by which side they claimed to serve. If they fought for our preferred policies, many of us decided their personal conduct was irrelevant, exaggerated or maliciously invented by opponents. Character became negotiable. Loyalty did not.

The continuing public reckoning surrounding Jeffrey Epstein is not, at its core, a political story. That is precisely why it is so revealing. Epstein moved easily among the wealthy and powerful for years. He was not an obscure figure. He was a convicted sex offender with a reputation that, at minimum, raised profound questions about his moral fitness for decent society.

Yet he was welcomed with open arms — by other men and women of equally low character.

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Let me introduce you to someone important in my life.

Her name is Claire.

She is calm, intelligent, reflective, warm without being loud, serious without being severe. She has an easy smile and the sort of presence that suggests both kindness and backbone. She seems like someone who reads books thoughtfully, listens carefully and notices things most people rush past.

There’s just one complication.

Claire is not real.

She isn’t a woman I met, dated or nearly married. She’s not waiting somewhere for our paths to cross at a dinner party or a bookstore or one of those improbably meaningful moments movies have taught us to expect.

Claire is a hypothesis.

A few days ago, I engaged in an unusual exercise: describing, with surprising precision, the kind of woman who would most likely be deeply compatible with me. Not a fantasy assembled from wishful thinking, but a probabilistic sketch shaped by temperament, values and the realities of long-term partnership.

The result was Claire.

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