From the very beginning of this column, I expect to run into a lot of opposition that I do not necessarily think is deserved. My audience is overwhelmingly comprised of college students who have a tendency, perhaps warranted, but, in my opinion, probably not, to think they are radically different from their forebears.

I suppose it would be best to explain my point further (which is to say, at all) before I continue insulting your judgment. My goal here, in simple and straightforward English, is to say that you all are a bunch of hypocrites for demanding that politicians tell the truth while simultaneously shunning those that do.

Perhaps I should back up yet again. At this point in time, a political candidate who came up and said that in college he had an affinity for various activities commonly embraced by college students would be accepted by most of you, the same.

Earlier today, I was thinking about the prospect of some day running for office, an aspiration that I do not doubt many Wolfpackers share. But for me, a concern for honesty quickly appeared in my mind, and I thought about what I would say if a reporter or other such instrument of public knowledge asked me about certain parts of my past.

Did you drink heavily in college? Did you curse constantly among your friends and in public venues? Have you really laughed in the face of virtually every kind of protester known to man?

For purposes of honesty, I would have to answer those questions with a resounding, “Yes.” I consume a bit more alcohol than I should, to say nothing of my age. I’ve sworn at everybody under the sun outside of my church — and at a few there. And I have straight up taunted liberal protesters who were being carried away by police from the 2004 inauguration, not to mention countless pro-choice, anti-war and anti-capital punishment activists in my day. None of these behaviors are what might be called beneficial to one’s election chances. Even a good many Republicans aren’t comfortable with pointing and laughing at people trying to save a man from lethal injection.

So, then the question about voters inevitably comes up: do they prefer someone who is genuinely and completely honest about his past, or do they prefer someone that depicts himself as a political saint or glosses over the poor choices of his past?

The quick and easy answer is that voters prefer a liar. If anyone can find 10 people qualified to run for national office who lived through the past 30 or 40 years without doing something that alienated the “moral majority,” I would like to see the list so I could investigate the vicious pack of lies behind each one.

The simple truth is that anyone born since 1950 had a decent possibility or even probability of having smoked marijuana in their youth. It is all the more likely that they drank underage and to an inappropriate extent. It is rapidly approaching certainty that they had sex with someone to whom they were not then and are not now married. All of these activities could, if reasonably disclosed, easily sink a candidate running against an opponent who denied such activities even if he had participated in them.

And so I am brought around to my original point. I would suspect that an overwhelming majority of college students would not negatively change their opinion about a candidate who commits any of the political sins I listed above. Many, in fact, would be drawn to such a candidate. But so, too, were many of our parents in their youth, 30 or 40 years ago. Nowadays, the polls seem to indicate their positions have changed.

The threat, then, is this: In our heady college naivete, we think that we are immune to sinking into the same frame of mind as our elders — that we will maintain for all our lives the belief that honesty is better than comforting lies. There is simply no evidence to support as much. And so it is that all of us must be vigilant, even as our lives change and come to involve families, homes and careers, and always at least manage to remember the philosophies of our younger days. If, at 30, we are embarrassed by the wishful thinking of youth, we have in many respects failed. Even when analyzing our current beliefs later on leads us to the conclusion that they are misled, we should remember our motives, and, if nothing else, we should ask ourselves, “Do I prefer a tainted truthteller to an unblemished liar?”