Americans Value Honesty And Integrity The Most

Americans find it most important for their future president to be honest. Only a few find intelligence important in a leader.

When it comes to presidential elections, Americans find the candidates' character more important than their political program and opinions. These are the results of a research conducted by Associated Press-Ipsos.

The public opinion poll shows that 55 percent of the citizens think that integrity, honesty, and other character virtues are the most important qualities in a presidential candidate.

One third of the people who were polled find a candidate's stance on certain political issues to be more important and even fewer of them think that a state's presidential candidate should have leadership qualities, experience, or intelligence. 

A poll conducted in 2004 showed similar results. 38 percent of the people who were polled chose integrity as the most important quality for a president. At the time, most of the people thought that George W. Bush was a man of integrity.

However, a poll by AP-AOL News conducted in January 2007 shows that as many as 44 percent of those polled thought that Bush was an honest man and that he had integrity. The decline of trust among voters is considered to be the consequence of the war in Iraq and hurricane Katrina, which hit the south-east part of the United States in 2005.