Dead Week is here. Normally that would mean we would trot out another editorial about your need as students to exert some effort. Or it could mean we’d chastise all the professors whose courses violate the guidelines about homework and exams during Dead Week. But that would be cliche. If you don’t know that you need to actually try this week, we’re not the ones to tell you.

So here’s something that might actually matter: Herman Cain is no longer running for president. Saturday, he suspended his campaign amid allegations of inappropriate sexual advances and a 13-year affair. Whether true or not, it was clear that the possibility of truth was becoming an enormous drag on his campaign.

We cannot support any candidate with such a past, even if he has good ideas. We prefer to examine records more holistically instead of forgetting everything before the recent past. How individuals have acted in the past points to how they will do so in the future and, even if that is private, it is always relevant if it spills over into public life.

Given that assessment, we think it unfortunate that other candidates, such as Newt Gingrich, have not fallen under similar scrutiny. While members of the media are right to examine aspects of candidates’ personal lives that spill over into public effects, they should do so fairly.

The moral shortcomings of Gingrich are nothing new. Allegedly he visited his first wife while she was in hospital to discuss the terms of their divorce. Six months after her death, he remarried. While still married to his second wife, he began an affair with his current wife.

We notice among this election cycle’s Republican candidates, there is a strong bent to idealism. That idealism does not, however, seem to encompass personal morals. Whenever they are discussed, it is only because they are newly surfaced charges.

That is the problem we face. Instead of examining candidates’ whole records, we pick and choose what we like from the recent past. Gingrich’s political career, for all his talk about devising supply-side economics, helping defeat communism and leading the Republican Party to a huge electoral victory in 1994, his political career may very well have begun only a few years ago.

There is little discussion of his private past, which constitutes serious baggage to some voters. There is little discussion of his and his party’s polarizing effect on politics in the 1990s, not yet undone. In the same way that studying the last two weeks of the semester will be no help for a final exam, scrutinizing only the last few years of a candidate’s life will not lead to a really informed decision.