Let's say for a minute that you're a politico, a policy maker/worker bee in a political campaign or for an elected office holder. Let's go a little further, and say you hitched yourself to a rising star - maybe the Latino mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa. (Of course, doing this means you got over the fact that he invented his last name to appeal to voters - but hey, Jon Stewart hardly did any different).
Your man is elected mayor of the second largest city in the United States. Not bad. He's popular and is a nice, likable guy that seems to be doing a good job. People talk of the governorship one day. And then - on a different day - to quote the LA Times, "The mayor was carrying takeout food and a bottle of wine" at a Sherman Oaks condo complex where his, er, mistress lives. Cue: divorce, mayhem, curtain.
People do stuff like that. In fact, one need not travel far to find another big-city mayor having affairs - just go to San Francisco. And there if you were but a campaign worker bee - say, his campaign manager - it might have been your wife doing the cheating! And that's not to mention the charismatic ex-president.
Where I meant to go with the "People do stuff like that" paragraph was not a rush to judgment, however: it was simply to answer the rhetorical title of this post. I no longer work in politics because politicians are people (perhaps even more prone than most to human failings - or having their human failings discovered, at least) and people do stupid, career-ending things, and that's one risk I'd rather avoid.
People will always destroy themselves. We need a politics where we can distinguish, somehow between the stuff that's relatively unimportant (having affairs with TV commentators, visiting brothels, hell, even shooting hunting companions) and stuff that's truly important (pardoning your allies who commit treasonous felonies, lying to get us into wars, hiding info about how decisions are made from the public, and on and on).
In and of itself, Sen. Vitter's visits to a whorehouse isn't that big a deal, but when you contrast it with his moral posturing over Clinton just a few years ago -- while he was visiting whorehouses -- then it's a different story. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/015233.php
Posted by: steve | July 11, 2007 at 01:20 PM