Error: Unable to create directory /home/demockra/public_html/wp-content/uploads/2010/09. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Sex Scandals and Politics: A New Norm?
by Kevin Van Dyke, Editor
April 27, 2009
In light of David Vitter’s political survival and the apparent political comeback of Eliot Spitzer written on the wall, I began to think back to a simpler time, a time when sex was taboo and charlatans claimed a 100,000 Dow was possible.
When thinking about such a time, I also remembered chuckling a few years back when I saw a particularly astute bumper sticker that read:
When Clinton Lied, Nobody Died
In the midst of the many abuses of power by the Bush administration, not seen since Watergate (and probably Teapot Dome before that), it seemed funny in retrospect how obsessed many had been in the late 1990s, just a few years before, about President Clinton’s zipper problem with the infamous Ms. Lewinsky.
Many of the popular defenses of Bill Clinton’s behaviors during the aftermath of the Lewinsky affair seemed to be based on two lines of thought:
1. This sort of behavior was nothing new among American Presidents.
Popular icons such as FDR and JFK were anything but faithful during their days in the White House. While no evidence exists about oral favors in the Oval Office per se, speculation about JFK makes Clinton’s behavior look like an ABC Family Special. Granted the press also conveniently never mentioned that FDR was in a wheel chair or that Kennedy was in ill health. In addition, for anyone who has watched the television series Mad Men knows, it was a different time. It was before the sexual revolution, it was before Watergate and the loss of trust between the public and its politicians, and most importantly, it was before the rise of the popular press and cable news (not to mention the internet). There wasn’t the competition we see today, and those in power were good friends with those in the media. For good or bad, it was a good old boys club with respected boundaries.
2 . This sort of thing was not a big deal elsewhere in the world.
This line of thought was especially interesting to me as at the time when I was studying European politics. It seemed that all of the institutional factors that had arisen in the US, such as the popular press, the internet, and the devolution of the good old boys club, had all occurred in Europe as well. However, unlike the US, despite the fact that the public now knew about the personal faults of their leaders, it seemed that the public didn’t give a damn. The easy explanation for this at the time was that Europe didn’t have the same evangelical and fundamentalist tradition as the US and was far more secular. As such, they didn’t see their politicians as moral role models and therefore could properly separate their actions as individuals from their policies which actually affected their pocketbooks.
As I read a Newsweek snippet that claimed that Bill Clinton’s survival was the exception to the rule of death by sex scandal, I began to wonder whether or not Bill Clinton’s scandal was not an exception, but rather an inflection point in the ethos of the politics of sex scandals. The more I thought about this hypothesis, the more it seemed to make sense. If this were true, what then could be the reasons for this new dynamic?
The Moral Crusaders Went Too Far
This argument goes on the assumption that politics works like a pendulum in the sense that one side often goes too far, which then causes a big backlash that moves the pendulum swinging back in the other direction. From a cultural perspective, this argument would start somewhere back in the middle of the 20th century. Out of the economic and war torn family unit of the Great Depression and World War II emerged a period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s that is sometimes referred to as the neo-Victorian era. This period of unprecedented economic prosperity enabled a return the one worker per family norm that hadn’t been seen in several generations. However, “hi honey, I’m home” had run its course by the mid-1960s, and the pendulum swung far back to the cultural left with the rise of the sexual revolution, the flower children, and a general destruction, for good or bad, of the morals and cultural norms of the previous period. This period in turn ran its course with the excesses of the 1970s, and by the early 1980s the new “moral majority” had risen to power and catapulted conservative California governor Ronald Reagan (who was once deemed far too conservative to ever be elected president) to power. This backlash/pendulum argument would then speculate that this moral majority movement had gone too far, starting with the Lewinsky affair and ending with the assault on homosexuals and immigrants in the years to follow.
Generational Changes
Tied to this previous explanation is the fact that just as the moral majority was stepping too far, new generations began to come of age who cared little for the wedge politics that defined their parents and grandparents generations. Many in these new generations X and Y had grown up in broken families, had a parent who had strayed, and had had friends of different races and sexual orientations. To many in these new generations, things weren’t as black and white or as us versus them. Simply put, most young people don’t care about consensual adult sex.
Context is Everything
Finally, as hinted at before, in the light of Bush’s abuse of powers and the overall failure of a presidency, all of 1990s’ political scandals seemed so feeble in comparison. Dear God, how naïve were we back in those roaring 90s? This argument is not only the easiest to explain, but is also needed by default to even begin to explain and/or justify the previous arguments. This would also seem to imply that any movement of the past decade in cultural norms is anything but nonreversible. If history is any guide, there is likely to be at least one step backward before we can necessarily begin to move forward. Conservative cultural forces in the United States are too strong and too entrenched to simply fade away.
What’s Next?
Granted, it will be years before we will know for sure whether the recent cases of David Vitter or Eliot Spitzer are evidence of a new dynamic or confirmation that our cultural pendulum has not swung much after all. Perhaps in the context of American evangelical traditions, American politicians with loose zippers can now finally be born again.
I don’t know if it’s sex scandals as such that Americans find fascinating, or if it’s hypocrisy coupled with sex scandals. Sure, people have affairs. But when the people having the affairs are the ones at the forefront of condemning others who have affairs, you’ve got a recipe for gossip!
Under the umbrella of “sex scandals,” you forgot Larry Craig and Mark Foley. And why not factor in Ted Haggard, for good measure? And there’s Jim McGreevey. Let’s look at all of these:
Jim McGreevey revealed that he was gay and then resigned from office. Why did he resign? Not because he had been having an affair with Golan Cipel, his homeland security advisor. No; Cipel was unqualified for the job of homeland security advisor and couldn’t get a security clearance because he was not a U.S. citizen. Verdict: nepotism!
Eliot Spitzer had been employing an expensive escort service. Why was that a problem? Because, as New York Attorney General, he spent years busting prostitution rings. Verdict: hypocrisy!
Larry Craig was vehemently opposed to homosexuality and gay rights. So was Mark Foley. So was Ted Haggard. Craig was caught soliciting sex in an airport men’s room; Foley was caught sending lewd emails to male congressional pages; Haggard was caught after the male prostitute he had been seeing (and buying drugs from) went to the press with the story. Verdict: hypocrisy!
David Vitter said, in 1999, that Clinton should resign for his sex scandal. But Vitter did no such thing in 2007. Verdict: hypocrisy!
The issue of Bill Clinton’s sex scandal was pretty divisive. Republicans desperately wanted to get him for something — anything. They kept throwing things at the wall to see if something would stick. Whitewater? Nope. Travelgate? Nope. Wealthy donors staying in the Lincoln bedroom? Not even that. Then, while looking into the Paula Jones thing, Republicans struck pay dirt with Monica Lewinsky and the possibility that he may have perjured himself. But most Americans really couldn’t care less. There was no hypocrisy; Clinton never claimed to be a morally upstanding citizen; indeed, like FDR or JFK, his trysts were known about but never really talked about.
Now, why did Bob Livingston and Henry Hyde resign shortly around the time of the Clinton impeachment? They were a liability to the Republican party, since it was revealed that they had also had extramarital affairs. I submit that a “sex scandal” is only a “scandal” if it involves some obvious hypocrisy. An ABC News poll taken in August, 1998 asked whether or not respondents thought Congress should impeach Clinton. 69 percent thought that Congress should not impeach him.
With regard to Jim McGreevey, we had our own case of nepotism here in The City by the Bay. Two years ago, it was revealed that Mayor Gavin Newsom had an affair with his best friend (and campaign manager)’s wife. Okay, that’s bad, but what really caused scandal was the fact that this woman, who worked for the city, mysteriously got more paid vacation days than everyone else.
Oh, and what about Paul Wolfowitz? Not a sex scandal, but another hypocrisy scandal with a sexual element, as Wolfowitz’s long-time partner, Shaha Riza, soon found herself in possession of a new job at the State Department, but with a very cherry bonus from World Bank on the way out. So cherry, in fact, that a lot of people wondered whether or not Wolfowitz had used his position as World Bank president to give Riza a lot of money. Wolfowitz resigned in the wake of the scandal, protesting the entire time that he had done nothing wrong.
So, I submit that the fact that a politician had an affair is not the issue; rather, hypocrisy is the issue. I think, actually, sex scandals by themselves aren’t interesting to the public unless that scandal causes the politician to have his foot in his mouth. Americans love to see people get their just desserts.
Mark, you make some great points. And yes, I totally agree that hypocrisy is definitely a large part of this. However, I think we must also separate consensual adult heterosexual sex from other kinds of sex. In general, heterosexual sex is much more accepted than homosexual sex (for reasons I disagree with) and sex with a minor (for reasons I agree with). Also, sex with a prostitute is usually seen as a slightly different case. Some people think this type of sex is consensual, where others do not. In general, it probably depends on the economic situation of the prostitute, and whether they really have a choice to be a prostitute. In other words, I don’t think there is a one size fits all answer that sex with hypocrisy is a death blow and sex without hypocrisy would be OK. In this scenario, Tom Foley’s actions would be survivable if he wasn’t such a strong advocate for child predator laws. Granted, the hypocrisy was the icing on the cake, and probably helped the Dems pick up an extra 10 seats in 2006, no doubt!
I think that, unfortunately, a gay sex scandal or, fortunately, sex with a minor are still career death blows outside of a few areas of the country. Although, I imagine this will change with gay affairs in the years to come. (McGreevey would still have been dead in my opinion, but that’s up for debate since we weren’t presented with the alternative scenario.) However, consensual adult sex scandals (excluding prostitution) appear to be easily survivable when there is no hypocrisy angle (this wasn’t true years ago). Yes, FDR and JFK’s sex antics were no big deal to the good old boys club, but that in itself is not evidence that the American people would have necessarily been dandy with it if they would have known. (Although, I think FDR’s immobility would have been far worse, which is another topic I suppose.) This was an era when a divorcee dare not even think of running for president. It is now quite common for both parties to nominate divorcees (Reagan, Dole, Kerry, and McCain come to mind).
I must say that I still think that the hypocrisy angle isn’t necessarily a killer anymore. Yes, it may lead to a wilderness period, but people seem to be much more willing to look beyond such trivialities (although wrong, hypocrisy may not have the same effect when it is unrelated to the important issue of the day; in other words, financial hypocrisy would be much more deadly in 2009 than sexual hypocrisy; I don’t think all hypocrisies are necessarily the same at every context). The survival of Vitter, Spitzer’s possible comeback, and Newt Gingrich being a frontrunner for the GOP nod in 2012 are all evidence to the point that Americans are willing to forgive hypocrisy. Perhaps it’s because they’re desperate? For example, the GOP is desperate for any leader (hence Gingrich), the guy who replaced Spitzer has been horrible (who cares if our governor was a hypocrite in retrospect now that the current guy is raising our taxes and cutting our vital state programs!), or from Louisiana (enough said).
I guess I see the hypocrisy angle as an interaction effect, or something that magnifies a sex scandal. One could posit that the original effect of the scandal is minimizing, but the interaction with hypocrisy is still as strong as ever. However, it could also be reasonable to posit that the interaction effect is also mitigating in such tough times when we have much more important things to worry about. Also, it is possible that Americans are so distrustful of their politicians, that hypocrisy is no longer a surprise to many. Of course, this is not to say hypocrisy is not a big deal–far from it! I agree completely that hypocrisy is much more salient than any type of sexual deviance outside of obviously grotesque acts. In fact, I agree that hypocrisy is the worst thing any politician could ever be accused of (poor John Kerry).
So yes, that was a long winded way of saying that I agree that hypocrisy is often the icing on the cake and a very large part of this. However, I don’t think that sexual hypocrisy is necessarily the death blow it once was either (Gingrich, Vitter, etc. as examples), where other types of hypocrisy might still be. This makes me think that sex isn’t as big a deal in the US as it was even a decade or two ago. However, that’s just an educated guess. Perhaps we have Bill Clinton to thank for going over the top in a semi non-hypocritical way eh’. Bill may have done the same for drug use as well (no one cared once Bush or Obama came along).
Of course all of this could also just be a lot of random noise.