Congressman Anthony Weiner has resigned his seat in Congress. Following the tradition of most Democrats who get caught in these media frenzied sex scandals he bowed to party pressure, not to his constituents, and gave up his public office.
First, I should say that I admired Anthony Weiner, as a Congressman. He was an articulate and vocal advocate for liberal progressive causes that I also believe in and he didn’t flip-flop; he stood firm for his positions and often held others’ feet to the fire on issues domestic and foreign. What he did is not defendable. The narcissistic and addictive reasons that his personality warped into something lewd I cannot diagnose. His initial lying was in my opinion motivated by a desire to protect his wife and family. And so he joins those many politicians who in our nation’s history have fallen, not because of political indiscretions but, due to personal and mostly sexual peccadilloes.
You may remember Senator Vitter of Louisiana, a family values right wing Republican who frequented prostitutes. He refused to resign, His party never asked him to. In fact they renominated him for the Senate and he was reelected. There was Senator Ensign, Republican of Nevada. He used public and party funds to pay the salaries of a husband and wife one of whom he had an affair with and then helped the husband get a lobbying job. Under fire from the Senate, not from the leaders of his party, he announced he would not seek re-election in 2012 and then, probably because of the Senate Ethics Comm. investigation he resigned so that committee would have no jurisdiction over his actions.
One of the first scandals of this past half decade was Governor Elliot Spitzer of New York. He paid a call girl and when that was discovered under intense pressure from his Democratic party he resigned. Not long after the scandal broke around Republican Governor Sanford of South Carolina. Seems he frequently left the state and his public duties so he could romance a lady from Argentina (of course he left his wife and children in the Governor’s mansion in Columbia, SC.) His state Republican gave him a pass, the legislature did nothing and he completed his term of office
What patterns can we see here? I see hypocrisy run rampant in the family-values right wing Republican Party which wants to impose its moral values on our society but not on its representatives. I see a Democratic party with a double standard of great liberality as to the social mores we should have government recognize and enforce but, holding their officials to strict standards that forget that elected officials are simply people with all the foibles and weaknesses of people. I also see a Republican party that has institutionalized the circling of the wagons and protects any of their own who get in trouble. While Democrats throw any of their folks who get in trouble under the bus in an irrational fear that voters will hold all Democrats accountable for the indiscretions of each single Democrat.
As I wrote in a recent blog entry sex scandals are nothing new to our nation nor even to the highest office in our land - the Presidency. At least nine of our forty-three Presidents have had sex scandals: four with revelations occurring while in office and unsuccessful efforts, by their oppositions to defeat them (I refer to Jefferson, Jackson, Cleveland and Wilson) Four of our Presidents were revealed to have engaged in extra-marital sexual dalliances either before or during their Presidencies, but the revelations occurred after they had left office and became tales that served to titillate the public. I refer to Warren Harding’s White House assignations with his mistress with whom he may have fathered a daughter; FDR’s long time affair with Lucy Mercer which began and ended during WWI in and then resumed after his election (in fact she was with him when he died at Warm Springs in 1945); Eisenhower’s relations with his female military aide during WWII; and JFK’s various involvements before and perhaps when he was President.. These matters became known after these four men had left the White House so they had no effect on their political careers.
(The ninth was President Clinton whose dalliance with his intern is probably the most famous and led to the fruitless Republican effort to remove him from office. Unlike this decade the Democrats rallied around him and refused to thrown him under that proverbial bus)
What would happen today with those Presidents? With a combination of the 24/7 media frenzied attention and the new more judgmental public attitude I’m not sure that Jefferson, Jackson or Cleveland would have been elected. America and the world may have been denied Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership due to an affair that began seventeen years before he ran for President. And Clinton might well have been deserted by the cowards of his party.
So Anthony Weiner is gone. The liberal progressive wing of the Democratic Party will have to look for a new champion. And, the media can get back to what he claims it prefers to do: report on the real issues facing America: jobs, deficits, Medicare, Social Security and war. Well, at least until the next public official is found to be subject to all the weaknesses of an average human being. If we insist on holding our elected officials to a higher standard we run the risk of deifying them and thus treating them like untouchable and omniscient figures come down from Mount Olympus to rule us. That would be a terrible mistake and feed all those who prefer a man on a white horse to a citizen chosen by his peers. As a people and as a body politic we must change our way of thinking and heed that age old injunction “Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged”
16 June 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment