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I don't know about the rest of you, but I grew up admiring Geraldine Ferraro. I was 14 when she ran for vice president, and I viewed her as a trailblazer.
When I saw her initial comments about Obama last week ("If Obama was a white man ... if he was a woman [of any color], he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is."), I thought, oh, come on, Gerry! You're kidding, right? You actually think—the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder quipped—that it's a stroke of good luck to be able to run for president, in post 9/11 America, "as a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama"?
Even Hillary Clinton seemed anxious to distance herself from this ("I do not agree with that ..."). That was the right move, but I wasn't eager to see Ferraro drawn and quartered. I was inclined to write her statement off as one of those stray, overtired, crackpot comments. I thought: Well, I'm sure she didn't really mean that! Not Gerry Ferraro!
Turns out she did really mean that. She really, really meant it. Today, she went on Fox News to explain just how much she meant it, defending herself against criticism by explaining: "[T]hey're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"
How's that? That's race-baiting, Gerry, and it's pretty appalling stuff.
Another idol crumbles. Bad week for Democratic icons!
[UPDATE, Tuesday night: The New York Times reports that Ferraro, reached at home, had this to add to her earlier remarks: “Every time [the Obama] campaign is upset about something, they call it racist. I will not be discriminated against because I’m white. If they think they’re going to shut up Geraldine Ferraro with that kind of stuff, they don’t know me.” Urgh.]
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Rosa, I'm glad you mentioned tragedy in your last post. I've been thinking all day that what makes Spitzer's downfall electrifying to watch isn't just the comical pop schadenfreude of seeing a public figure stand accused of the very vice he has publicly deplored (and Liza, some other examples that pop to mind from this very well-padded list include televangelist-turned-adulterer James Bakker, senator-turned-washroom-cruiser Larry Craig and New Jersey governor-turned-gay-Episcopal-priest James McGreevey.) The "myth" Dahlia refers to -- that the holders of power are somehow immune to human weakness—is at least as old as Aristotle's definition of the tragic hero: A powerful man of noble birth, who experiences a reversal of fortune because of an error in judgment or character. In the words of the Shakespeare scholar Robert Heilman (as quoted in this essay), the tragic hero is caught "between imperative and impulse, between moral ordinance and unruly passion ... between law and lust." I think some of the fascination this scandal affords comes from that paradox at the heart of political power. Some part of us expects our leaders to be morally exemplary supermen, no matter how often we're reminded that once in power, they often operate more like tribal warlords, brazenly amassing women and wealth. The argument can certainly be made that Spitzer's dalliance is a private matter, unrelated to affairs of state (assuming he used his own money to pay for that staggeringly expensive nookie.) But to move from an ancient archetype to a more modern one, isn't Spiderman's motto "with great power comes great responsibility"?
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It would have been just one more distressing story about a controversial, possibly threatening student essay; gun possession on campus; and an expulsion and involuntary hospitalization in Virginia. There are almost too many layers to untangle: The 23-year-old student who wrote the violent short story for a college writing class was a former sailor in the Navy. Guns found in his car were legally owned, although in violation of campus policy. His work of fiction references Sueng-Hui Cho and the killing spree at Virginia Tech last year. And the professor subtly threatened with death in the work of fiction is named "Mr. Christopher." That’s because the assistant writing professor at UVA-Wise—the one whose life may have been threatened—is Christopher Scalia, son of the U.S. Supreme Court justice.
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"Dow Climbs 416.66 for Its Biggest Gain in Over Five Years," reports the New York Times. The Gray Lady attributes it all to the actions of the Fed, which "injected a burst of financial adrenaline into the ailing banking system." Well, maybe so! But maybe the adrenaline was pure schadenfreude, as Wall Street celebrated the downfall of Archenemy No. 1.
And this, incidentally, is why L'Affaire Spitzer is tragedy as well as farce, for the nation as well as for his family. Spitzer did a whole lot of good in his long career, especially as New York attorney general. His hypocrisy on the-- ahem! --small matter of prostitution rings shouldn't lead us to forget that. Let's hope the many good causes he championed don't suffer the same fate as his career.
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That's a good point, Dahlia—if I understand you correctly, the argument would be that human nature is constant, in high places and low, and that the proportion of wrongdoers and plain idiots is bound to be the same among politicians (even moralizing ones) as it is among private ones. We're just a lot more likely to hear about a governor and former prosecutor when he is found to have been visiting a prostitute than an ordinary person.
I don't know if I entirely agree, though, that it's unreasonable to expect public figures to behave with more decorum than the average citizen. I don't fraternize with powerful officeholders, but living in Washington, I know lots of ordinary people who work for the U.S. government. While they are not public figures, many do consider themselves public servants, and it does affect their personal lives. Many have security clearances. In part because of their clearances—and the way their careers will be impacted by any significant ethical or legal problems, not just prostitute visits but, say, drunk-driving arrests—and in part because they feel they are vested with a public trust, they are, often, more careful about what they do and say. They are less likely to download bootleg music files or drive 30 mph over the speed limit, and more likely to pay their nanny taxes. I do, sort of, expect more of public officials. They have taken oaths of office and promised to uphold the law. For many people I know, this does result in a certain amount of behavior modification. They aren't exempt from human frailties, by any means, but they do have an extra incentive to try to be.
That said, Marjorie's point is brilliant, like everything she wrote. Maybe the trust invested in powerful public officials is offset by the temptation that more often comes their way, and so it all evens out.
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Dahlia, Mrs. Chatterbox was right. I'm amazed, in fact, at the lengths we'll go to, to prove that these people's every gesture and utterance fits into some grand scheme. When five minutes in the Senate visitors' gallery should make plain that even when they have a script, our elected officials still manage to come out with more or less the same number of unfortunate slips as any of the rest of us. Sometimes, though this is not widely known, they say stuff just because they actually feel that way. And whenever anyone in public life does something because it's the right thing to do, we'll go through whatever contortions are required to explain how this was in fact a wily if exotic political play. Why are we so afraid to get caught out thinking these are real people? When if they weren't, they'd be no fun at all to write about.
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Liza and Melinda, I confess I am torn here: Is the problem that big-deal moralizing politicians always cheat or that everyone cheats and the big-deal moralizing politicians always get caught? The late Mrs. Chatterbox, Tim Noah’s wife, Marjorie Williams, once wrote that “the core myth of Washington life is that the men and women who win political power here somehow also win exemption from the irrational, elemental forces of human nature that guide behavior everywhere else, exalting, ruining, ennobling and disrupting lives in Phoenix and Flint and Tulsa and Miami.” That sounds right to me. Sex makes people stupid. Possibly it just makes extraordinary people extraordinarily stupid?
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So behind every squeak is a little bit of grease? These super-clean super-moralizers usually do turn out to have been railing against themselves all along. And if I feel like looking away, I guess it's lucky for me that I have finally given in and made the leap from sordid reality to ... sordid reality TV. Yes, I was always a little vain at never having seen a single minute of American Idol or any of the other shows, but I am a frail hypocrite, too, because now my daughter has me hooked on something called Millionaire Matchmaker, starring this fabulous woman named Patti Stanger, who teaches boys (some of whom are getting on in years) how to be respectful on dates; Big Patti would have made quick work of the Luv Guv!
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Yes, exactly—I don't find the Spitzer debacle tedious yet, in part because the details (some prostitutes found him "difficult"—in what way?) are too interesting and in part because it's just so striking how the loudest moralizers often turn to have been wrestling in secret with the very shame they've set out to exterminate. Two years ago we had the Rev. Ted Haggard, aka Pastor Ted, the evangelizer and inveigher against "homosexual activity" who turned out to have indulged in the selfsame activity with a call guy. Now Spitzer, breaker-up of prostitution rings, turns out to have availed himself of one—and to have overpaid, at that. Shades of Elmer Gantry! This seems such an eternal type—the moralizer brought down on a morals charge—that by now we should almost assume anyone nicknamed Mr. Clean (that is, anyone who makes a point of his rectitude and prosecutorial zeal) has a dirty secret. It's a different personality type than, say, Bill Clinton. Can XXers offer other examples of Gantrylike personages, hoistable on their own petards? What I always wonder is: What is the psychological impulse that leads someone to denounce the practice they are engaging in? Is it simple hypocrisy or something more complicated?
As for Dahlia's point: There may or may not be stricter gun control if women ran the world—only one way to find out, really—but it really does seem safe to say there would be less visiting of prostitutes in the interstices of time between governing and testifying before Congress on bond insurance.
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I think you have a point, Melinda, and had Eliot Spitzer merely had a boring old affair, we probably wouldn't be making such a fuss. But there are a couple of factors that make this case different. One is the hypocrisy of it all. Spitzer made his name by cracking down on corruption and white-collar crime, and, as Emily pointed out yesterday, high-end prostitution rings.
The other factor that sets this apart is the same thing that attracted our attention to so many of the rich-guy criminals who Spitzer busted as A.G.: the dollar signs. Spitzer's alleged that $4,300 night with a prostitute is as outlandish to most of us as Dennis Kozlowski's $6,000 shower curtain.
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I am guessing that the answer will be yes—but am I the only one who finds this Spitzer stupidity actually kind of tedious? Why don't we out the handful of big-deal politicians who actually keep their pants on and be done with it? Which would solve the whole problem of wives having to show up and stand there for their ritual humiliation when they could be out practicing law, or playing tennis, or getting even, for all I care. Don't look now, but I don't think the public would faint in surprise or anything. And all it would take would be one brave spouse, willing to state the obvious ...
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My friend Corey Owens takes me to school for last week's gender-based generalizations . . . .
Guest post follows:
Not to stand between you and your spitball-straw, but "...if women ever ran the country"...?!? Come on. The not-so-subtle suggestion that a) women do/would care more about that fact that "kids keep dying" and b) men somehow care less is both ill-informed and dangerous. The importance of the fact that many (albeit not all) of the politicians who would defend the right to carry assault rifles into elementary schools happen to be men should be mitigated by the downright foolishness of so many men AND women on both sides of the gun control debate. "...if women ever ran the country..." is a pretty good way to keep the debates about both guns and gender stuck deep in the mudholes of old.
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