The weird gene in American politics
This week, the career of western New York congressman Chris Lee went up in smoke after the Gawker website posted a PG-13 photograph and email texts that the married Republican sent to a woman through Craigslist.
Lee has since resigned, but his story got me thinking about politicians — including New York Democrat Eric Massa, who resigned from the House last March — who when all is said and done just seem kind of weird.
Let me say as an aside, that I tend to like politicians far more than average Americans do.
When you work closely with these men and women, you find that most are fairly normal, fairly honest people, all working within a very tough system.
But every once in a while, you come across an elected lawmaker who just has that weird vibe, and sometimes it blows up spectacularly. There’s Senator Larry Craig, accused of tapping toes under bathroom stalls.
Then there’s former Governor Eliot Spitzer, whose clenched-jaw intensity apparently carried over to his relationships with prostitutes.
There’s a long list of this sort of pols-gone-wild behavior — and yes, it almost always involves sex.
The worst-ever in my experience was former Plattsburgh Assemblyman Chris Ortloff, whose nervous tics and eccentricities turned out to be concealing a sociopath’s predatory instincts.
I have an armchair theory about all this.
I actually think there are two distinct kinds of nutters that wind up in politics. The first kind is drawn to it by some kind of nervous desire to win acclaim and approval and acceptance.
It must be a peculiar kind of thrill for a this kind of neurotic personality to walk that tightrope every day, masquerading in plain sight, never taking off the mask in public.
But I think there’s a second, more innocent kind of weirdness in American politics. That’s the kind where fairly normal people simply can’t stand the cloistered, always-under-scrutiny nature of modern civic life.
These men (and occasionally women) do shabby things that are fairly normal in American society. They flirt on-line with strange women, they go to see prostitutes. They get lonely and search for companionship in the wrong places.
They struggle clumsily within unhappy marriages.
Doing that stuff if you’re a bank branch manager in Buffalo is just sort of sad. But when you’re a high profile politician it begins to look frankly nuts.
Who would risk a seat in Congress over a dead-end flirtation?
In the end, I wonder if guys like Chris Lee don’t secretly want out. I wonder if at least some politicians don’t use this kind of clumsy self-inflicted scandal as an escape hatch from lives and careers they no longer want.
When New Jersey’s Democratic Governor James McGreevey resigned in 2004, after admitting to homosexual affairs, he sounded positively relieved.
“At a point in every person’s life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world,” he said, “not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is.”
For Chris Lee, that point came this week.
Tags: politics
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You may be right Brian, but I wonder if there isn’t something that corrupts or transforms them when they get in office or achieve fame. You know the old saying about power, fame works the same way. Look at all the Hollywood types that turn out to be…well, bizarre is probably far too kind. That girl Lohan, Michael Jackson, the sports stars- it’s the fame and whatnot I think. You have people telling you how wonderful you are 24/7 and have gobs of cash at your disposal, it’s corrupting.
Oh, my god! A shirtless photo? A shirtless photo is PG-13? The horror of it all! What is this world coming to?
The horror of it all is not the shirtless photo but that anyone regards this as newsworthy.
Interesting thoughts, Brian. I, on the other hand, chalk it up to the complex and little understood condition called sexual addiction.
I think we are way to puritanical in this society. Yes, of course there are appropriate standards of sexual behavior
Opps! Hit a wrong key and it posted before I was finished. Continued.
We scrutinize our politicians and celebrities way too much. Frankly I don’t care who they sleep with. It’s none of my business. It’s between them and the significant others (spouses, live-ins, whatever).
I’m with James, it may be none of our business. However, I don’t want our politicians espousing “family values” on Sunday and ignoring their so-called values the rest of the week.
Okay, I have to push back a bit.
When a married guy representing 700,000 people emails a shirtless photo of himself flexing his muscles to a strange woman on Craiglist, it’s not puritanical to question his judgment and state of mind.
–Brian, NCPR
I am not familiar with Chris Lee’s position on social issues but it is clear that Republicans have staked out the “high ground” on these issues only to be embarrassed continually by the behavior of their members. I don’t think Democrats have a better track record on salacious behavior, but that’s not the point. If you have the audacity to court “values voters” and get caught with your pants down (or your shirt off), you deserve the ridicule and ruin that follows.
James, when they feel qualified to pompously lecture the PUBLIC on morality and “values,” then they make their private behavior fair game for that public.
Yet another promiscuous philanderer (or wanna be) who feels qualified to protect the “sanctity of marriage” from loving, committed gays.
Did he have to resign though? Other congressmen have done similar (or worse) things and have been re-elected and are still serving.
Brian M.,
Why is the woman “strange”? Does she have three eyes or four legs?
A weird serendipity: just yesterday I confessed to a bad case of “scandal envy” as I watched the Italians reacting (very mildly) to their prime minister’s years-long antics. “Goodness,” thought I. “Wouldn’t it be more fun to have politicians who chase girls instead of politicians who sell votes?”
Presto! Up pops an American politician that chases girls!
But of course we don’t shrug it off in that uniquely Italian fashion. After all, we are lots more moral than those Italians.
Congressman Lee posted his occupation as “lobbyist” rather than, well, any other occupation one might use when fishing for dates on Craigslist.
Things that make you go hmmm.
The irony is he’ll probably become a lobbyist once the “scandal” of this story dies down. That seems to be the preferred career choice of former politicians.
Power doesn’t corrupt. Power reveals.
I think Brian is right. I bet this particular guy wanted out. Maybe this was a weird as he could manage. It doesn’t really seem like one that required him to jump ship? I think he wanted to jump. Some of the other examples are in another world of creepiness, I am not sure I would compare them to this.
Mayflower: Il Silvio doesn’t lecture Italians on the “sanctity of marriage.”
He looked pretty good for 46.
I was shocked that someone would lie on Craig’s list. That poor women he was flirting with must have been devastated.
Brian, When politicians are telling the public how to live their lives, that’s when the public should be pushing back at them. Government should be protecting our rights to the pursuit of happiness, not defining for us what that is. It’s the pushing of individual and family values on each other that leads to hypocrisy all around. Republicans want smaller government? Start by getting out of people’s bedrooms.
It comes down to character doesn’t it? We elect these people expecting them to be serious, hard working representatives of our wishes and welfare, just what they promised to be. Instead, we find them out to be just exactly what we didn’t want. I can accept people being fallible, but the sheer arrogance, lack of character and outright stupidity of some of these people is just ridiculous.
I hold the opinion that anyone stating a position, or displaying the idea they are in a committed, monogamous relationship should be tarred and feathered (figuratively) if they are found to be failing in that respect. That goes for this guy, John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Bob Packwood, Larry Craig, anyone of any party. It just reflects their over all character. So yes, power does reveal as well as corrupt.
Ya know, if some schmuck like me can maintain a decent reputation over 20 years in my little part of the world, and I’m sure most of us do the same, then why is it so difficult to expect our “leaders” to do the same?
Or, maybe Lee is one of those rare conservative congress people that actually feel shame.
I think the fault is ours.
We want heroes. We say we want elected officials of high moral values, what ever those are. Then we find out they are human and are ready to have a good time when they fall from the pedestal we have put them upon.
Why are they there? They are there because they want to get elected and know we demand them to be saints, so they claim to be the saints we want them to be.
This is the game we play with elected officials and those in sports.
Let the game begin – or I should say continue.
I read an interesting study several years ago that linked competitiveness and a desire for power with high sex drives. So why are we surprised that our star athletes and politicians are prone to having affairs?
The studies I have seen show that around 65% of American married men have an affair at some point in their marriage, so the odds are if these guys are just drawn randomly from our population you are going to get a fair amount of men who will cheat. (the stats on men who are co-habitating are even higher!)
I think the craigs list thing though shows something else going on? But the odds are people like this guy or like Elliot Spitzer this was not their fist time down this road.
It’s too bad they can’t just have a quite discrete affair or of course be faithful.
“I hold the opinion that anyone stating a position, or displaying the idea they are in a committed, monogamous relationship should be tarred and feathered (figuratively) if they are found to be failing in that respect.”
Exactly. And any politician who is divorced is unfit for office.
But this guy can come back. Look at Elliot Spitzer and Bill Clinton. It’s not over for him he can get his act together and make a plan for the future, he is just foolish and kind of weak and of course I would say he has committed a serious sin a mortal sin; (but I know that is not relevant to a secular discussion) but we all fall into that in some parts of our life. The question is whether this is a pattern or not, I do think he did the right thing in resigning.
I think much of these exchanges miss the point. Politicians’ sexual lives would be largely irrelevant if they didn’t go to such lengths to project a sanctimonious image. Yes, a large percentage of the public admits to having an affair or affairs, but the average schmo hasn’t presented himself as a protector of American virtue. I believe that it’s hypocrisy that infuriates most people, not infidelity.
oa says:
February 12, 2011 at 3:55 pm
“I hold the opinion that anyone stating a position, or displaying the idea they are in a committed, monogamous relationship should be tarred and feathered (figuratively) if they are found to be failing in that respect.”
Exactly. And any politician who is divorced is unfit for office.”
Jeeze, even you can do better than that. I’m disappointed. Divorce is one thing. Being a total hypocrite is another.
But if you said you’d marry someone til death do us part, and you get divorced, doesn’t that make you a total hypocrite?