{"id":3739,"date":"2011-02-10T07:43:14","date_gmt":"2011-02-10T12:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=3739"},"modified":"2011-02-10T12:07:54","modified_gmt":"2011-02-10T17:07:54","slug":"the-weird-gene-in-american-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/02\/10\/the-weird-gene-in-american-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"The weird gene in American politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, the career of western New York congressman Chris Lee went up in smoke <\/a>after the Gawker website posted a PG-13 photograph and email texts that the married Republican sent to a woman through Craigslist.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Let me say as an aside, that I tend to like politicians far more than average Americans do.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But every once in a while, you come across an elected lawmaker who just has that weird vibe, and sometimes it blows up spectacularly.\u00a0 There’s Senator Larry Craig, accused of tapping toes under bathroom stalls.<\/p>\n

Then there’s former Governor Eliot Spitzer, whose clenched-jaw intensity apparently carried over to his relationships with prostitutes.<\/p>\n

There’s a long list of this sort of pols-gone-wild behavior — and yes, it almost always involves sex.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I have an armchair theory about all this.<\/p>\n

I actually think there are two distinct kinds of nutters that wind up in politics.\u00a0 The first kind is drawn to it by some kind of nervous desire to win acclaim and approval and acceptance.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But I think there’s a second, more innocent kind of weirdness in American politics.\u00a0 That’s the kind where fairly normal people simply can’t stand the cloistered, always-under-scrutiny nature of modern civic life.<\/p>\n

These men (and occasionally women) do shabby things that are fairly normal in American society.\u00a0 They flirt on-line with strange women, they go to see prostitutes.\u00a0 They get lonely and search for companionship in the wrong places.<\/p>\n

They struggle clumsily within unhappy marriages.<\/p>\n

Doing that stuff if you’re a bank branch manager in Buffalo is just sort of sad.\u00a0 But when you’re a high profile politician it begins to look frankly nuts.<\/p>\n

Who would risk a seat in Congress over a dead-end flirtation?<\/p>\n

In the end, I wonder if guys like Chris Lee don’t secretly want out.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

When New Jersey’s Democratic Governor James McGreevey resigned in 2004, after admitting to homosexual affairs, he sounded positively relieved.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

For Chris Lee, that point came this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, the career of western New York congressman Chris Lee went up in smoke […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3739"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3739"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3740,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3739\/revisions\/3740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}