Crying time
Toolbox
Published: June 26, 2009
The language of scandal and repentance has run its course. The wife of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford apparently understood as much, refusing to appear with him as he apologized for his bizarre disappearance during his visit to his mistress in Argentina.
Our culture of confession and redemption has established the expectation in some people's minds that, if they tell all and then apologize, everything will be forgiven. Television has made a fetish of personal revelation, as if openness about one's weirdness equaled validation. Thus, we have become accustomed to the loyal wife standing by as the errant husband apologizes for betraying her.
Politics is a poor arena to attempt a secret life. The list of politicians past and present who have strayed from the strait and narrow is a long one, going back to the beginning of the republic. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, political enemies, were both famous for their dangerous liaisons. In recent decades, we remember powerful congressmen unhinged by youthful beauty, including Wilbur Mills and Wayne Hayes. President Kennedy was a pathologically compulsive seducer, and President Johnson, too, had his dalliances.
The 1990s were the decade when the two most powerful political titans, President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, were also titans of scandal. Clinton's scandal was more titanic because the Republicans chose to make it so. But Gingrich's indiscretion cost him his job.
By the time Sens. David Vitter, Larry Craig, and John Ensign faced up to their transgressions, it was possible for the ordinary citizen to shrug, though each revelation came with its idiosyncratic details. Meanwhile, Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York, brought a special level of sleazy detail to the ever-evolving genre of the scandal story.
And always the apologies. In Sanford's case, it almost seemed he was grasping at the ritual of apology as applied to his marriage as a way to save himself from the larger scandal, which was his loony behavior.
Now it turns out that Sanford, who was being mentioned as a potential presidential candidate, was loony all along. He was prone to political stunts, such as the delivery of two pigs to the South Carolina legislature and his high-profile effort to deny his impoverished state federal stimulus money. It seems that leaders, Republican and Democrat, can get away with the most scandalous political irresponsibility until the day that their romantic peccadilloes reveal to the world that they are not what they pretend to be.
Sanford confessed that he had spent days "crying" in Argentina because he had decided he had to break up with his mistress. Middle-aged men suffer these breakdowns from time to time. Most of them are not governors of states, and they move on with their lives without becoming objects of coast-to-coast ridicule.
It is the prime minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, who is setting a high bar for self-indulgent male behavior. The billionaire media tycoon has lately been denounced by his wife, who is seeking divorce, for cavorting with young actresses, "models" and, it now appears, a high-priced prostitute. Berlusconi, with the sort of braggadocio that is not wearing so well these days, asked why someone should pay for sex when the true pleasure is the conquest.
American politicians are encumbered by the persona of purity they feel compelled to maintain and are generally unable to rely on the kind of toleration that Berlusconi and other Europeans enjoy. At the same time, the power of the tearful confession is waning. It will be a good sign when wronged wives begin to give the public the proper cues: The guy's a hypocrite and a jerk, and groveling before the TV candidates is not persuasive.
Then maybe we'll get less posturing and moralistic preening by politicians who we know from the start are human like the rest of us. Real dignity is not a posture. It is a way of living.
41