The topic of this post is that most popular of subjects: sex. Even better, it’s sex and politics, the combination of which is one of the abiding obsessions of the American public.
The occasion: the return of two scandal-tainted politicians to the news. The first, former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, is the Republican candidate in a special election for the U.S. House of Representatives. The second, former New York congressman Anthony Weiner, is by press accounts considering a run for mayor of New York City. Weiner, a Democrat, resigned from the House of Representatives in 2011. Sanford, a Republican, served out his term as governor but was censured for misconduct by the South Carolina House of Representatives.
Sanford’s sin was the more conventional adultery — though he managed to combine it with a bizarre twist: while governor, he disappeared for a week in 2009, claiming to be on a hike in the Appalachians while actually visiting his mistress in Argentina. Weiner is in some ways a more interesting case. His was a very modern fall from grace: Weiner was caught “sexting,” i.e., sending suggestive photos of himself to a woman who followed him on Twitter. (I will spare the reader a link to the images. Trust me: the congressman is no Channing Tatum.)
Neither Sanford nor Weiner is a sure victor. The former faces a tough Democratic opponent in Elizabeth Colbert Busch (sister of comedian Steven Colbert); the latter, should he run for mayor, can expect an uphill battle. But their return to the electoral spotlight is evidence that a sexual scandal represents far less than a death sentence for a political career. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared that “there are no second acts in American lives.” When it comes to sex and politics, it sometimes seems that there are nothing but second acts.
Not all politicians, of course, survive sex scandals. Much depends upon the details of the indiscretion, the support of his or her party, and the indulgence of constituents. New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and Louisiana senator David Vitter both consorted with prostitutes. Spitzer resigned; Vitter didn’t. A groveling public mea culpa, particularly with the aggrieved but forgiving spouse at hand, appears to help. Slate blogger Matt Yglesias suggests that simply weathering the initial firestorm of controversy and refusing to resign is the surest way to save a political career. This is certainly one lesson to draw from the case of Bill Clinton, who saw his presidency engulfed by the Lewinsky scandal in 1998-99 but ended his presidency with a public approval rating as high as Ronald Reagan’s when the latter left office.
Sex scandals are nothing new. Politicians are people, after all, and some, disenchanted with their spouses or bored with monogamy, will stray. Adultery, we should recall, is one of the great an enduring themes of Western literature. (See Troy, Helen of, and Karenina, Anna). Most adulterous politicians manage to avoid public uproar by conforming to what is now a fairly routine and socially acceptable pattern: a discreet affair, a not-too-ugly divorce, and then remarriage. We Americans may not think highly of divorce (unless we want one). But we’re suckers for marriage. A simple wedding ceremony can transform a “home wrecker” into a respected second spouse.
Scandals seem to have increased in recent decades. One reason: evolving media norms have blurred the distinction between the private and the public. President Kennedy’s sexual promiscuity was an open secret among the Washington press corps at the time; such a conspiracy of silence is hard to imagine today. The rise of the Internet has provided yet another blow to whatever residual privacy politicians may possess: any intimate text or suggestive image is, for all intents and purposes, ineradicable and subject to retrieval and retransmission. This is why we may expect more media frenzies like the one that prompted Congressman Weiner’s resignation.
There is another reason why political sex scandals will not go away: we love them. No mere blog post can do justice to the national neurosis that is the American attitude towards sex. Suffice it to say that we manage, as a society, to be both priggish and prurient. Thus, a glimpse of a woman’s breast during a Super Bowl can cause an uproar even as an avalanche of explicit pornography is readily available to any half-sentient 14-year-old with access to the Web. Our cable television revels in naked flesh while prime time, constrained by federal regulation to conform to “community standards,” must get by with sniggering innuendo. The political sex scandal is ready-built for us: it allows us to salivate and scold at the same time. What could be more delicious?
Joe Barnes is the Baker Institute’s Bonner Means Baker Fellow. From 1979 to 1993, he was a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, serving in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.