Politics, and Scandal, as Usual

By N.R. Kleinfield

Published: March 11, 2008 in the New York Times

It keeps happening. Recklessly, shamelessly, cavalierly — as if this time they’re the ones who will somehow manage to get away with it all.

But many of them don’t.

Congressmen, senators, governors, presidents, mayors — politicians at all levels keep starring in this familiar and non-partisan soap opera rerun. They engage in clandestine sexual entanglements, commonly cloaked in the tawdry textures of hotel pseudonyms and airport bathrooms and pay-by-the-hour copulation. All too often, their stealthy frolics then poison their political careers.

And now add to the lengthening list Gov. Eliot Spitzer, husband, father of three teenage daughters, who authorities on Monday said had been involved with a ring of prostitutes.

“I think biologists could tell you this has something to do with natural selection — the person who acquires power becomes the alpha male,” said Tom Fiedler, who teaches a course in press and politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He was involved in reporting Gary Hart’s notorious fling with Donna Rice in 1987 that terminated the senator’s presidential bid.

Politics and sex is an old story, and as Mr. Fiedler and others point out, it simply reinforces the lessons of the aphrodisiac of power taught in Shakespeare. Its prime characters constitute a crowded society.

Governor Spitzer’s startling appearance with his wife, Silda, at his side is itself something of a contrapuntal answer to New Jersey’s 2004 entry in this dubious catalog of political misbehavior, Gov. James E. McGreevey’s relinquishing office after disclosing a gay affair.

By now, many of the more publicized escapades have become embedded in political lore, from President Bill Clinton encounters with Monica Lewinsky to Senator Bob Packwood and his unwanted advances on women to Representative Mark Foley and his lewd e-mails to House pages.

Who can forget the late Wilbur D. Mills, the one-time powerful head of the House Ways and Means Committee, and his dalliances back in 1974 with the stripper Fanne Foxe? She’s the one who barreled out of Mr. Mills’s car and waded into the Tidal Basin in Washington when the park police stopped them. Enterprisingly, she went and changed her name from the Argentine Firecracker to the Tidal Basin Bombshell, and got a book out of her adventures.

There was, as well, Representative Gary Condit, whose career imploded when it came out that he had been involved with Chandra Levy, an intern who was murdered. And Wayne Hays, the Ohio representative, who quit in 1976 after it was revealed that the job requirements of Elizabeth Ray were less as a secretary than as his mistress. In her famous words: “I can’t type. I can’t file. I can’t even answer the phone.”

Sexual missteps among politicians are nothing peculiar to the United States, having firm grounding in England, for instance, and turning up with good regularity throughout the world. But they seem to reach more absurdist proportions in this country, and have almost the quality of a catch-me-if-you-can game at a time when private borders have gotten extremely porous.

“There is a broader anxiety about what is private anymore,” said Paul Apostolidis, a political science professor at Whitman College and the co-editor of the book “Public Affairs: Politics in the Age of Sex Scandals.” “It’s not that politicians are behaving more badly. We’re just learning about it more often.”

But why does it go on repeatedly when the ramifications can be so dire?

“I don’t see why we would expect politics to be more free of the psychological contradictions of other humans beings,” Mr. Apostolidis said. “People do self-destructive things that are not rational.”

Psychologists mention the sense of entitlement felt by those who attain political standing that blinds them to the consequences of their actions. And they say that ambitious politicians are invigorated by risk and feel impervious.

Not always, of course, are political careers ruined by sexual irregularities. Rep. Barney Frank continued to win re-election in Massachusetts even after it was disclosed in 1989 that he had hired a male prostitute who ran a brothel out of his apartment.

It is sometimes speculated that certain politicians, at least subconsciously, want to be caught and have their careers upended. But do they?

“I’ve never seen it,” said Dr. Farley. “I don’t believe it’s a factor with these people. It’s just in their nature to push things. I don’t think they have a death wish. I think they have a life wish. They just love all aspects of life — some of it too much.”