Michael Currie Schaffer: The Difference Between Democratic and Republican Sex Scandals
[Michael Currie Schaffer is working on a book about the pet industry.]
Forget Iraq, terrorism, and the rickety credit market. This is turning out to be the best year in a while for political sex scandals--certainly the best since 9/11 supposedly focused our leaders on less tawdry pursuits. It's enough to make Gary Condit's head spin: Only eight months old, 2007 has already featured a Washington madam, a cruising senator, a cuckolded campaign manager, and a home-wrecking TV reporter. And while other sorts of recent governmental improprieties have had a decidedly Republican cast, booty calls appear relatively bipartisan. The soiled bedsheets of prominent Democrats like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his San Francisco counterpart Gavin Newsom are hanging in public view right alongside those of Republican Senators David Vitter and Larry Craig.
But if it doesn't take David Broder to show that wandering eyes and weak wills know no party, it's also worth pausing to consider some differences between the year's major Republican and Democratic sex scandals. On the one hand, comically anachronistic forays into the hidden netherworlds of whoring and cruising; on the other, consensual affairs that begin in the professional sphere of post-sexual revolution America. While the politicians involved may all find themselves in the same amount of trouble down the road--say, at Saint Peter's desk, or at least in divorce court--the specifics of their transgressions say a great deal about their respective political affiliations in the here and now.
The Republican version of the 2007 sex scandal, in fact, looks a lot like pretty much everyone's version of the 1957 sex scandal. In Craig's case, that means the world of the closet. Never mind that within a couple miles of Craig's Washington, D.C. offices there are dozens of places to non-illegally seek out casual sex; Craig followed the pre-Stonewall logic of the modern right wing straight into the bathroom, with all its attendant physical discomforts, and legal dangers. Vitter, too, played the part of a horny Rip Van Winkle. And while no mere sexual revolution can be expected to render obsolete the world's oldest profession, four decades of social upheaval have surely made it easier for a handsome young Louisianan to find a non-illegal extramarital bedmate (preferably one who doesn't keep phone logs). But both Craig and Vitter, officially disapproving of the very social changes that would have eased their stepping out, sinned the old fashioned way. They're now paying the price: Craig said he planned to resign, and Vitter is a punchline.
By contrast, the Democratic version of the 2007 sex scandal mirrors the plot of a bad Lifetime special. In San Francisco, Newsom apologized last winter after his close friend Alex Tourk quit as campaign manager upon learning that Newsom had a 2005 fling with Tourk's wife, a mayoral aide. The affair had been a consensual romp between more or less equals, born amidst Newsom's divorce and the hothouse environment of big-city politics. Likewise, Villaraigosa was led astray in the public world of work rather than in the seedy realms where secret sex used to take place....
Read entire article at New Republic
Forget Iraq, terrorism, and the rickety credit market. This is turning out to be the best year in a while for political sex scandals--certainly the best since 9/11 supposedly focused our leaders on less tawdry pursuits. It's enough to make Gary Condit's head spin: Only eight months old, 2007 has already featured a Washington madam, a cruising senator, a cuckolded campaign manager, and a home-wrecking TV reporter. And while other sorts of recent governmental improprieties have had a decidedly Republican cast, booty calls appear relatively bipartisan. The soiled bedsheets of prominent Democrats like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his San Francisco counterpart Gavin Newsom are hanging in public view right alongside those of Republican Senators David Vitter and Larry Craig.
But if it doesn't take David Broder to show that wandering eyes and weak wills know no party, it's also worth pausing to consider some differences between the year's major Republican and Democratic sex scandals. On the one hand, comically anachronistic forays into the hidden netherworlds of whoring and cruising; on the other, consensual affairs that begin in the professional sphere of post-sexual revolution America. While the politicians involved may all find themselves in the same amount of trouble down the road--say, at Saint Peter's desk, or at least in divorce court--the specifics of their transgressions say a great deal about their respective political affiliations in the here and now.
The Republican version of the 2007 sex scandal, in fact, looks a lot like pretty much everyone's version of the 1957 sex scandal. In Craig's case, that means the world of the closet. Never mind that within a couple miles of Craig's Washington, D.C. offices there are dozens of places to non-illegally seek out casual sex; Craig followed the pre-Stonewall logic of the modern right wing straight into the bathroom, with all its attendant physical discomforts, and legal dangers. Vitter, too, played the part of a horny Rip Van Winkle. And while no mere sexual revolution can be expected to render obsolete the world's oldest profession, four decades of social upheaval have surely made it easier for a handsome young Louisianan to find a non-illegal extramarital bedmate (preferably one who doesn't keep phone logs). But both Craig and Vitter, officially disapproving of the very social changes that would have eased their stepping out, sinned the old fashioned way. They're now paying the price: Craig said he planned to resign, and Vitter is a punchline.
By contrast, the Democratic version of the 2007 sex scandal mirrors the plot of a bad Lifetime special. In San Francisco, Newsom apologized last winter after his close friend Alex Tourk quit as campaign manager upon learning that Newsom had a 2005 fling with Tourk's wife, a mayoral aide. The affair had been a consensual romp between more or less equals, born amidst Newsom's divorce and the hothouse environment of big-city politics. Likewise, Villaraigosa was led astray in the public world of work rather than in the seedy realms where secret sex used to take place....