With all the media coverage of Congressman Weiner’s wiener, I’ve been wondering just how powerful these kinds of scandals are.
Does anyone besides me think that’s it’s possible that had there been no Monica Lewinsky there might have been no Bush presidency? Did history turn on a blow job? I think it quite probably did.
I also think it’s very possible that dems took the houses in 2006 because of Mark Foley and the similar Republican scandals. So what say you all? Am I full of it or what?
Whatever benefit the Republicans got from the Lewinsky ordeal was destroyed with the impeachment. Bill Clinton’s all-time high approval rating came when he was impeached, and it didn’t drop below 65% during the Senate trial.
While this is true, I think the Bush/Gore election was so close in part because of Gore’s association with the Clinton administration. And, yes, sexual scandals have been a part of politics since near the founding of the country. More recently Gary Hart in the 1980s was knocked out of the running to be nominated for president for his scandal.
Odesio
I know it plays in the USA but unless it involves illegality, animals or children personally I take it as a positive.
IHMO politicians generally are interested in power. Money power and sex power tend to attract different types so as I see it if the guy is screwing around he is going to be too busy to also be stealing. There are always exceptions of course.
My expectations of politicians are very low, however I am more interested in them being honest in public office than what they do in their sex lives.
I think the answer is related to the question I posed in this thread, namely that people automatically attach a certain severity to a sex scandal. For something as simple as sleeping with an adult woman other than one’s wife, it usually just bounces off without inflicting permanent damage, as it did with David Vitter and presumably will do with Arnold Schwarzenegger. When the sex scandal rises to actual criminal behavior, on the other hand, it tends to wreck a career and drag the person’s political party downward some distance as well. There’s no doubt that the behavior of Mark Foley and Larry Craig caused some voters to move away from Republicans generally as well as sinking their careers.
I think it depends on the person’s position and track record at the time of the scandal. With Clinton post-Monica, it was 1998 and the economy was going gangbusters for most people; having money in one’s pocket goes a long way towards overlooking narcissism.
With Wiener and so many others, they are merely a small cog (or in his case, a Dem attack dog) and can’t really take any credit. Plus, especially with that douchebag, he initially lied about it, saying he didn’t want to involve the cops about his ‘hacked’ Twitter account because they had other stuff to do, etc. With no go-go 80’s economy to fall back on, he was (is) toast.
Hart had no national goodness/track record to save him, and Arnold didn’t really lie to the public about it (as far as I know, I’m not in Calif so I don’t follow it that closely).
People have forgotten that scandals that brought down really powerful leaders like Wilbur Mills and Wayne Hays. Both of them were long-time committee chairs and weilded real power.
In both cases, the affairs were just the tip of the iceberg. Mills was exhibiting increasingly erratic behavior (due to alcoholism and/or addiction to painkillers) and Hays was not only having an affair, but put his girlfriend on the government payroll in a do-nothing job. But the news of the affairs (in pre-Internet days) spread like wildfire and knocked them both out of office.
What? Adultery is still a criminal act, here in liberal Minnesota. And in a lot of other states, too.
Maybe not prosecuted very often, but still “criminal behavior”.