This nicely highlights an ambiguity in the OP. ‘Expect’ has both a normative and a non-normative meaning. Contrast these two statements:
My wife is flying in from out of town. I expect her to be home by 9pm.
My daughter is out on a dinner date. I expect her to be home by 9pm.
One is a prediction, the other is a prescription. You apparently took the OP to be saying we should expect politicians to have affairs in the latter sense, i.e., politicians should have affairs. I assumed the OP simply meant that they predictably will. Perhaps the OP could clarify the matter.
Oh…to be honest, that possibility never crossed my mind. Thanks for pointing that out Gorsnak. Looks to me as if the OP has left the building, at least for today, but maybe he’ll wander back in and clarify things. Though with this particular OP and my past experience with him, I am not hopeful.
This entails an assumption that the wife is necessarily being deceived or betrayed. Many times that’s not the case at all. I say, if the wife doesn’t care, why should I?
I remember back in '92 when Clinton was running, my late Mom told me what she had heard on the grapevine: Everybody in Arkansas knew Clinton really was what he appeared to be – really smart, really capable, and really dedicated to making people’s lives better – but they also knew “Slick Willie” had this one flaw. He was not only a reckless philanderer/womanizer, but he seemed to get an extra thrill out of the possibility of getting caught at it.
I’m not trying to moralize the point, so take this for what it’s worth.
What your wife will and will not accept has nothing to do with how some would view your character. If you’re the one up for scrutiny by the unwashed masses, it matters not what she thinks or accepts. It’s what you do that counts.
My wife accepts that I drink and smoke too much. Should that be reason enough for everyone else to dismiss that when making a decision about my ability to represent anyone? That’s not the best analogy, but the fact that the wife accepts some things, doesn’t mean everyone else should.
duffer makes a good point. Just because one person is willing to give them a pass, why should everyone else?
I’m not saying that I wouldn’t vote for someone who’d had an affair. But I do think the decision on whether or not to give them your support should depend on your opinions and your opinions alone.
I remember an editorial cartoon from the Clinton Admin. A pollster is standing at a guy’s door. Caption: “Well, I think the lousy draft-dodging pot-puffing lying cheating womanizer is doing a good job.” I think that was the attitude of most Americans at the time.
The OP asked for personal opinions about the relevance of marital fidelity in politicians. I gave mine. I didn’t say it was everybody’s. Atually, to be morse specific, I was rebutting the notion that marital infidelity necessarily means a person is untrustworthy. That’s a different issue from whether it can make him unpopular.
Who here has said otherwise? Note that I said “That’s why I say, if his wife doesn’t care, why should I?” I was giving my own opinion. I never said that anyone else had to agree with me.
Exactly. Everyone is going to have a different take on what it does or does not mean to them. And everyone is going to come at it from a different perspective.
Myself, I don’t REALLY care if they are out there screwing the interns or whatever (as long as they aren’t RAPING them of course or doing something else illegal…at that point I’d care). But…I don’t want to know about it. I want them to be bright enough and discrete enough that me, John Q citizen never finds out for sure. THEN I’m happy.
Agreed…I second the motion, especially if the OP does not return to clarify things.
Any statistics on which of the two in each case filed for divorce? For example, if a Congressman finds out his wife is sleeping with half of D.C., I could hardly find fault in a divorce.
BTW, I’m curious if this instance would be something you could find acceptable in your quest of electing officials that aren’t divorced.
Yes, but you’re basing your opinion on someone else’s. It just seems odd that you’d accept what the partner of the person in question’s view of the matter is.
Point taken, but let’s not collapse the issue into two perspectives. I think most would view the issue along three perspectives:
[ol]
[li]I will not vote for a candidate that has an affair.[/li][li]I do not care if a candidate has an affair.[/li][li]I do not care if a candidate has an affair so long as the spouse agrees (e.g. an open-relationship).[/li][/ol]I think there are significant number of people that fall into camp #3 and the DtC’s quote reflects that opinion.
Wait a minute…what if Keira Knightley went into politics…would you care if she did that… and the furry costume covered a bare minimum of skin area…and there was video?
What’s odd about it? That’s the only person whose “trust” may or may not have been violated. If there has been no such violation, then how is it an issue? the partner’s view is the only view that matters at all, in my opinion. If the partner doesn’t care, there’s no victim. If there’s no victim, then what’s the problem?
I do not consider an affair in an open-relationship to be unethical, so it should not be a consideration. An affair in a non-open-relationship is typically unethical and, in those cases, should be factored in with all of the other “character assessments” (does the candidate leave the seat up, did the candidate kill a tame bear in a cage, does the candidate cheat on his taxes). The character assessments should then be weighed appropriately with all of the other criteria (is the candidate intelligent, is the candidate a capable administrator).
The difficulty with the above determination is that it requires insight into the candidate’s relationship that voters really don’t have. So you are really left taking the candidate’s word for it and probably discounting the issue. Now if you are of the belief that affair == bad, then the determination is trivial.
Don’t they all?