Naturally, when word got out that soon-to-be-ex Governor Eliot Spitzer (D-NY) had a thing for high-priced hos barely older than his children, most people's sympathies were with his wife, Silda, and daughters Elyssa, 17, Sarabeth, 15, and Jenna, 13. But not political reporters and analysts. They were wringing their hands over how the sordid mess affected the other woman in Spitzer's life.
No, not "Kristen." Hillary.
The Nation's John Nichols on how Spitzer's skanky behavior throws the NY senator's presidential campaign off message in these crucial days leading to the PA primary:
Hillary Clinton really wanted the endorsement of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer for her presidential race. She got it. Now, however, she's got another campaign headache. ...
It's not that Clinton is tied in any way to the governor's troubles. Rather, he is a distraction - the big player in her adopted home state who is now in big, big trouble. The Clinton campaign immediately began sponging Spitzer's name from the Senator's campaign website - just as Idaho Senator Larry Craig's name disappeared from the website of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney after Craig's bathroom troubles in Minneapolis. ...
The media won't let go of this one, and sooner or later Tim Russert and Chris Matthews are going to be obsessed with everything Hillary Clinton has to say about it. Clinton will be answering breathless questions about all her governor's troubles, about whether he should resign and, of course, about her impressions of what it means when prominent political players - like governors or, say, presidents in the 1990s - get wrapped up in sex scandals.
Washington Post White House correspondent Peter Baker explains how the Spitzer sex scandal brings back memories that the Clinton campaign has been trying to squelch from the beginning:
[H]is apparent involvement with a prostitution ring has not only distracted attention from her efforts to take down the front-runner, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), it has also brought back unhelpful memories of her own husband's dalliances in office. There on cable television again were pictures of Bill Clinton hugging Monica S. Lewinsky. And the image of Spitzer's wife standing painfully by his side while he acknowledged unspecified wrongdoing could not help but remind some of Hillary Clinton's own stand-by-her-man moment.
This certainly is not the way Clinton's strategists would have mapped out this week on the campaign trail. They want voters to be thinking about that 3 a.m. phone call in terms of who is ready to handle a crisis in the White House, not in terms of where an unfaithful husband might be catting around town. And, sure enough, the late-night comedians wasted little time linking the Spitzer case to the Clintons. Jay Leno joked Monday night that Spitzer's scandal "means Hillary Clinton is now only the second angriest woman in the state of New York." David Letterman offered a Top 10 List of excuses Spitzer might cite, including the No. 1 excuse: "I thought Bill Clinton legalized this years ago."
The Atlantic's Matt Yglesias wonders whether the whole sordid affair will lead people to "worry about the fact that putting Bill Clinton back in the White House seems to raise the possibility of once again having a Democratic administration derailed by a sex scandal."
While Baker calls Spitzer "a bad-luck charm" for Hillary, The Nation's Jon Wiener takes a contrarian view:
A woman president is not going to get arrested for soliciting sex in a rest room at the Minneapolis airport. A woman president is not going to be caught sending hot text messages to young congressional pages. Many voters may find these arguments persuasive in the wake of the Elliot Spitzer story: if you want to avoid losing your leaders to sex scandals, vote for a woman. ...
The question is not whether we will see new revelations, but whether disgust over Spitzer's destruction of his career will lead some voters to look to a woman for freedom from sex scandals.
Of course, Wiener's argument fails if conclusive evidence ever materializes that Hillary is a practicing lesbian, as has been rumored for years – not that there's anything wrong with that, other than losing her status as an aggrieved wife by matching Bill's marital infidelity with her own.
Then there's New York Times columnist Gail Collins, who feels personally betrayed, by Spitzer –never mind Silda, or even Hillary for that matter: "I thought electing Eliot Spitzer governor of New York was a really good idea. ... [A]lthough Spitzer has been in New York politics for years and years, I never ever heard a single person say, "What if it turns out he's paying for $1,000-an-hour call girls with wire transfers - you know, like the ones he used as evidence when he was attorney general? Really, it never came up."
www.thestilettoblog.com
Victoria Knox (AKA The Stiletto) blogs about politics and ... you name it, since these days everything has become politicized..
In most democracies, a politican caught seeing a hooker is no big deal. A BIG deal would be lying to start a war leading to the deaths of thousands of one's own soldiers. The United States' upside down morality with respect to its leaders is obvious to everyone else and even a few Americans.
In many countries, including the one I live in, prostitution is legal. Hookers are hookers by choice, join unions, have workplace protections and pay taxes.
There are no pimps and drugs are frowned upon as bad for business. When prostitution is legal, the coercion and slavery of victimised women isn't possible or necessary. It's just another career choice.
As for the johns, guys like Spitzer are left to sort things out with their wives and families if they aren't discreet and life goes on. Outing a john is of limited political utility and doing so tends to backfire on whoever outed him....if for no other reason than there are a lot of males out there who discreetly patronise hookers and they are more worried about whether or not the person concerned was dong a good job as governor.
When one sees a President who lied to kill getting away with it, but a Governor who likes sex and lied to his family gone from office the next day, the lack of any real sense of proportion to American public morality stands out like dogs balls.
by
Steve Withers (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 3 comments)
on Sunday, March 16, 2008 at 3:11:28 PM
It's the hypocrisy. Spitzer investigated and shut down two similar call-girl rings in his career. In addition he routinely engaged in prosecutorial abuse, using his untrammeled power as Attorney General to harass, intimidate and ultimately destroy people - and sometimes entire companies. He is the very embodiment of the warning that "absolute power corrupts absolutely" and is the reason why checks and balances are necessary at all levels of government, from dog catcher all the way up to president.
If you insiste on making it about the sex so you can feel superior to us uptight Americans so be it. But you are fixated on the weeds and cannot see the forest.
by
The Stiletto (37 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 30 comments)
on Sunday, March 16, 2008 at 3:25:28 PM
2 comments
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