Silly season comes early in Washington, along with the steamy weather. It is just barely June, and we are already watching the meltdown of Congressman Anthony Weiner, an outspoken liberal Queens Democrat and a one-time candidate for Mayor of New York City. This disgusting and delightful episode began innocently enough with the question of whether the Congressman sent a photo of his filled-out jockey shorts to a West coast co-ed. She assured us that she was not offended by such japery. Stranger things have happened, even in the New York Congressional delegation. The episode seemed like a pleasant, if erotically-charged, diversion. As Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out in another vein, it was “good to think.” Now we learn that the Congressman has checked himself into the Eliot Spitzer wing to deal with a whimsical mental illness that the DSM-5 might label “cad-atonia.” Weiner may be needy, but psychiatry is not likely to provide a cure.
At the time I marveled at how Weiner made such a hash of his own defense. If he did Tweet young women, admit it as ill-conceived teasing and move on. Taking seriously Weiner’s (at first) plausible assertion that his Twitter account was hacked, I worried about the prevalence of Candid Camera politics. I spoke of those luscious gotcha moments in which politicians were upended by trickery of which conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart and his associate James O’Keefe of the famous NPR-Arab donor sting have become so expert. In this case my suspicions of Breitbart were unfounded. Despite being an articulate defender of progressive policies, it has become clear that the Congressman was a fully engaged politician.
Here is yet another instance in which the cover-up proved far worse than the crime. Early on Weiner was accused of sharing lewd pictures of himself. “Lewd” seemed to be something of a term of art, although apparently there is a photo that is more explicit in the mix. Still, the original photo of filled out briefs, the basis of the scandal, would hardly qualify as foreplay in most cultures. Whatever. Still, such sharing is a venial sin, but straight-out lying to blame others edges toward a mortal one. Weiner’s decision was something of a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Had he lied and gotten away with it, that would have been the best of all possible Weiner worlds. The problem is that the worst of those worlds is what happened. Lying and getting nabbed. He made fools of his colleagues and that is unforgivable in politics, and he directed our attention away from pressing matters for more than one wet dream news cycle. The fate of Congressman Weiner is in play, and public attention will not fade until it is resolved through a resignation, through boredom, or through a new crisis. (Pray for a tsunami, Anthony!).
The hysteria is such that now a seemingly innocent connection between the Congressman and a 17-year old Delaware maiden is being questioned by the police. Let’s admit it, the truth is that Anthony Weiner can say with a straight face, “I did not have sex with any of those women.” All the tsuris, none of the tingle.
The dispiriting reality is that discussing policies, even as our nation teeters on the brink of insolvency, is not sufficiently engaging. This is not a new phenomenon. Civil society has never been a seminar room. A careful discussion of the “issues” is not to be found in our history and not in any other society that has an open public sphere. Politics is often a slightly elevated form of gossip. We engage in the personalization of policy, understanding issues through the character – and hypocrisy – of their proponents. And it is here that Weiner is doing so much damage to the progressive cause. He personifies the swamp that Nancy Pelosi once promised to drain. As a friend said, rather than drain the swamp, Weiner swamps the drain.
Perhaps it is unreasonable to think that a large and robust public will ever have a profound debate on the debt ceiling or on Medicare reimbursements. We are not experts, after all. Still it is dismaying that so often the discussion zips to whose zipper is undone, ignoring our collective futures.
Today the Congressman has a choice: will he resign or will he be a punchline? Perhaps he can tough it out (as Barney Frank, David Vitter, and Bill Clinton did), but he harms his cause. As long as he is in Congress, Republicans will not let Democrats forget. Democratic leaders from Nancy Pelosi on down, now calling for Weiner’s resignation, realize this all too well.
Weiner’s fundamental flaw was in embracing the “I’m so special law.” After his New York Congressional colleague Representative Chris Lee was forced to resign over his own hunky photo, one might imagine that politicians would recognize that at least that deviance was off-limits. But now, Anthony Weiner knew, just knew that the rules didn’t apply to Queens.
Neither Lee nor Weiner quite reach the charmed scandal circle of Arnold or Dominique, much less the Sultan of Slime, John Edwards, but they rank high on the ick scale. While ickiness has its appeal in a gossip economy, it distracts us from the business at hand. What might be comic relief becomes slapstick.
The worst deception is that one can have it all. This is the belief that one can create policy and have a rockin’ good time. Weiner apparently thought that he could be in a graduate seminar and a happy home at the same time he was in a junior high locker room. Fantasies of omnipotence have their charm, but they also have their price.
That Weiner has a psychiatric disorder that could explain his behaviour is laughable. This seems to be nothing else than a case of weakness in the face of the multitude of temptations that anyone with the of that being a US congressman faces. Certainly Weiner must think he was “special”, but its hard to imagine how he possibly thought he could get away with what he did, or any public representative could, given that their personal lives are in fact so vulnerable to being fodder for the media.
I had turned the TV and cable and internet off for a few days. Sometimes it is good for my little family. When I turned it back on, well, I had a big laugh— between Colbert and JS and Bill Maher and the actual pictures. I did not know if Weiner was married, so I had to look it up. Too bad, I thought. And then I caught myself—- this is funny stuff and AW did step in it again and again and the satirists were all over him and all over the media for letting AW’s weiner take over the news. That said, let’s face it, given the public that we are, there was no graceful way for him to shrug it off as immature. There was no way out for AW. He was to be ridiculed, exiled, sent to political Siberia for sexting. What we (or at least I) worry about my kids doing (not yet, they’re ten, but I worry).
And a lot of people must do this or we would not have a word—- sexting—-for it. And politicians are people— the dialogue was like bad porn talk and the pictures, well, they could have been worse. I have not gained any respect for AW, don’t get me wrong, but again I did not start with any. But isn’t there something oddly prurient about how obsessed we get with other people’s sex lives. And not just on the right. And would it be news if he wrote it to his wife or he was not married (so no one could play around with his abuse of the sanctity of marriage—- and use that against him). And why do we give it more than a side note? It does not help his family. If this is his political death, we don’t have to hungrily expose all of the details of the corpse.
Are we all getting in touch with our inner Kenneth Star? Let’s detail someone else’s sex life it takes 500 pages or 5 days of TV and in this case, it has the odd honor of not being sex so much as foreplay without any touch. Naughty talk. Let me jumpcut and see if this makes any sense: right after the Monica scandal broke with Clinton, everyone on the left had had it with him, they were disgusted; they wrestled to figure out why he did it, etc. They wanted a rational and public answer to an irrational and intimate urge and action. Guess what, no one ever got that satisfaction and no one will get it with Weiner. You just take it at face value, for about 5 minutes and move on.
And then, yes, discuss the real issues. We have enough problems with the crazies on the right running for office and an economy that seems to be in a permanent slumber. We need to rethink our relationship to an entire swath of the world— I do think this is getting done and I think AW is a temporary sideshow but I am interested in why we get so damned into these sideshows. Maybe if we gave it a big “so what” shrug of the shoulders and moved past it without getting tripped up in it we would look more like the adults we are. I mean, really, a politician caught with his pants down—- next.
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And from a not so different angle, I have had it with knowing everyone’s business. When the Arnold scandal broke, my first thought— and I am not trying to sound holy; like I said, I got a huge laugh out of a lot of the AW stuff before I thought about how much it dominated political discourse—- none of my business. I do not want to be invited into anyone else’s bedroom. Not my business. There must be a way to let people fall from grace and then just give them some privacy.
On a lighter note, I’m not sure that I understand the logic of all of this. If someone is an exhibitionist in the material world, it is a crime. If someone is an exhibitionist in the virtual world it is no big deal. Let’s let that go for a minute. Now for the more serious note. I have rarely seen a politician invite one on one face to face interviews and lie so convincingly and with such sincerity. This demonstration becomes a headline for distrusting politicians. By the way, in the private sector, if this was an executive or a representative of a company, in most cases he would be dismissed. Perhaps he would be given some employee assistance to deal with his issues. People have toyed with an honor code for politicians — some colleges have them,and variations of them exist at military academies. I doubt that one would ever be adopted for politicians, because, I fear, most might fail. What a sad commentary on the way politics is conducted.