Sex Americana:
Infidelity is no longer a career-killer for politicians. But weirdness, mendacity and ineptitude just might be.
Infidelity is no longer a career-killer for politicians. But weirdness, mendacity and ineptitude just might be.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204120604574252223853818460.html#mod%3Drss_Today
By GERARD BAKER
Familiar as it was in its essential plot, the agony of Mark Sanford this week was curiously singular in its theatrical detail.
Sex has upended so many political careers in the last few years that we have become dully inured to the tableau of staged contrition by which the fault is confessed to the world. Whether the backdrop is Washington or Trenton, Boise or Albany, the script is always the same.
But in Columbia, S.C., last Wednesday, a week of surreal small-state misadventure was fittingly capped with a press conference that might have been scripted by David Lynch, with its mysterious, murmuring stream-of-consciousness observations about life and love.
There was, for once, no adoring wife, standing by her man, gazing dewy-eyed at the flawed hero. There was no attempt by the sinner to explain his sin in artfully phrased self-exonerations; no references to some inner demon, an abusive father, an addictive personality or the indescribable pressures of working so hard for the good of the American people.
There were instead some cringe-making, if honest, excursions through the cheap literary landscape of forbidden love (“the odyssey that we’re all on in life is with regard to heart”); a little homespun moral theology, (“God’s law indeed is there to protect you from yourself”), and, with its hemispheric wild-goose-chase subplot, from Appalachia to Argentina, an inescapable sense of borderline insanity about the entire event.
For all the talk of yet another politician dragged down by an uncontrollable libido, it may well be the sheer strangeness of Mr. Sanford’s behavior, rather than his original sin, that will do him the most political harm. MORE AT THE LINK ABOVE
By GERARD BAKER
Familiar as it was in its essential plot, the agony of Mark Sanford this week was curiously singular in its theatrical detail.
Sex has upended so many political careers in the last few years that we have become dully inured to the tableau of staged contrition by which the fault is confessed to the world. Whether the backdrop is Washington or Trenton, Boise or Albany, the script is always the same.
But in Columbia, S.C., last Wednesday, a week of surreal small-state misadventure was fittingly capped with a press conference that might have been scripted by David Lynch, with its mysterious, murmuring stream-of-consciousness observations about life and love.
There was, for once, no adoring wife, standing by her man, gazing dewy-eyed at the flawed hero. There was no attempt by the sinner to explain his sin in artfully phrased self-exonerations; no references to some inner demon, an abusive father, an addictive personality or the indescribable pressures of working so hard for the good of the American people.
There were instead some cringe-making, if honest, excursions through the cheap literary landscape of forbidden love (“the odyssey that we’re all on in life is with regard to heart”); a little homespun moral theology, (“God’s law indeed is there to protect you from yourself”), and, with its hemispheric wild-goose-chase subplot, from Appalachia to Argentina, an inescapable sense of borderline insanity about the entire event.
For all the talk of yet another politician dragged down by an uncontrollable libido, it may well be the sheer strangeness of Mr. Sanford’s behavior, rather than his original sin, that will do him the most political harm. MORE AT THE LINK ABOVE
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