Gil Smart leads off this Sunday News column “The right’s law of the jungle” with the off hand (sic) remark “Elliot Spitzer — who would have received my vote for president but for his hooker problem — had an excellent piece at Slate.com last week on what he termed the “Republican war on the weak.”
Whether Smart means he wouldn’t vote for Spitzer as president because of his “hooker problem” or whether Spitzer would not be a candidate for president because of it we cannot tell. Hopefully it is the latter.
Leaders are not like most other people. They often have been born with great drive and intellect and, as a result of personality and sacrifice to work, have not found fulfillment in their early social life and marriages. In Muslim cultures (and Morman historically) this can be resolved through taking a second wife and hundreds of millions perceive this as normal. Until recent generations in the USA, no public attention was paid to extra marital relationships which, in fact, tend often to provide a safety valve and help maintains a cohesive and rewarding family unit.
We suspect that male leaders are driven by larger amounts of testosterone which studies have linked to aggressiveness. Also successful males are attractive and have the resources to pursue their lusts or their passions.
So we often face a middle age crisis… a time when we are torn between loving relationships at home and perhaps the first time we have truly fallen, head over heels, in love. It comes… it goes. Sometimes damage is minimal; often it is considerable, even disastrous. But for some it is part of the human experience and maturation. Perhaps it makes many of us better and wiser.
So let’s not discard Elliott Spitzer to the scrap heap of history because he had a public ‘scandal’ during an era of public hissy fits, something that did not attract notice to JFK or MLK, figures so beloved that their initials suffice. For that matter, add FDR!
Get real. Get human. And let’s get on.
So Mr. Field, it is also ok with you, because of Spitzer’s “great intellect”, that he should also get a pass for willfully violating the Band Secrecy Act that prohibits efforts to avoid the requirements of the law; Mr. Spitzer’s department, when he ran the US Attorney’s office in NYC, likely prosecuted regular, dumb ass American’s for violating this law. You have an amazingly elitist attitude.