The Absurd Report

Why did Eliot Spitzer go down so quickly, while Bill Clinton managed to hang on indefinitely? A tale of two zipper problems.

Undoubtedly the scarcest commodity in American political life, with its sky-high levels of partisan polarization and its cable-news-driven incentives toward oppositionalism and contrarianism, is unanimity of opinion. So maybe the most astonishing thing about the Eliot Spitzer self-immolation was the gusher of agreement that it brought forth from all sides, especially on two points. First, there was the unalloyed shock that, of all people, Spitzer—that storied crusader against Wall Street corruption, that tireless scourge against all manner of malfeasance, that embodiment of political rectitude—could possibly have been engaged in transgressions so tawdry and venal, so reckless and just plain dumb. And second, there was the insta-verdict about what he had to do: apologize (as profusely as possible) and resign (as quickly as possible).

But the long and endlessly entertaining history of political jiggery-pokery suggests that neither of these reactions should have been so automatic. The list of pols caught dabbling with ladies of the evening is not short and includes such familiar names as daytime-TV misery exploiter Jerry Springer (back when he was a city councilman in Cincinnati), toe-sucking strategist Dick Morris, and Louisiana Republican senator David Vitter. Even lengthier is the list of braying moralists—Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ted Haggard leap to mind—whose libidinal follies laid them low. Indeed, I’d go so far as to posit a General Theory of Sexual-Political Perversity: It’s always the most sanctimonious public figures who have their schlongs in the wrong places.

That Spitzer proved to be no exception to this theory owes much, I suspect, to the particularities of his vanities. Here you had a guy who saw himself as a Jewish Kennedy in the making—combining the dash and idealism of John with the self-righteous ruthlessness of Bobby—

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