Occam’s Razor

What’s a horny politician to do?

Ack! Another politician is caught with his pants down! Just what we needed: a little jolt of scandalous cappuccino to wake us up. After all, the presidential campaign has gotten a bit boring of late. Even political junkies like me are beginning to nod off. What we needed was a distraction. Fortunately, New York Governor Elliot Spitzer provided just what we needed. We learned recently that on Valentines Day of all days he hoofed it down to the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. and had an extremely expensive sexual experience with a very high priced 25-year-old prostitute with the doubtlessly assumed name of Kristen.

Sexual tourists of the nation’s capital will now have to add room 871 of the Mayflower Hotel to their list of destinations. It is about equidistant anyhow from the Tidal Basin (where stripper Fanne Fox and Arkansas Congressman Wilbur Mills were found drinking and driving in 1974) and the Capitol steps (where Rita Jenrette and Congressman husband reputedly made whoopee back in the 1980s). The Mayflower Hotel is also not that far from the Vista Hotel, where back in 1990 former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, married at the time, was famously caught smoking crack cocaine while his “long time female friend” observed. Doubtless, if D.C. hotel rooms could talk, they would be deafening.

I had no inkling that Elliot Spitzer was dealing with a few personal demons. However, I am not surprised. Someone as popular and successful as Spitzer probably deserved a comeuppance of some sort. This man after all was such a phenomenal Attorney General of New York State that to many Americans he was a household name. Unlike some recent U.S. Attorney Generals, he was obsessed with ensuring that the law was vigorously enforced, especially against the powerful. He took on price fixers, securities firms, insurance companies, the record companies and even police corruption in the town of Watkill in upstate New York. If he appeared on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, he need not worry about the thunderous applause, just a chorus of boos. No wonder he was elected governor with almost 70% of the vote.

His record as governor thus far has been a disappointment. With these scandalous revelations, it is an open question whether he will remain in office. Still, Bill Clinton had a rocky start as president too. He eventually won a second term. In spite of his own moral failings, he retired with near record high approval ratings. Perhaps Spitzer’s hesitancy to leave office is that he hopes that some of Bill’s luck will rub off on him. Republicans in Albany who want to impeach him might want to review the political implications of Bill Clinton’s impeachment first. Most Americans feel that moral failings while in office that are not illegal are politically excusable. Thus far, Spitzer has not been charged with any crime.

Why did Spitzer do it? I cannot read his mind but as a man a few years older than he is, I think that I have a good idea. I believe that he did it because like many married men he was not quite satisfied with what he was getting at home. Obviously, I have no idea what his sex life is like. His wife is quite attractive. I think in Spitzer’s mind, once you have made the dubious decision to step out on your wife, having sex with a prostitute seemed the lesser of many evils.

Ironically, if Spitzer were a Shi’ite Muslim in Iraq, he could come to an agreement with a local woman to be his wife for a day, get his rocks off and the clerics would bless it. Alas, he lives in America where unless you are polyamorous or have an open marriage, such options are closed to married people. Having sex with a prostitute can have some advantages. First, you cannot be accused of having an emotional affair. Some women will overlook a sexual affair but will string you up by your heels for having an emotional one. If, like Elliot Spitzer, you spend $4300 for an encounter with a down payment on a second one, you can be accused of being a cheater and wasting a lot of money, but you can at least escape the emotional affair rap.

The sad reality is that if you are a horny married politician your options are very limited. You could come on to that buxom secretary or filing clerk but such dalliances usually turn into steamy emotional affairs that go toxic and then public. That will not do for an ambitious politician, particularly one that looked like presidential material in 2012 or 2016. Besides, you have an image to maintain in the workplace so showing this side of yourself is very risky. You can have an affair with your right hand but that feels like second-class sex. A high-class hooker may cost a ton of money, but they tend to be discrete. That is in part how they command such extraordinary fees.

I hope Elliot Spitzer at least had a trusted partner in crime. I hope he was not dialing for escort services on his cell phone or finding them on Craigslist. I hope he had a way of funneling the money through a third party. Even so, there are risks in these contractual affairs and for a change, he got stung.

I will probably draw the wrath of wives everywhere (and many husbands too) by wishing New Yorkers would cut him a little slack. I felt sorry for Hillary Clinton when her husband’s tawdry oral affair with Monica Lewinski made the light of day a decade ago. At the same time, I did not feel that it diminished Clinton’s competency as president. Like most Americans, I saw his impeachment as a manufactured hullabaloo. If Spitzer ends his political career over this scandal, New Yorkers and Americans will probably be the poorer. His hypocrisy is evident, but we are all hypocrites, just generally in different matters and in different degrees. All of us make mistakes. I think this is a forgivable political mistake. His wife will have to figure out whether it is a forgivable marital mistake.

As I once outlined, there are many reasons for infidelity. This transgression has the hallmark of being one of the more forgivable transgressions. It appears that Spitzer had powerful sexual needs that his wife would either not accommodate or he was too embarrassed to express. I remain skeptical that either sex is naturally inclined toward monogamy. Wives who expect monogamy from their husbands had best recognize that they are fighting Mother Nature. They can reduce the odds by exceeding expectations in the bedroom. If you are a once a week type and he is a once a day type, you might want to find a way to be a twice a week type. If you refuse to do X, Y and Z because you think they are kinky you might want to do your best to do X, Y and Z at least occasionally. Otherwise, particularly if he has a very high sex drive, he may go find X, Y and Z somewhere else. Sexual kinks can have this sort of power and if press reports are correct Spitzer had a few.

As for politicians and sex, while it seems that they go together like bread and butter, I am willing to bet they are no more inclined toward infidelity than the rest of us. Sexual sins seem to be non-discriminatory. If infidelity made people deathly ill, you could not get a room in a hospital due to the shortage of hospital beds. Men like Spitzer who avail themselves of a call girl are bucking the odds. The truth is that while prominent men caught with their pants down make the papers regularly, for a man to cheat, he generally needs a woman. Since most men avoid prostitutes, roughly as many women are having lapsed periods of virtue as men.

Spitzer deserves a political slap on the wrist, perhaps a censure by the State Assembly, and then, like with the Larry Craig scandal, everyone should move on. This is a matter between the Mr. and Mrs. Spitzer. Politicians who actually work for the benefit of the people they serve are rare enough creatures. Spitzer was one of these public servants. There is no point in making them an endangered species for these truly minor kafuffles.

March 11th, 2008 at 08:07pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2008, Sociology | 2 comments

Infidelity: It’s Not So Simple

Prurient Americans (which, frankly are most of us) are waiting breathlessly for the release of Bill Clinton’s tell all book, My Life. Rest assured most of us will not start at Chapter One. Instead we will skip ahead to the part of the story where Monica Lewinski shows up. As you might expect many of the key details (from Clinton’s perspective) have already been disclosed. We learn that once Bill confessed his sins to Hillary he was in the doghouse. Apparently the First Lady can make the President of the United States spend two months sleeping on the couch. We learn that the whole family did counseling. Because we’ve seen snippets of Clinton’s interview with Dan Rather (scheduled to appear on 60 Minutes on Sunday) we learn that Bill dropped his pants for Monica “just because I could.”

It is doubtful that the book would sell quite as well if Clinton had kept his relationship with Ms. Lewinski wholly platonic. It is ironic that his human failing will cause sales of the book to climb into the stratosphere. For all the legal woes and bills inflicted upon him by Ken Starr and the vast right wing conspiracy during his years in office he may end up laughing all the way to the bank.

Clinton’s father died before he was born. He watched his stepfather repeatedly assault his mother. He learned very early to compartmentalize his feelings. He was hardly surrounded by role models during his upbringing. So in retrospect if he had a predisposition toward secrecy and trailer park trash it is perhaps not too surprising. It didn’t help that he was a fairly attractive guy, a terrific public speaker and a born extrovert. Add the title of President of the United States to his resume and if Ms. Lewinski was his only moral failing in office then I frankly give the guy some credit.

As a rule women other than my wife don’t fawn over me. But if I had a 21-year-old temptress willing to perform repeated acts of fellatio on me I doubt I would have held on very long. Most of us guys, when we are only with other guys and after a few beers will candidly admit we are more than capable of such indiscretions. Part of the male brain is wired toward infidelity. It takes repeated conscious effort to live up to our wives’ expectations. Fortunately for us we are rarely in positions of power. Most of us aren’t attractive like Bill Clinton. So his scenarios tend to be hypothetical for most married men. Because we are not alpha males it is easier for us to proclaim our undying commitment to our wives. It’s not that hard to be morally sanctimonious, at least in public, when others in the public spotlight succumb to temptation.

If there is an aspect to the whole sordid affair that really irks me though it is that we quickly resort to stereotypes. Bill was bad for straying. Hillary was good because she didn’t. Monica was a slut and would put out for any guy, not some star struck young lady with intimacy issues. That’s as deep as our thinking goes. Because Hillary held out and Bill didn’t, she is the one with the grievance. She was pure. Bill was Evil. End of public discussion.

This is balderdash. I’ll grant you that there are certain marriages where the wife can make a fairly convincing claim of innocence. We’ve all heard stories of husbands who repeatedly cheat on their wives. At the same time we repeatedly shake our heads wondering why the wives just don’t file for divorce or how they could be so clueless. I think in even the most egregious cases some fault lies on both parties. In the case of the chronically cheating husband the wife was probably more than a bit myopic going into the marriage in the first place.

I can cite the case of someone in my wife’s side of the family. He is roughly Bill Clinton’s age. At the time I first met him he was getting married for the second time. But by that time he had already fathered two children out of wedlock. His father repeatedly cheated on his mother. His father allegedly spent much of his adult life being verbally and physically abusive to them and wrapped up in an alcoholic haze. Wife Number Two was a woman who came from a family of some privilege and money. His wife didn’t learn about much of his sordid past until shortly before the marriage. Yet that did not seem to deter her from marrying him. I don’t know why she married him. Hopefully it was for love. But there were lots of alarm bells that should have gone off. There was one thing though: this in law is a really good-looking guy. We’re talking 9 on a 10 scale, at least. I can’t help but wonder if his looks overwhelmed her common sense. Anyhow, rest assured they have been divorced for some time. Eventually he strayed and hit the booze. She tried to patch things up, but it didn’t work out. He had mentally left the marriage years earlier. And now he is onto wife number three. Last I heard she was still a divorcee and not anxious to get remarried.

There is no way to know for sure the dynamics of the Clinton marriage. But I bet Hillary was more than a little star-struck by Bill. Certainly she knew Bill came from a dysfunctional family. She was likely attracted to him because he was handsome. But I bet part of the attraction was he gave the appearance that he could surmount his past. If so this was a naive assumption. She should have known better. The odds were that if she married Bill she would have many an episode of heartache. Warning flags were there and it appears she chose to ignore them.

Or maybe she figured she could change Bill. This is another one of those fatal mistakes often made by myopic women fixated on one particular guy. I’m guilty of it myself. I have learned the fallacy of this reasoning through the school of hard knocks. No one can ever change anyone. Personal change can only come from within.

Whatever the complex dynamic of the Bill and Hill relationship, Bill’s affair with Monica Lewinski was really a symptom of a larger dysfunctional marital relationship. Hillary was probably clueless. She shouldn’t have been clueless. If the relationship were at the deep enough intimacy level it most likely would not have happened. And if Hillary had reached that inner core of Bill Clinton’s being she would have known who he really was and perhaps never married him. For that she should shoulder some responsibility. I don’t know what kept her busy during the mid 1990s, but I have a feeling she should have spent much more private time with Bill. The work necessary to sustain a rich marriage gives the appearance of being postponed to revel in the thrills of power and prestige.

Hopefully as a result of this encounter their marriage now has that level of intimacy and connection it likely lacked. But somehow I am skeptical. Hillary is a senator and spends at least six days a week in Washington and away from her husband. It sounds like the pattern is repeating itself, except this time there is a role reversal. I hope there is no new Monica Lewinski in Bill Clinton’s future. He’s not quite the Alpha male he was now that he is out of power. But I wouldn’t be surprised if another one turned up in time.

June 19th, 2004 at 11:19am Posted by Mark | Best of Occam's Razor, Sociology | no comments