The Culture of Exposure?

[frigidmagi]

NYtimes

[quote]The most interesting part of my job is that I get to observe powerful people at close quarters. Most people in government, I find, are there because they sincerely want to do good. But they’re also exhausted and frustrated much of the time. And at these moments they can’t help letting you know that things would be much better if only there weren’t so many morons all around.

So every few weeks I find myself on the receiving end of little burst of off-the-record trash talk. Senators privately moan about other senators. Administration officials gripe about other administration officials. People in the White House complain about the idiots in Congress, and the idiots in Congress complain about the idiots in the White House — especially if they’re in the same party. Washington floats on a river of aspersion.

The system is basically set up to maximize kvetching. Government is filled with superconfident, highly competitive people who are grouped into small bands. These bands usually have one queen bee at the center — a president, senator, cabinet secretary or general — and a squad of advisers all around. These bands are perpetually jostling, elbowing and shoving each other to get control over policy.

Amid all this friction, the members of each band develop their own private language. These people often spend 16 hours a day together, and they bond by moaning and about the idiots on the outside.

It feels good to vent in this way. You demonstrate your own importance by showing your buddies that you are un-awed by the majority leader, the vice president or some other big name. You get to take a break from the formal pressures of the job by playing the blasphemous bad-boy rebel over a beer at night.

Military people are especially prone to these sorts of outbursts. In public, they pay lavish deference to civilian masters who issue orders from the comfort of home. Among themselves, they blow off steam, sometimes in the crudest possible terms.

Those of us in the press corps have to figure out how to treat this torrent of private kvetching. During World War II and the years just after, a culture of reticence prevailed. The basic view was that human beings are sinful, flawed and fallen. What mattered most was whether people could overcome their flaws and do their duty as soldiers, politicians and public servants. Reporters suppressed private information and reported mostly — and maybe too gently — on public duties.

Then, in 1961, Theodore H. White began his “The Making of the Presidentâ€

[Mayabird]

Actions are different from words, as I figure it. Sometimes words can be actions in themselves, as in direct insults and so forth, but I roll my eyes whenever there's some video of some politician off the record saying "shit" or something and then a bunch of news bruhahah over it. There are more important things going on.

[Batman]

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, yes, a politician spouting 'family values' and 'morality' has no business ignoring those in his own life.
On the other hand, CAN you be an effective politician in the US WITHOUT doing so?
What are the chances of someone becoming a senator who's admittedly gay, owns up about having an affair with his secretary and wants to divorce his wife, or confesses he sees hookers because he likes anal and his wife won't do it?
Look at the whole Clinton mess. So WHAT if he got a blowjob by Lewinsky. That's between Bill, Monica, and Hillary. It had absolutely NO bearing on how he did as POTUS. Which was, incidentally, the general reaction over here in Europe. Remember what happened in your country?
YES, lying about your sexual mores and pretending to abide by a moral code you don't really care about is WRONG. But at the same time, that seems to be the only way you can get into a position to CHANGE those in the US.

[General Havoc]

We've had governors and congressmen who are openly gay, Batman, and I recall more than a few sex scandals that derailed senior European politicians' careers. If we're to discuss this issue, then "behold the prudish puritan Americans who are so unlike us free-thinking Europeans" is something I'd rather nip in the bud.

Not every American politician runs on a family values platform, despite what you seem to think. John McCain had an affair and divorced his wife, as did Newt Gingritch, neither of which prevented them from being elected. As to Lewinsky, most Americans thought the matter was horribly overblown as well, it led to the end of the Special Prosecutor law. Moreover, Clinton went before congress and lied about what had happened. You can argue that the question was bullshit and that the republicans were on a witch hunt, which they were, but having an affair and perjury before Congress are two vastly different things.

I've read the British and French tabloids. I'll not hear any nonsense about how Europeans are so chill and awesome by comparison to their thuggish transatlantic counterparts. It is not at all unreasonable for us to expect those politicians here who do trade on the family values label to live up to it. Most will not do this, some with good reason, and of those, some will get burned or caught. It happens everywhere.

[Batman]

I freely admit that I was working on incomplete information because I DON'T follow US politics all that closely (heck I don't follow GERMAN politics all that closely) and I'm glad I was wrong about gay/not family friendly politicians making it, and I never pretended that Europe is IMMUNE to that sort of bigotry, or that it shouldn't be exposed when it happens.
But the fact remains that the VAST MAJORITY of the US populace seems to buy into the morality/family values thing so if you want to achieve anything of note as a politician in the US, you have to pretend to abide by it.
And OF COURSE Clinton lied about having an affair. In a culture like yours he HAD to.
'Yeah okay so maybe Bush Jr got thousands of americans killed in a completely pointless war that didn't achieve much of anything and was initiated on false premises to begin with, massively favoured big corporations over the people he's actually supposed to represent, but Clinton HAD AN AFFAIR WITH AN INTERN!!!'
And YES, the general reaction over here when it happened WAS-Um-so?

[General Havoc]

And OF COURSE Clinton lied about having an affair. In a culture like yours he HAD to.

Please show me the German President or Prime Minister who openly admitted that he was having an affair, and had everyone be chill with it.

I am so sick of this "American culture is debased" crap when the same exact shit happens in Europe. You think that Clinton would have gotten off easy had he been the PM of Britain? They nearly impeached Tony Blair for having Catholic leanings. Ask Jean-Marie Le Pen if Family values are quaint idiocies not applicable to European politics. In a culture like yours, not only would a similar person have had to lie, the people he lied to would then have turned around and patted themselves on the back for being so much more moral than the "marry quick, divorce quick" speakeasy culture of those ignorant American pigs.

'Yeah okay so maybe Bush Jr got thousands of americans killed in a completely pointless war that didn't achieve much of anything and was initiated on false premises to begin with, massively favoured big corporations over the people he's actually supposed to represent, but Clinton HAD AN AFFAIR WITH AN INTERN!!!'

Bush ended his term with an approval rating of 19%. Clinton ended his with 60%, despite the Lewinsky thing. I think the record would therefore show that most people over here did not base their decision of Clinton's worth as a President on whether or not he could keep it in his pants. It was a concern for many, yes, but it was not the same thing as George W. Bush. At risk of disabusing you of your no-doubt cherished view of America as a land of prudish idiots, most people over here do not consider Bush to have been a better President than Clinton, and those few who do, do so generally for political reasons, not sexual ones. I'm not gonna deny that there were people who were legitimately shocked and felt he should have been thrown out, but the vast majority of Americans felt something between disappointment to indifference to shock at the President's appalling lack of taste.

The vast majority of the US buys into the morality thing, yes. So does the vast majority of Europe. So, in fact, does the vast majority of humanity. We define our "morality" clauses differently perhaps, but when the President has an affair, we do view it as a matter of some national interest. For all their protestations to the contrary, I do not believe that the Europeans view matters any differently as a whole. Recall that at the same time as the Lewinski scandal, Britain got the lovely Back to Basics campaign, a public morality campaign that resulted in more than two dozen major sex scandals that sank the Tory party for a decade and a half. (An overstatement, yes, but it certainly contributed).

Clinton never had to resign, for all the bullshit he was put through. Ask Tim Yeo and the Earl of Caithness about how permissive Europeans are when it's their own politicians sleeping around.

[frigidmagi]

Quick sidetrip, it's fun to note that Jr holds the record for highest Presidential approval (September 12th 2001) and lowest approval rates (most of 2007 and 2008). The man literally threw away the support and good will of the American Public and the world. Not something you see often.