May 10, 2007
Gary Hart II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:30 AM EST Like Fred Smoler, I appreciated John Steele Gordon’s feature article on Gary Hart on Tuesday. Hart has distinguished himself in the last couple of decades as one of the relatively few men who continue to think productively about policy after leaving public office. Most of them tend to follow the example of Paul Laxalt or Dale Bumpers, both elected with Hart in 1974, who retired into comfortable lives of consulting and cushy legal work. Hart, whose life is doubtless just as comfortable, has stayed active in the realm of politics and public debate and earned a graduate degree from Oxford in 2001. One reader has noted this in the comments section of this website. It’s remarkable that a motivated and pretty thoughtful person like Hart could have let his presidential aspirations founder on such a stupid mistake. Also, like Fred Smoler, I think it would be nice if the press would be a little more reluctant to pry into the “legal aspects of [the] consensual sexual lives” of public figures. At the same time, I’m not sure I’d agree that “a politician’s sexual life is none of my business, any more than mine is of a politician’s.” I’d argue that there are some situations in which a public figure’s sex life is fair game for journalists. When a politician sets himself up as an advocate of moral virtues or family values, but leads a life that’s inconsistent with his own ethical prescriptions, it should be legitimate for journalists to challenge him. Recent history provides many examples of such hypocrisy. Congressman Steve LaTourette, for example, voted for the Defense of Marriage Act and then divorced his wife for a staffer he’d been sleeping with. This is hardly a vital matter of public concern, but if the press has a right to reveal insincerity and duplicitousness, then LaTourette’s sex life has to be in bounds. More recently, Representative Harold Ford lost a Senate election last November in which he presented himself as a Democrat with traditional social values. When it came out that he had partied at the Playboy mansion, Ford’s campaign unraveled fast. I find it hard to pity him. Investigations of a person’s private life can, of course, become too invasive. But we live in a time when public personalities have to lay open their private lives, and regrettable though that may be, I doubt that it’s possible to turn back the proverbial clock. The best and most realistic hope for the future is that reporters will focus on outing hypocrites, rather than on embarrassing basically decent but flawed people. Some good men will suffer, but if a few more two-faced politicians, like former Congressman Mark Foley or former Kentucky Governor Paul Patton, are made to answer for their errant ways, I’m not sure their constituents will be the worse off for it.
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