May 8, 2007
Gary Hart Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:30 PM EST Today’s lead piece on this website, by John Steele Gordon, is titled “Gary Hart’s Monkey Business: How and Why a Candidate Got Caught.” Monkey Business, as Mr. Gordon points out, was the name of the yacht on which Hart was photographed with a woman to whom he was not married. The photographs appeared after the press had staked out Hart, after getting a tip that he was having an affair, and after reporters had seen the woman emerge from Hart’s townhouse. My memory is that when the press could not immediately prove that Hart had slept with the woman, a reporter asked him whether he had ever slept with any woman to whom he was not married. Hart, if I recall correctly, was understandably flustered when asked this question. Mr. Gordon concludes by noting, I think correctly, that “his political career ended because he failed to realize that the rules of the game with regard to the private lives of politicians had also fundamentally changed, thanks to the debacle of Watergate.” It would be nice if we could figure out how to restore the older rules. I think a politician’s sexual life is none of my business, any more than mine is of a politician’s. I find it disgusting that the press hounds politicians about legal aspects of their consensual sexual lives, and does so with orgiastic hypocrisy, claiming some purpose higher than boosting circulation by appealing to salacious interest and Grundyism. The First Amendment is normally taken to guarantee the press’s right to so invade the lives of politicians, so European-style privacy laws will not, apparently, survive judicial scrutiny. Here’s what might work: A rich and public-spirited citizen could endow a foundation to fund the similar hounding of reporters who write such stories and editors and publishers who print them. I think something like this briefly flared up, on a purely volunteer basis, during the hounding of President Clinton, when the sexual irregularities of a few reporters (and Republican elected officials) were circulated by some sauce-for-the-gander types. All of those thus exposed were outraged, but a few of them also shut up. A $100 million endowment, to fund absolutely tireless gossips who would be restricted to violating the privacy only of those who had cast first stones, but who would then hound such types to the grave, would be money well spent. This would not work with hard core exhibitionists, and we have a few exhibitionist-moralists in the press, but we do not have too many. People who exult in invading other people’s privacy are nonetheless generally more chary of seeing their own private lives on public view.
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