The long fall from perfection

Americans always start with the assumption that their elected officials, and others in leadership office, are saints. Maybe it is because of our cultural faith in goodness, or maybe we are just generous. How much easier, however, and more practical, the American experience would be, if we just turned the assumption around, and looked at any candidate for office, high or low, as a no-good, immoral, cover-your-ass son of a bitch. I made the switch even before Bill Clinton started lighting up Monica Lewinsky with cigars. I believe my original thoughts on the subject date clear back to Richard Nixon and Watergate. But I didn’t follow through on them – I let myself believe that the Nixon immorality must be unique – until the late 1980s, several highly placed scandals later, when I picked up the paper one morning and looked at a photo of Donna Rice sitting in Gary Hart’s lap. No more, I said. No more permitting my faith to be blind-sided by Donna Rice, or Fanne Fox, or Elizabeth Ray, or any other anonymous figure from the boobs and bribes school who, if it hadn’t been for Spiro T. Agnew or Gary Hart or Wilbur Mills or Bill Clinton would have worn their anonymity to the grave. That same day, I penned my bottom-up manifesto. I argued that any American male over the age of 25, who had been to four years of college, already possessed an inventory of experiences that made him unfit for high office, if and when discovered. Thus it was natural to expect the worst of a candidate, and let himself prove himself upward. Those with silver linings in their clouds would naturally emerge from the morass, and the electorate could appreciate the brightness of the silver lining without losing sight of all those clouds, which would soften the fall, if ever it came. How unnatural, meanwhile, to assume abiding goodness in a candidate unless he could prove he had been plucked from school no later than puberty and educated in a convent where media, coeds, and other temptations of the flesh were not available. Because of that, I can assure you right now that there are things about Barack Obama, about Hillary Clinton, about John McCain, that we do not know, but should be willing to forgive when they are revealed, because we knew they were there all along. The psychology and sociological communities are starting to get on board with this. On television, we are never more than a channel click away from a learned professional weighing in about Eliot Spitzer, the no-good son of a bitch. They opine that he turned out to be a no-good son of a bitch for natural reasons. Surprise! They suppose he is really no different from anyone else, you or I, who might go into politics. No kidding! They suggest that politicians aren’t getting steadily more crass; they always were. It’s just that in today’s media world, they’re just getting caught more often. Astonishing! I am so glad, in this environment, that I am a bottom-upper. Watching the perfect in their falls from perfection was so painful. I still flinch at the memory of Nixon’s resignation speech in August of 1974. But it wasn’t his perfection he fell from; it was mine. Watching the sons of bitches striving to climb out of their primordial moral slime is so much easier. Those who make it are so much more believable. Those who don’t, well, maybe Eliot Spitzer will know better next time. I bet that’s what he’ll say in his book.