One Nation, Under Scandal

The months leading up to a major presidential election are necessarily tense: candidates and party officials, supporters and detractors busy snipping and heaving carnivorously at every opportune political potluck, meet-and-greet, debate, press conference and splashily arranged photo-op. Allegations and accusations piroutette across the headlines, polarizing parties against each other and, this year, even turning typically aligned party members against each other. It’s in in these heated, gestational election months when the parties couldn’t seem further apart, and when heated rifts that have cracked open within parties seem ready to come to a messy head.

It was from the steamed-up climate of this political pressure cooker that the resignation of New York Governor and long-time champion of reform Eliot Spitzer came like a sudden blunt object to the head last week, drawing a frenzy of renewed national media attention, both scooting attention away from (and, yet, somehow, to) this already contentious political race.

Sex scandals in American politics are hardly novel, of course, and they’ve even been known to affect an election here and there. From speculations about John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe to the notorious philanderings of that eponymous Democrat from Hope, Arkansas, it seems like several high profile sex scandals in the recent past, like Mark Foley and Craig David, have barely had time to go out before another blaze has started up somewhere in the distance.

The LC community is no stranger to this phenomenon either this year. In the past year the College has endured two public sexual harassment accusations that have cast a long shadow across an administration and a student body frantically trying to effect change--from an increase in the endowment and the institutional profile of the College, to a drastic improvement of the student center and better funding for student activities, let alone pressing outside political considerations.

And as with any political scandal, more is at stake than just unpleasant attention. The LC institition as well as it students are bound, as is a politician like Spitzer, by a certain amount of public good will and support. When Spitzer sensed his was rapidly collapsing this week, he resigned.

Fortunately, as a relatively low-flying liberal arts institution, LC has the advantage of a few more inches of elbow room before the ravenous jaws of public opinion descend in snapping for necks. But as the political pressure builds, whether in the wake of a sex scandal or a failed college event or just mounting political pressure of one kind or another, and when internal parties just couldn’t seem any further apart, Spitzer might serve not as a moral “lesson” per se, but rather a reminder, however simple, that we’re all on the same team, as LCers and as “politicians” in a larger sense. That is, what unites us as Americans in politics, and as students at an openly political school, and is not just mutual feelings of general liberal good will. It is, rather, scandal itself: cyclical, returning, rearing up when least expect. Red or blue, Clinton or Obama, man or woman. All of us. 1,800 little scandals under god.