Yet another sex scandal

Today's the day of the Mississippi primary but the political spotlight seems to have been usurped by Eliot Spitzer, the governer (for how much longer?) of New York. He's been said to have been hiring prostitutes - at a massive $1000-an-hour - which is all the more ironic given that he investigated prositution cases when he was still New York's attorney general. It's not just a sex scandal case though; it seems likely to escalate into a full-blown investigation of corruption charges and even money laundering.

So how much can we demand to know about the private lives of our politicians? Or indeed, other figures of authority? When I was at high school, the headmaster of one of the schools in our area was nearly forced to resign after copies of Playboy were found in his office drawers. This seemed a little extreme to me, especially since at that particular time a lot of the boys on our school bus were publicly ogling the same sort of magazines. The problem though of course, was that as headmaster as a school, his conduct and moral behaviour would influence not only the reputation of the school, but also all the pupils in that establishment. If a cleaner could find the magazines, what would prevent a student from entering his study and finding them as well? However, knowing a lot of the boys on my bus, they didn't require much 'corruption' in this area and if they did, the older boys were already doing a very good job of it. And to have found the magazines in the headmaster's (normally locked) study, students would have had to be snooping around somewhere they shouldn't have been in the first place.

But this current case, at least in my mind, another matter entirely. Spitzer is refusing to comment on these charges, saying that it is part of his private life, separate from his work and ability to govern. However, Spitzer has based his political reputation on his intentions to stamp out corruption and bring a high standard of ethics to New York politics. This goes down to the issue of trust and whether he can deliver the promises he made to the citizens of New York when he was voted into his post. Using prostitutes is one thing (not that I condone it, but that's a different issue), to cover it up and use state money to arrange these meetings is another.

Not that it's entirely all that surprising to the American political news reporters. It's only been a few years since the governer of New Jersey, James McGreevey, had to step down after having a homosexual affair with his state's head of Homeland Security. Mark Foley had to resign from the House of Representatives in 2006 after he was found to be sending 'sexually explicit' text messages to teenage male interns in the House (which I think is worse). And of course, there was that high-profile case of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky several years ago, when he was still US President. I wonder how long it'll be before that case gets dragged up and used in negative publicity against Hillary Clinton, with this political sex scandal case emerging at such a crucial time in the election process?

Of course, American politicians don't have the monopoly on sex scandals. Plenty of UK MPs have been thrust under the spotlight over the exposure of affairs and the use of prositutes, or indeed, 'rentboys'. The question we have to ask is whether or how much their conduct in their 'private' lives affects their work and standards, and our perspective of them and their suitability as decision-makers for our country. A lot of it depends on the nature of the 'indiscretion', the legality of it (for example, an affair with someone not in the political or business sphere is very different from someone who's a subordinate you've just promoted!), and also how honestly and well the politician deals with it once it comes out under the public eye. In the case of Eliot Spitzer, having built his reputation on the moral high ground, he may find that the higher you rise, the greater the fall.