Last week, instead of showing up to his gubernatorial impeachment trial, Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich worked the talk show circuit. Blagojevich faces serious corruption charges, most notably his attempt to auction off Barack Obama’s recently vacated Illinois senate seat to the highest bidder. Yet, the politician dubbed by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart as “Scumdog Millionaire” insists that he’s done nothing wrong—and continues to say so on major broadcast television, time and again.
Most rational humans in Rod Blagojevich’s boat would be less inclined to show their guilty faces in such a highly scrutinized public sphere, but then again, most of us would never let ourselves get there in the first place. This is because most of us are not politicians, and wired more sensibly.
There seems to be a distinct quality that most of us ordinary folks possess, that self-editing aversion to shame that keeps us mere mortals from sunning ourselves in our vices for the world to see. Politicians are an interesting case study, as they seem to disproportionately lack this fundamental behaviour-regulating tick. Political trainwrecks show us what happens when ambition combines with carelessness and entitlement on a massive scale, and they can be tantalizing to behold.
Take, for example, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer. Most of us recall the high-profile media blitz surrounding Spitzer’s revealed penchant for four-figure call girls, which led to his resignation in March 2008. Though Spitzer was eventually cleared of charges alleging his use of public funds as a paid-sex piggybank, one obvious question is left unanswered: who spends $80,000 on escorts and expects to get away with it in the first place?
Then there’s former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, whose list of criminal charges rivals Eliot Spitzer’s escort bills to near epic proportions. In January 2008, some 14,000 text messages between the mayor and his female chief of staff were uncovered which would sully the mayor’s reputation beyond repair. These texts not only explicitly detailed their extramarital affair, but also discussed their use of public funds for romantic rendezvous. In addition, the records showed that the two had conspired to fire the former deputy police chief of Detroit, despite their testimony to the contrary during the course of a public whistleblower trial in 2007. Kilpatrick was also revealed to have used public funds to cover the lease of a personal SUV, along with draining a civic fund to pay for a resort vacation for his family, and funnelling state grant money directly to his wife. The list, unbelievably, goes on.
The most astounding correlation between the blaring indiscretions of these, and most other, political blunderers is not necessarily the moral dispensation required but the sheer brazenness of their actions. Though it may be naïve to hold politicians to a higher moral standard than the rest of us, they should at least do us the courtesy of pretending to have some sense of right versus wrong. As of late, Blagojevich is whoring himself out on Larry King Live, Spitzer’s writing regular columns for Slate.com, and Kilpatrick is laughing off his jail sentence with a public flourish of defiance. Maybe what they ought to do instead is bury their heads in the sand and pretend to feel sorry. Then, they might seem human.
