Political comebacks

No human being is so bad as to be beyond redemption, Gandhi once observed. In the United States, a number of disgraced former politicians are putting that observation to the test as they mount what appear to be successful comebacks.

Of course, we are not talking about monsters like Hitler or Stalin, but still, there is no doubting the enormous capacity of human beings to forgive.

How else can one explain the resurrection of such politicians as former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, and Eliot Spitzer, the former New York governor, all of whom were considered politically dead not too long ago?

Sanford resigned in disgrace following an affair with an Argentinian woman, but sins forgiven, he made a remarkable comeback earlier this year, winning a Congressional seat.

Weiner left Congress similarly tainted after explicit photos of himself he sent to a number of women became public, but is now the leading candidate to replace outgoing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Spitzer was the man who cracked down on prostitution but was caught with call girls. His reputation in tatters, he resigned five years ago, but announced recently that he’s in the race for comptroller of New York City. One recent poll shows him in the lead.

Should politicians be disqualified from jobs they are good at simply because of their private peccadillos?

The list of politicians behaving badly includes such notables as former Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who was arrested for “lewd conduct” in a men’s restroom, and eventually left the Senate; now Louisiana Senator David Vitter, who, accused in a call-girl scandal in 2002, withdrew from that year’s governor’s race, only to resurface and win a Senate seat in 2004. In 2007, he was caught up in an infamous Washington, D.C. prostitution scandal, but with his wife by his side, Vitter publicly apologized for his indiscretions and asked for forgiveness. He went on to win re-election in 2010. Then there is Bill Clinton, who was impeached as a result of the Monica Lewinsky affair, but we know that it didn’t stop him from winning a second term, and going on to become a revered elder statesman.

In Canada, we don’t have as many tawdry tales of infidelity or sexual impropriety, in part at least because the media culture traditionally frowns on reporting them. One of the rare exceptions was during the 2010 Toronto mayoral race when NDP rising star Adam Giambrone quit after he admitted to lying about his sexual escapades with many women. He is staging a comeback as the NDP candidate in next month’s Scarborough-Guildwood byelection.

Perhaps the more notorious scandal — or non-scandal — involved former Public Safety minister Vic Toews, whose extra-marital affair with a younger woman was spilled to the public by Liberal staffer Adam Carroll. The information, gleaned from Toews’ messy divorce, was well known to the Ottawa parliamentary reporters, who mostly turned a blind eye because they deemed it a private affair. It didn’t matter that Toews had set himself up as a man of family values, who hailed marriage as a sacrament, and still fathered a child out of wedlock. There is Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, of course, but his problems relate to alleged drug use rather than infidelity.

Sex and politics are a very combustible mix that wise politicians avoid. But the big question is: Should politicians be disqualified from jobs they are good at simply because of their private peccadillos? Should it matter if no crime has been committed?

There certainly is a good argument to be made that, if you are a married politician who covertly pays prostitutes, you bring your own character and moral fibre into question. And if you are a politician who, for instance, rails against homosexuality and you are caught soliciting in a men’s bathroom, you have to be exposed for your hypocrisy. But where should the line be drawn?

In the U.S., where they operate on the principle that politicians have no private lives, everything is fair game. Here in Canada, we tend to believe that while politicians are public people, their personal lives are private. Canadian media — rightly or wrongly — often err on the side of caution, holding that unless a politician’s private life affects his or her ability to do the job, it is no one’s business. The lesson from the U.S. though, is that politicians caught behaving badly need not lose hope, because people will forgive. Indeed, politicians making a comeback after scandal might even benefit from name recognition.

Second chances can work out well, but the public’s capacity to forgive and forget might not always be a good thing.