Vito's Problems and Ours

Another doomed Republican, another sexual surplus and moral deficit:

Rep. Vito Fossella of New York acknowledged on Thursday that he fathered a child from an extramarital affair, answering questions that arose from his arrest on drunken driving charges last week.

“My personal failings and imperfections have caused enormous pain to the people I love and I am truly sorry,” said Fossella, a Republican, who has three children with his wife in Staten Island, N.Y.

But do we care about this? Or do we care about puritanical witch hunts that make it impossible for philandering politicians to do the People’s Work? Who cares about causing pain to the people you love, we’re in danger of saying — what about our pain, we, the constituents? Our sights have been set so low that even top-shelf moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum is reduced to parroting the Clinton Doctrine: who cares what our politicians do ‘in their personal lives’ if they secure the goodies of liberty! Eliot Spitzer, wrote Nussbaum,

one of the nation’s most gifted and dedicated politicians, was hounded into resignation by a Puritanism and mean-spiritedness that are quintessentially American.

My European colleagues (I write from an academic conference in Belgium) have a hard time understanding what happened, but they know that it is one of those things that could only happen in America, where the topic of sex drives otherwise reasonable people insane. In Germany and the Netherlands, prostitution is legal and regulated by public health authorities. A man who did what Spitzer did would have a lot to discuss with his wife and family, but he would have broken no laws, and it would be laughable to accuse him of a betrayal of the public trust.

Goodness. “A lot to discuss with his wife and family?” What a trivialization! What an incredible moral deafness to the reality of adultery, betrayal, and intimacy! To get such language from a moral philosopher ought to trigger spontaneous rounds of flabbergasted scoffing. But instead, we practical moral philosophers of everyday life seem to have convinced ourselves that we don’t have the luxury of counting on our public officials to exercise a minimum of self-control — even if only for the relatively few number of years they’re in office!

Ah, but we live in the era of career politics, you say, and you’ve got me there: how dare I expect, say, Bill Clinton to not cheat on his wife during his entire climb up the ladder of power? That’s a big investment of time and effort he made on behalf of the American people! He’s one of the nation’s most gifted and dedicated politicians! He cared about social justice: so what if he couldn’t even be just to his wife and daughter?

I hope you can see through the sudden forest of punctuation marks that I’m gesturing toward a big difference between puritanical witch hunts and self-respecting standards of self-respect. Someone who fails in their private life like Vito or Bill or Eliot has failed in their public life, because they are the beneficiaries of a public trust which requires them to live out their daily lives during their term in office with an ounce of moral character. It’s clear that many of us now think that a little adultery or drug use does little to impair one’s capacity to succeed in the workplace. But the case of Vito Fossella is especially instructive, here, because it reveals how the adultery and the bastard child and the drunk driving are all part of an interlinked personal problem that does affect his ability to serve his constituents. Rep. Fossella is no victim of a puritan witchhunt. He’s a guy who couldn’t maintain the sort of personal discipline necessary to holding public office. Is that too much to ask? If we answer yes, we’re selling ourselves short — very short. About that, too, we ought to be honest with ourselves. We might just dislike that sensation enough to talk ourselves back into the possibility of public virtue.

And no, I’m not terribly worried that this road leads directly to a puritan police state. Our tolerance for past follies and crimes has hugely ballooned (Obama, Bush) and won’t shrink again soon. And most everyone agrees that politicians who commit crimes while in office ought to be punished, even if the crimes are the consequence of silly laws that ought to be changed. What I’m angling for here is simple: a basic public consensus that if you sleep around on your spouse you are a bad person, and to hell with your future in politics, because we still have enough talent in America to replace you with someone who isn’t a bad person and is nonetheless capable of being a ‘gifted’ and ‘dedicated’ public servant.

And my bottom line concern is that there now too many Americans who think there are now too many adulterers for us to successfully entitle ourselves to that concept of nobility.