When Private Goes Public

Camille Paglia, I am noticing slightly belatedly, turned in a pitch-perfect expression of the problem with the ‘let sleeping adulterers lie’ meme in post-Clintonian political commentary:

As a Democrat who was supporting him until Obama showed his mettle during the primary debates, I was shocked by how badly John Edwards has behaved during the lurid flap over his private life. I’m not surprised and really don’t care that Edwards had an extramarital affair, but what a craven, sniveling little worm he has turned out to be — fleeing into hotel bathrooms, pretending to know nothing about payoffs under his nose, offering a paternity test while the mother bizarrely refuses it, and canonizing his long-suffering wife while doing her dirt. Elizabeth Edwards too has been ethically compromised because of her aggressively sanctimonious defense of her husband’s reputation over the past year. Both of them well deserve their exile from the Democratic convention.

Not surprised, really doesn’t care, but oh, how every act and judgment call and moral disposition that surrounds the affair carries some kind or another of despicable, inexpungable taint! Of course, it’s impossible to ever have this reaction if the news never becomes public. As much as I hate press hounding and paparazzism, the answer to the Edwards Problem is not, contrary to Nussbaumian belief, giving horny young pols a suitable place to ram their rod. Edwards could, but apparently in fact could not, content himself with hookers; did that choice have anything to do with the illegality of prostitution? Or rather with the stunted relationships that it guarantees? I mean this both sincerely and perversely — it’s perilous to try taking even a beautiful, sophisticated, exclusive whore out for a romantic candlelight dinner, and hard also to get out of a a prostitute the sort of bent rise that’s made possible by, say, the gross possibilities of Seducing Miss Lewinsky.