Cheats can now prosper in the new lovey dovey world of US politics
To understand how an adulterer can now be a presidential frontrunner, we need to peer inside Americans' bedrooms
Pamela Druckerman
Friday September 7, 2007
The Guardian
Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton were a picture-perfect couple as they campaigned together recently. Between political remarks they held hands, hugged and exchanged intimate whispers. And yet even some supporters were surely wondering: how on earth can they still be married?
Hillary Clinton's legendary endurance of her husband's extramarital trysts haunts her candidacy for president. But then, there's no shortage of adultery hovering over this election: Rudy Giuliani's awkward transition into his third marriage; John McCain's overlapping relationships with his first and second wives; and Newt Gingrich's "periods of weakness". Mitt Romney seems one of the few major candidates without marital baggage - save for a great-grandfather who was a polygamist.
Europeans are keen to know who their politicians are bedding, but that doesn't usually sway their votes. Nicolas Sarkozy sailed into the French presidency in May, even though gossip about his marriage is a fixture of Parisian dinner parties. In Britain, political sex scandals seem more like an industry than a moral matter. When newspapers reported last year that John Prescott, then deputy prime minister, had been involved with his diary secretary, it took about a day for the woman to hire a publicist and sell her story to the Mail on Sunday - but Prescott held on to his post for another year. David Blunkett, while home secretary, could probably have weathered the media storm over his involvement with a married mother, who then had his child, if only he hadn't fast-tracked a visa for her nanny.
In the US, the polls seem to be ominous for adulterers. In a Newsweek survey this year, 43% of Americans and more than half of Republican evangelicals said they wouldn't vote for a candidate who had an extramarital affair. A Gallup poll last year found that adultery was seen as worse than human cloning.
So why is Giuliani a frontrunner, with strong support from evangelicals? The answer isn't in the polls, where people say what they think they should - it's in bedrooms. The changing way Americans treat politicians' infidelities reflects the changing way they handle such affairs in their own lives.
Back when John Kennedy took women for a dip in the presidential pool without a peep from the press, Americans didn't automatically assume that cheaters had personality defects. On the contrary, their behaviour could be seen as glamorous or passionate. In 1973, slightly fewer than 70% of Americans said that adultery was "always wrong", compared with 82% in 2004. In the days when most husbands went to work while wives tended house, Americans were more comfortable with the idea that couples might keep secrets from each other; a man could even safely boast about his extramarital exploits. Lyndon Johnson so detested being in Kennedy's sexual shadow that he reportedly said: "I've had more women by accident than he's had on purpose."
America's fidelity rules, for presidents and ordinary people, began changing in the 1970s. No-fault divorce made marriage disposable. And as more women went to work, they had the means to walk away too. A generation of brides and grooms read one another the one-strike rule: cheat, and it's over. Couples therapy created an army of people preaching that an affair is a symptom of other problems, and that healthy couples don't keep secrets. (The new mantra became "It's not the sex, it's the lying".) In 1987, when Gary Hart spent the night with a blonde who wasn't his wife, he was out of the presidential race in a week. A cheating politician, like a cheating husband, was thought to be capable of any manner of sin.
It was no accident that the film Fatal Attraction - in which a man's affair spirals into a killing - came out a few months after Hart withdrew. Hollywood had embraced the new thinking about marriage and added its own twist: there's no such thing as a harmless affair. Aids sharpened the message that "promiscuity kills".
Britain was also waging its own battle with infidelity. Soon after John Major led a "back to basics" campaign in 1993, multiple members of his party were felled by adultery and other sex scandals (some suggested the campaign be renamed "back to my place"). Edwina Currie, who later published an account of the extramarital affair she had with Major in the 1980s, when the two were MPs, told me the British were always more concerned about hypocrisy than the risks of illicit sex. "When a politician in Britain stands up and says 'back to basics, family values', the rest of the nation says: 'Yeah, we'll agree with that. But let's just find out what you did last Sunday afternoon.'"
By the late 1990s, Americans increasingly viewed infidelity as evidence of a psychological disorder, with support groups for "betrayed spouses" and straying "sexual addicts". When Bill Clinton's dalliances with a White House intern became public in 1998, his antagonists in Congress tried to play a primitive game of gotcha. Clinton wisely followed the therapeutic playbook that Americans were following at home. First he confessed. Then he went on tour to apologise. Even the detailed disclosures in the Starr report mirrored the confessions Americans were offering in therapists' offices. Soon after the vote to impeach Clinton, his approval rating jumped to 73%.
The public still wanted to know why Hillary Clinton tolerated her husband's repeated infidelities. Marriage experts were flooded with phone calls demanding to know if the Clinton marriage was merely a political arrangement.
Americans may have now caught up with the Clintons, and could be edging closer to Europeans' more sanguine views on marriage. The latest thinking from American therapists and religious groups is that affairs need not be a marital death sentence. And as the many children of 1970s divorces hit bumps in their own marriages, they are rethinking the one-strike rule.
That, combined with the fact that we have been through it before, means that the death knell is less likely to sound for straying American politicians who confess and repent. This helps to explain why life has almost returned to normal for David Vitter. The senator from Louisiana apologised in July for "a very serious sin in my past" after his number appeared in the phone records of an escort service. But the Idaho senator Larry Craig remains in political limbo after pleading guilty to "disorderly conduct" in an airport men's room - allegedly soliciting sex from an undercover policeman - then claiming it was all a misunderstanding.
Although fidelity isn't strictly required of American politicians any more, a love story still is. In private life, the most accepted excuse for cheating is falling out of love with one person and into love with another. America's presidential hopefuls are taking heed. Giuliani takes pains to show that although the marriage to his current wife, Judith, may have been forged through infidelity, she is really the love of his life. No doubt Bill and Hillary were trying to make a similar point in Iowa. Given the patchy marital histories of many candidates, we can expect lots more lovin' on the campaign trail.
ยท Pamela Druckerman is the author of Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee; a version of this article appeared in the Washington Post.
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