Village Schoolmarm Ethics
by digby
The world is going to hell in a handbasket and Andrea Mitchell is obsessing over the fact that Jerry Brown’s staffer used the word whore and Brown hasn’t grovelled to her satisfaction. She’s brought it up in every segment this morning, she and Chris Cilizza rubbing their hands together gleefully at the prospect of the arrogant plutocrat Meg Whitman winning because she was victimized by some unknown staffer who said a bad word. Cilizza offered the sage advice that a politician must always sincerely apologize to the person leaving no doubt as to his deeply felt personal contrition. (Of course, in the real world of politics that’s total bullshit, but never let that stop the schoolmarms from issuing their useless directives.)
Mitchell also, incidentally, allowed Condi Rice to lie about it, saying that Brown took too long to apologize and then did it only “grudgingly” and “defiantly.” The truth is that his campaign apologized immediately and Brown apologized again in the debate last night. Unfortunately, once you get into the apology game, the Village schoolmarms are never satisfied, even if you publicly flagellate yourself with a cat-o-nine-tails.
I don’t condone the staffer’s use of the word whore obviously, (although the use in this context was metaphorical — as in selling herself to special interests not turning tricks on Wilshire Blvd.) It’s politically off-limits, especially when it’s employed against a woman and the staffer shouldn’t have used the word. But this Villager hissy fit is ridiculous. The state of California is in deep, deep trouble right now and to even spend a minute on something this vapid is truly an outrage. (Even the undocumented maid issue was a bit much, although it did expose the fact that Whitman has been talking out of both sides of her mouth on the issue of immigration, which is a huge one in California.) The Beltway, however, is taking this silly “whore” nonsense to extremes and it’s infuriating, especially considering the hideous treatment they themselves give to female candidates. Their glass houses are lying in shards all over the ground.
I would also just add, for context, the way a different late breaking scandal (far worse than calling a politician a whore for selling out to special interests) in a recent California Governor’s race was dealt with:
Long before the storm, Schwarzenegger had taken steps to insulate himself from the likelihood that his boorish behavior toward women might surface. When the Los Angeles Times did print graphic details from six women five days before the vote, he apologized immediately, if vaguely. Then he went right back to his bus tour and his throw-the-bums-out rhetoric, leaving reporters churning. “Arnold ran a very effective campaign of just saying there’s waste in government, there’s special interests’ influence and there’s job-killing legislation getting passed in Sacramento,” said Bruce Cain, a political science professor at the University of California-Berkeley. “That message drowned out everything else, including the sexual harassment stuff.” The message clearly resonated. Four in five voters interviewed as they left the polls Tuesday rated the California economy poor, and two-thirds disapproved of Davis. But what surprised political analysts most was that 43% of women stuck by the Terminator despite the harassment accusations. And they weren’t light charges. Going back 25 years to as recently as 2000, women said Schwarzenegger had grabbed their breasts, spanked them, pulled up their shirts and accosted them in elevators — all at a time when he reigned as one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures. […]
“Everybody jumped all over this, probably wrongly, as Gray Davis dirty politics, and voters discounted it,” Bowler says. It helped that Schwarzenegger’s aides, including experienced operatives who spent years in former governor Pete Wilson’s administrations, performed what Cain calls “textbook damage control” — then got aggressive. The candidate himself said most of the charges weren’t true without elaborating and blamed dirty politics.
The village press was so thrilled to be covering the big Republican movie star they could barely rouse themselves to ask questions much less call for the smelling salts. IOKIYAR writ large.
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