The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate by Marjorie Williams

Author:Marjorie Williams [Williams, Marjorie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Essays, Literary Collections, Non-Fiction, Political
ISBN: 9781586485412
Google: 0hA5DgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B003P9XDC0
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2007-03-29T23:00:00+00:00

I kind of think it might be unfair to imply otherwise.

Anyway, I may be wrong, but I think we should try to play it fairly straight.

What do you think?

Marji

—January 14, 1991

WHY CHARACTER MATTERS IN POLITICS

Pity the politician, beset by sharks and vultures, fanatical reformers and a moralistic press. For at least a decade, it’s been open season on anyone foolish enough to run for office or serve in government—an age of “mindless cannibalism,” in the words of former speaker of the House and one-time entree Jim Wright.19 Or so say Suzanne Garment20 and Larry J. Sabato,21 lending their very different voices to the chorus of analysts who have lately specialized in second thoughts about the cloud of scandal that enshrouded the Reagan administration and then drifted down Pennsylvania Avenue to engulf the House leadership22 and the Keating Five.23 Their books both argue that the ethical, financial, political, and sexual scandals of recent years represent a kind of hysteria, and that Americans in general and journalists in particular need to reevaluate how far they are willing to go in judging the human creatures elected to govern us.

But their books offer very different explanations. Sabato’s, devoted almost exclusively to press coverage of political scandal, simply argues that the press has become too prosecutorial, too herd-like, and insufficiently respectful of politicians’ private lives: “The press has become obsessed with gossip rather than governance; it prefers to employ titillation rather than scrutiny; as a result, its political coverage produces trivialization rather than enlightenment.”

Garment makes a more sophisticated, more provocative argument that the entire political culture of America has shifted so that its components perpetually collude to produce scandals—among other things—as a distraction from having to produce intelligible policy. It’s not that politicians have become more corrupt, she writes; it’s that we have become a nation of goody-goodies. “Today’s myriad scandals come in much larger part from the increased enthusiasm with which the political system now hunts evil in politics and the ever-growing efficiency with which our modern scandal production machine operates.”

She details this apparatus at length, including the investigative and prosecutorial machinery within the government: the Office of the Independent Counsel,24 the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, the ever-swelling oversight committee staffs on Capitol Hill, and the agencies’ inspectors general. Outside, the public advocacy groups have grown adept at feeding journalists leads and information; the post-Watergate rules and regulations police everything from political contributions to revolving-door employment to financial disclosure. New mores allow reporters to cover issues and events formerly off limits—or to cover familiar areas of politicians’ lives with a new kind of skepticism.

The crux of Garment’s argument is that each of these new inventions or developments feeds the others to create a vicious cycle of perceived corruption, voter mistrust, and ever-closer regulation:Out of distaste with the grubby realities of democratic politics, recent reformers managed to weaken those centers of power, like political parties, where much of the fundraising and favor-giving in politics once took place. Today, such activities must be more closely attended to by individual officeholders themselves.

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