I've been waiting for a public discussion of Giuliani's "family values"and here comes one from Slate (posted yesterday) by Emily Bazelon that concludes:-
A past like Giuliani's betrays a level of self-indulgence that, if nothing else, suggests that more fireworks are in store and that the show will be long-running. We'll all be strapped into front-row seats. Giuliani's psychodramas may or may not tell us about the sort of leader he'll be, but we've already been forced to think enough about the sort of man he is. (The prospect of President Hillary Clinton and four more years of her marriage leaves me with a similar sense of dread.) All elections are trade-offs. But when a candidate starts off with a loutish and loathsome past, chances are good that his time in office will be marked by missteps and distraction and that he'll be more irritating and less effective as a result.
Just how much weight do we give to the personal lives of candidates running for public office?
1 comment:
We seem to give an awful lot of weight to people's personal lives, but only as it suits our own purposes. I recently read a news article about a young woman that was denied a teaching credential just a week before graduation because there is one photo of her at a party with a drink in her hand on her myspace page. Our current president is a former drug addict and a young woman can't get a teaching credential because she drank alcohol at a party? We seem to scrutinize people's personal lives in such random ways and with such ambiguous and fluid criteria.
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