Why are we surprised that politicians cheat? And why we should care.

Cheating bothers me, a lot. But beyond the actual marital infidelity we've seen from politicians such as John Edwards, John Ensign, and Mark Sanford, what really bothers me is lying, hypocrisy, hubris, narcissism, privilege, and paternalism. In short, the idea that the rules that apply to the rest of us don't apply to them. This raises the "private" behavior of these elected public leaders (current, former, and aspirational) to the level of something that we should all care about. After all, these men are making the laws that govern our lives.

I believe that the behavior of these individual men reflects a larger belief system that underlies powerful political philosophies, namely the conservative movement. The neo-conservatives of the 1950's and beyond, including Bush-era leaders such as Paul Wolfowitz, followed the ideas of Leo Strauss, "a philosopher who believed that the elite should use deception, religious fervor and perpetual war to control the ignorant masses." Many of these leaders who profess a strong belief in conventional morality and religion actually believe it's an important way to control the masses, but once again, the rules do not apply to them, the elites. (And yes, among Democrats, we don't always do better. I am still mad at Bill Clinton for behaving like an undisciplined, privileged idiot, and for exponentially compounding his problems by lying.)

We can see this hypocrisy again in the recent reported instance in which anti-abortion politicians paid for an abortion when he caused a pregnancy. Wealthy, elite men have always found ways to procure illegal abortions when necessary in their own lives; it is women, especially poor women, who must be punished for living with the consequences of their actions under anti-abortion laws.

For a truly revealing example of this dynamic of selective morality in a larger context, which relates directly to Mark Sanford and John Ensign, listen to Jeff Sharlet's interview with Terry Gross on yesterday's episode of Fresh Air. (Well worth listening to, whether you download the podcast or sit in front of your computer to listen. It's the second segment in the show.) Sanford and Ensign have been involved with "The Family," a secretive, powerful fundamentalist Christian organization that explicitly believes that they can identify God's chosen ones, elite and powerful leaders whom God wants to rule. And if you are a chosen one, you can be a murderer or dictator (such as Siad Barre in Somalia and Suharto in Indonesia) and still do God's Work. Sharlet said The Family's philosophy/theology is linked to ideas of American power; paternalistic, dangerous, and away from law and regulation. After all, if God is in charge and the hand of God directs the free market and America's imperialist adventures, who needs laws to protect us?

Think this sounds esoteric? The Family's house on C Street currently houses at least five Congressmen. The Family started the national prayer breakfast back in the 1950's, a tradition that continues to this day, accompanied week of lobbying by foreign officials (lots of defense ministers).

So yes, John Edwards, John Ensign, and Mark Sanford, I care when you start acting like Scarlett O'Hara. As Rhett Butler said, "You're like the thief who isn't the least bit sorry he stole but is terribly terribly sorry he's going to jail." Because if your political philosophy and morality applies to me, but not to you, I want no part of it.

For more on this, and why it actually does relate back to our ideas about mothers and fathers, I recommend George Lakoff's work on the Strict Father (conservative) and Nurturant Parent (liberal) models of the world. The Strict Father is an authoritarian leader whose judgment cannot be questioned. "Because I said so" works in a Strict Father household, but a Nurturant Parent model requires more explanation---and more democratic rule--than that.

Lakoff's book Don't Think of an Elephant is pretty accessible, and I recommend it. I had the chance to hear him speak last year, and while he is incredibly professorial in his delivery, everything he said made sense to me. Interestingly, his model explains why such disparate conservative causes including low taxation, referring to our enemies as "evildoers," captial punishment, anti-abortion, and anti-gay-marriage aggregate under the same tent. All have to do with black and white morality, right and wrong, us and them, and living under the rule of a strong father...one who can pretty much do as he wishes behind the scenes. Lakoff is a linguist, and he makes the point that each of us has some elements of the Strict Father and Nurturant Parent models ingrained in our brains. Conservatives have been better than Liberals in finding ways to use this knowledge to get their message across. Fortunately, President Obama is a much more effective communicator than recent candidates were, such as the inscrutable and wooden John Kerry.

The Bush years showed us where the Strict Father model got us. I have grown much more cynical over the years but I do still hope that we can continue to move toward a model of government that is transparent, accountable, and egalitarian in the sense that the same rules do apply to all of us, and that we create laws that respect people's ability to live their lives without requiring a hypocritical, authoritarian thumb to keep us in place.

Swindled by John and Elizabeth Edwards

It's Mother's Day weekend and I wish I were writing about flowers and sweet tributes.

But with all the hoopla this week about Elizabeth Edwards' new book Resilience, in which she tells her side of the story about John's affair, I'm stuck thinking about how angry I am at both of the Edwardses. John primarily, for embarking a destructive, narcissistic path that could have jeopardized the 2008 election for the Democrats, but also Elizabeth for continuing to support his campaign after John's first incomplete confession about his affair with Rielle Hunter. How calculating was it that John "confessed" just after announcing his candidacy, making it harder for Elizabeth to say we have to stop this campaign now? Still, she should have insisted then and there for all of our sakes that he shut it down.

I am taking this personally because I was an early supporter of Edwards' 2008 run, before Barack Obama announced his candidacy. Edwards lives in my home town, and many people whom I admired said he was the real deal. The groundwork for the primaries got into full swing early on here, 2006 if not before. So I made significant personal donations and supported the campaign. What really fries me is that I also encouraged friends and family to contribute. It stings to know I put my personal endorsement behind someone who was such a fraud. I'd really like to get that money back for my friends and family.


I met Rielle Hunter once, June 21, 2006, when I was invited to attend a Dave Matthews Band concert with John Edwards, his daughter Cate, some friends and a small group of campaign supporters. Rielle was there at the backstage reception, introduced as a filmmaker working with the campagin. I think she had just recently arrived in North Carolina. She seemed nice, maybe a little shy or stand-offish, it was hard to tell. Little did we know that she was starring in her own soap opera rather than documenting the campaign.

This whole experience has been a depressing dose of real-world cynicism. When I meet people, I want to accept them at face value. I hate the idea that when I meet a young-ish, hot-ish female campaign worker, I might now think, "Yeah, is she really just a groupie with a token job?"

John's hypocrisy and hubris are astonishing. Power is intoxicating and makes people think the rules don't apply to them. I think there was a belief in the Edwards family, and the campaign, that John was an exceptional human being and the American people could not be deprived of his leadership, no matter what his personal failings were. Bull. That's awfully like the kind of deluded thinking that the Bush administration operated on for eight years.

Elizabeth's interview with Oprah was just sad. Elizabeth has every right to hate Rielle, but there is a child involved (whom Elizabeth keeps calling "it") who deserves to know who her father is. There still seems to be a lot of denial going on, an understandable hope that things are not as bad as she fears them to be, but also a whole lot of wishful thinking that the reality of John fathering a child either does not exist, or somehow would not affect her life directly. (Rebecca Traister wrote very eloquently about this on Broadsheet this morning.)

And what does it say about John, and his campaign staff, that after Rielle hit on John the first time they met, they awarded her a lucrative freelance job that allowed her to travel with the campaign?

Part of why I am drawn in to this story is that I should have known better to be taken in by him. It was exciting to get to know a candidate, and I bought the idea of him as a loving family man. Elizabeth grounded him, gave him substance. But there were signs that this campaign was not for me, and I wish I had heeded them earlier. When I saw their completed 28,000 square foot mansion, I should have thought, "This is completely inconsistent with the theme of fighting poverty," rather than "Well, if he's elected President, this would be the Southern White House." The campaign staff, especially Andrew Young (who is the person claiming to have fathered Rielle's baby) were fond of saying, "You're family," when I knew we were really just donors.

Is this just a rant, or is there a lesson in here somewhere? We'll see where this leads next. Elizabeth has put the scandal squarely in the spotlight by writing her book. Yet the mainstream media seems to be downplaying the fact that a federal probe is underway investigating whether Edwards improperly used campaign funds to pay Hunter. That's the unwritten chapter in this saga which is likely far from over.

Infidelity isn't just about sex, it's about power

I've felt conflicted about writing about the John Edwards scandal. I supported the Edwarss '08 campaign, I have met them both, and I like Elizabeth a lot. I finally got my initial thoughts off my chest earlier this week. I don't want to get bogged down in the details of their situation, but reading the reaction to the news, I feel compelled to write once again.

One reaction to the news has been that the American people are too uptight about sex and we shouldn't be such Puritanical morality police. It seems to me that only men can afford to think that way. To me it's not just about sex but about power. The women I've talked to have all said "How could he do this to his wife, to risk what they have built together?" I am glad to see more female commentators such as Ruth Marcus at The Washington Post contributing their analyses, because it really does look different from our point of view.

Maybe not all women would agree with me on that, but this week I am revising the Mojo Mom chapter on financial and career planning. I have to get across the tricky message that each mother has to create her own safety net that will support her in the case of life's unexpected crises including unemployment, divorce, illness or death.

Not an easy topic to communicate! And in the context of the book I don't want to deliver it as a hammer blow, but rather a realistic, proactive heads-up that we each have to be ready to support ourselves and our families if necessary.

Marriage is an imperfect institution and yes, many marriages end. I have seen it up close and personal from the kid's point of view, as my parents and many of their cohorts divorced. But marriage is still the foundation that many of us have chosen to count on. When couples split up, men tend to do much better financially than women, who may end up with little support, no financial credit for the caregiving they've done for years, and primary responsiblity for the kids. The research documenting this effect is controversial, but even a corrective study said that women have an average 27 percent decline in their standard of living and that men have an average 10 percent increase in their standard of living after divorce. In my own experience, I saw that divorce was highly expensive and disruptive for both men and women, but often the wives were displaced homemakers who had to scramble to find a new job, while the husbands continued on established career paths. The wives has supported their husband's career paths in so many ways that yielded no reward once the marriage ended.

So if a wife cheats, she knows she may be pulling the rug out from under her own life--and obviously creating devastation for her husband and children--I don't mean to condone it in any way. But there is a power differential in many couples: when a husband cheats, he's throwing away her financial security for her. The Edwards affair illuminates this situation into high relief, as Elizabeth so obviously invested in and sacrificed for his ambitions for the benefit of the whole family. Yet he can throw it all away on a whim. This public explosion of a marriage we were invited to admire is a wake-up call for all married women: if it can happen to them, it could happen to me. It cuts through our blissful denial to remind us that we are potential members of a very angry First Wives Club.

Where does this land us? Back at page one of Feminism 101? Into a maze of policy reform to make sure that safety nets work in a way that makes sense in a modern world? Mothers & More reports that The minutes of the Social Security Council meetings held in the late 1930's reveal that Social Security was designed to discourage women from employment, to encourage men to work by linking benefits to income and years worked, and to send a message to women to stay married since their economic security was tied to being a dependent of a wage-earning husband.

I am still trying to process my feelings and thoughts and channel them productively, but honestly, for now I am just pissed.

Why the John Edwards scandal matters

Now that John Edwards has confessed his affair, the blogosphere has stopped talking about why the mainstream media wasn't covering the allegations, and started talking about whether and how it matters.

It matters to me, and here's why.

On a personal level, I feel betrayed as a campaign contributor. Edwards' 2008 campaign was the first I had ever been significantly involved in. I admired his ideas and respected his willingness to bring Progressive ideas to the mainstream Democratic table. Living in Chapel Hill, I had a chance to meet him on several occasions and I thought his charisma would help promote his important causes, ending poverty and establishing health care. Now I know that the money I donated and raised from others may have gone to support his mistress in a well-compensated, fairly bogus job, paying her over $100,000 to make four short campaign "webisodes." Score one for political cynicism.

Knowing that Edwards went forward with his Presidential bid after the affair had not only begun, but had been revealed to his wife, creating a situation that could have cost the Democrats the election had he been the nominee--score a million for political cynicism and anger.

A lot of bloggers say this scandal shouldn't be about sex, but as a woman I feel compelled to point out that the situation does raise every wife's worst nightmare, that her husband would cheat on her and she wouldn't even know it. I mean, this guy was publicly cultivating the image of the perfect husband, and using it to sell his political candidacy, at the same time that he was cheating.

Score one for life cynicism.

Hypocrisy obviously plays a big role in our judgments of Edwards. Edwards himself gave speeches invoking morality: "I want to see our party lead on the great moral issues - yes, me a Democrat using that word - the great moral issues that face our country," Edwards tells the crowd. "If we want to live in a moral, honest just America and if we want to live in a moral and just world, we can't wait for somebody else to do it. We have to do it."

Edwards said of President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal, "I think this president has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen."

If politicians are going to build their politcal platforms on moral issues, then their own internal consistency to those principles is fair to examine.

I find it ironic that I am pondering this story just as I wrote about how turning 40 makes me realize that life's rules do apply to me. John Edwards surely knows on a deep level that this is true of him as well, yet he has escaped into a zone where he has acquired such hubris and arrogance that he thought he could get away with his deception. This seems to be embedded in the very essence of politics, which is what I find truly disturbing. I perceived Edwards' Nightline interview as totally disingenuous, but I did believe him when he said:

Then I went from being a senator, a young senator to being considered for vice president, running for president, being a vice presidential candidate and becoming a national public figure. All of which fed a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe that you can do whatever you want. You're invincible. And there will be no consequences. And nothing, nothing could be further from the truth.

You do have to be pretty arrogant to run for President. Who could really know that they were qualified for such a job? But what will we get from leaders who believe that they can do whatever they want with no consequences--pretty much what we've had for the last 7 and a half years with George Bush. I had hoped that Edwards was a chance to turn the page beyond that kind of illegitimate leadership, but now it is clear that he is not immune to the narcissism and entitlement that comes with political power.

Many powerful men share elements of this core flaw, whether they are Bush administration officials promoting torture or forging intelligence to justify the Iraq war, social conservatives denouncing homosexuality and voting against civil rights for gay people while leading closeted lives themselves, Eliot Spitzer prosecuting prostitution while being a client, or Republican politicians promoting policies that will curtail reproductive rights for American women while knowing that if their daughter, girlfriend, or wife needed an abortion, they could always arrange to get one (see Vice President Dan Quayle and others).

What goes on in another couple's personal life may not seem like our business. But the fact that we are governed by leaders who think that the rules don't apply to them is something that should concern all of us. The consequences of that kind of thought can affect our lives, all the way from most personal decisions we make, to the United States' role on the world stage.

One solution is to get more women and more regular people into leadership positions. I know that is a hug challenge as long as it takes millions of dollars to run for political office. But organizations such as Emily's List and our own amazing Lillian's List here in North Carolina have made a real difference. We have to keep going. National office might be out of the question right now for some Moms, but what about state or local leadership? We need excellent school board members, town council leaders, mayors, and state legislators. And those positions create experience that can leader to higher office later.

For some women, I suspect that the question about entering public life is not so much "Can I do the job?" but rather "Can I stomach the political process?"--the insanity of it all: the money, the media, and the pressures and temptations of power that affect not only men but women as well.

I have House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's new book Know Your Power in hand. I have not read it yet, but I did hear her interviewed on NPR when she talked about how Congress seemed like the ultimate Old Boys' club--Congressmen around the table even had a conversation about childbirth without inviting input from the women who were present! Ultimately though, Pelosi ultimately learned that there is no "secret sauce"--despite the aura and mystique the men tried to create, there is no secret recipe for success.

I wrote in my book Mojo Mom that the world needs your leadership. That was true when the book was new and I believe that is more true than ever now. So I ask each of you to look at what we can do to cook up your own recipe for public engagement.

Moms get political on latest podcast

Check out this week's Mojo Mom Podcast to hear two opinionated political Moms' pre-Super-Duper-Tuesday analysis of the primary season.

John Edwards had just announced that he was leaving the race when I called up Pundit Mom to talk politics. She and I had both been Edwards supporters. Tune in to see what we're thinking now that Edwards is out.

Feel free to leave a comment here telling us which candidate you will be supporting, and why. Comments are moderated, but I am open to civil discussion and truly curious to know how you'll be making your decision. If you are undecided, what factors might motivate you to support one candidate over the others?

You can read more of PunditMom's analysis at her own blog as well as MOMocrats. She also contributes to the group blog at MomsRising.org