The Vain and the Desperate - How Media Invasiveness Transformed Politics

The Vain and the Desperate - How Media Invasiveness Transformed Politics

Some of the most respected men in American history could not be elected in today's climate.

* FDR had Lucy Mercer as his mistress during his marriage.

* JFK recklessly fucked any woman capable of drawing breath, including the mistress of a Mafia boss, and every reporter in America knew it. Almost all of them kept his secrets.

* Thomas Jefferson - well, you all know this story. He owned slaves until his death, and he had several children with one of them.

If we applied today's rules to those men, none of them could ever become President. Would the country and the world be better if we had elected some bland, sanitized individual instead of FDR or Jefferson?

For that matter, has anyone ever established any correlation between conservative sexual behavior and competency? Not to my knowledge. Some of our greatest leaders have been horndogs, while some of our weakest presidents, like James Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, George Bush and Richard Nixon, were monogamous or asexual. Hell, Hitler was monogamous! The two variables of promiscuity and competence seem completely independent, yet we continue to hold that a great man or woman can be disqualified for his or her private behavior, thus inevitably pushing the blandest mediocrities into office.

This is an article "about a new brutality on the campaign trail, about uncharted frontiers of media invasiveness and about the way both would wind up culling the herd, not in favor of the strongest candidates but in favor of those so driven or vacuous that the caress of the spotlight redeems the indignities of the process."