In a message dated 6/3/03 12:32:32 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: >Steve Miller wrote: > >> Maybe what angers voters is not the scandal, but hypocrisy. Someone >who is >> perceived as "liberal" on social issues is less of a hypocrite for having >an >> affair than is someone who runs on a "family values" platform. > >Gary Hart was a liberal in good standing, but he is the textbook case of >a politician ruined by a scandal. Clinton is probably a bigger >hypocrite given his effort to co-opt the family values stuff.
In all fairness Gary Hart was a pro-gun, pro-free-trade Democrat from Colorado (where I lived at the time) and thus was not a libera in good standing. Leaders of the liberal East Coast and Midwestern Democratic Party bitterly resented Hart's positions on the issues and their allies in the news media took Hart apart over his perceived infidelties even as they apologized later for Clinton's. Which brings up another theory on why some politicians resign over scandals and some don't: that the mainstream news media has a heavy influence on public opinion, and that the same news media tend to favor liberals over conservatives, such that someone perceived by people in the media as conservative gets roasted while someone perceived as liberal gets cover sympathetically. LIkewise Bobby Byrd, kind of Democatic party pork-barrel, gets a total pass on having actually belongs to the KKK, while Trent Lott gets roasted for making one complimentary comment about Strom Thurmond's presidential bid made before most of the current population was even born. David Levenstam
