Don’t sleep with subordinates. Don’t sleep around with co-workers. Don’t get women drunk for the purpose of taking them home for sex. Pretty simple rules to keep in your personal life. Keeping them won’t insure that you won’t be accused of something, nothing can prevent that if someone else wants to accuse you, but it does a lot for your defense later when you don’t have a string of people coming along to claim that you did something wrong. Look, this can get dicey obviously, most people that were in college at one point or another might have slept with someone, or multiple someones, after a night of hard boozing. That’s college boy behavior though. When you’re a 40 or 50 something year old man, you better have out grown that a solid decade plus ago, or it’s going to bite you in the ass.
I don’t feel in the least bit sad for Eric Swalwell. I’m not in the camp that says believe every accusation reflexively, but I’m in the camp that says you should take it seriously and investigate the claims. Let’s be honest about the Swalwell case, you have four separate women in the initial article, with dates and locations that match their schedule and his, claiming similar things about him getting them trashed drunk and taking them home, or striking up conversations on the internet that turned overtly sexual from professional quickly, claiming fairly similar things. You also have video surfacing of him kissing some woman, reportedly a sex worker, who was not his wife. You have folks, mostly anonymous or at the staff level, in the Democratic Party saying it was an open secret that Swalwell was always hunting for his next fun night in the sack. The most charitable possible read you could grant Swalwell is that someone coordinated these accusations to come out as a political attack on him right in the middle of a run for Governor of California, and embellished his behavior beyond what it actually was. The problem for Swalwell is that his reputation of behavior suggests that the allegations are believable, not to mention the volume of accusations. He says he will fight the “untrue” accusations now, but that he made errors in judgment and so he is dropping out of the race. One would presume that if he’s serious about fighting back, he’ll file suit against his accusers. Let the courts figure that mess out, but my guess is he’ll never file a single lawsuit denying the accusations. The point that we know is that Swalwell’s inability to control his impulses made him a uniquely poor candidate for Governor of the largest state in the union, and he could not continue campaigning as a serious candidate. He made his bed, now he has to sleep in it.
Now, I didn’t just make “Swalwell” the headline, I added the words “Hypocrisy, and the Democratic Party.” There’s a rather deeper argument to be had here about when and how scandals happen, and why they happen. There’s also a much bigger argument to be had about when people should withdraw from public life. Al Franken was knifed up and left for dead (metaphorically) over a photograph in the early days of the #MeToo movement that showed him with his hands hovering over a passed out woman’s breasts. Ralph Northam got caught with an old photo of himself during med school wearing “blackface” and a Klan robe. Tara Reade accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her in the Capitol basement when he was a Senator and she worked on the Hill, an accusation that largely fell apart when some of the locations she described didn’t exist at all and other facts in the story didn’t match. Katie Hill was driven out of Congress for having affairs with staff after her ex-husband released intimate photos and text messages of her with staff members, in what appeared to be a revenge porn case (a judge threw her suit against him and the publishers mostly out, saying it was a public interest story). Andrew Cuomo was driven out of office as Governor of New York after the Attorney General’s office issued a report accusing him of sexual harassment and assault, and not a single prosecutor was willing to take the case, but he nevertheless resigned rather than be impeached and removed. And of course, there was the Bill Clinton case. None of these were handled the same, nor were they the same on their surface. Some of these were shocking and came out of nowhere. Some were well known Washington truths that everyone knew. (As an aside, one of these scandals quite literally partially happened in a room/apartment I used to occupy, at a time I was not in town living there. If you know me, you can ask in private)
I want to focus in on the cases where everyone in Washington knew about these guys, and everyone turned a blind eye until it was convenient to throw the person overboard. Everyone knew Bill Clinton was a dog when he was Governor of Arkansas, then acted shocked when he had an affair with an intern in the White House. Voters knew what they voted for. At least that was all fairly publicly litigated. Democrats in Washington knew about Al Franken’s drinking long before his scandal. Again, as other staff and even “anonymous” Congressional sources have said, they knew Swalwell tried to have sex with or sext any woman he could. Andrew Cuomo’s divorce happened long before he was Governor, and it was well known that he was getting around as a bachelor, and probably even once he was dating later. How did Democrats in Washington know about Eric Swalwell for years, but only 50 or so days before the primary for Governor it becomes public knowledge? So basically as long as he was holding a seat in the House and voting for a Democratic Speaker, no biggie? But when he was potentially problematic in a Governor’s primary we might screw up as a party, now we learn he committed assault. The timing stinks. And well, if he’s horrible now (and as I said above, yeah), why wasn’t he horrible last year, or five years ago, or whenever?
Now look, last point on this- unfortunately voters only mildly care. Bill Clinton had an affair in the Oval Office with an intern and his approval shot up over 60% because voters didn’t want to hear about it and thought Bill was a good President. Democrats have spent years calling Trump every bad name in the book- racist, rapist, traitor- and he has received more votes and a higher percentage of the vote in three straight elections. The truth is that most of America doesn’t really view Washington as an honorable place and is content with the fact that powerful men (and some women) sleep around and do things that they don’t really want their own spouse to do, but let’s be honest, many Americans don’t even leave their spouse anymore for sleeping around. Almost nothing is really a cancellable offense in our society now. You’re either criminally guilty, or you’re not. Some would even argue that getting a Nazi tattoo and stealing from your mother-in-law is A-OK with the voters today. I guess we’ll see about that.
Apocalypse Vibes 