Politicians are not known for being model citizens. Left or right, if you go into a room full of them, after shaking a few hands, you’re likely to really want to find a restroom to wash yours. Even a casual history buff knows that going back 250 years to the nation’s founding, the stereotype of the sleazy elected official is older than the Constitution itself.
So, this isn’t an issue of good vs. bad. It’s an issue of maturity. Twenty years ago, if you caught a politician with his pants down, literally, he was shamed out of Congress.
In 1987, Democrat presidential contender Gary Hart, a U.S. senator from Colorado, saw his political aspirations go up in smoke when the Miami Herald broke the news that Hart had a “womanizing” problem. The scandal became known as the “Donna Rice affair,” which effectively ended his candidacy and his Senate career.
When all of this became known, Hart did what you’d expect at the time. He quietly took steps to exit the public stage and maintain a lower profile for the rest of his life until today. He’s still with us at 89 years old, by the way.
History is not without its colorful characters. Wilbur Mills was a congressman from Arkansas in 1974 when the U.S. Park Police pulled his car over because it was 2 a.m., and he didn’t have his headlights on. The officer found that Mills was drunk with injuries to his face from a little brawl he had with a Washington, D.C., stripper whose stage name was Fanne Fox.
She was in Mills’ car at the time of the traffic stop. And so, when police approached the car, she did what any self-respecting stripper would do when sitting in a car driven by a drunken congressman who had just been pulled over. She jumped out of the car and into the nearby reservoir that sits in front of the Jefferson Memorial, better known as the Tidal Basin.
The press had a field day with this, and Fox now had a new name – “The Tidal Basin Bombshell.” As polarizing as politics can be, Democrats and Republicans alike saw the story for what it was. An embarrassing scandal that eventually took Mills down and ended his career.
Had this happened today, the Democrats would have painted Mills as almost saintly in his efforts to provide support to a “sex worker.” They would dox the cop who pulled him over, and somewhere along the way, they would have found a way to blame President Donald Trump.
Believe it or not, Mills survived this incident and was re-elected after it, but he lost his clout. His errant ways soon caught up with him, and he faded away in disgrace.
The point is, for better or worse, for Hart and Mills, and other politicians of the era, bad behaviors had consequences, and they paid them like adults. Keep in mind, these were the more extreme cases of political controversy.
Your everyday congressional rep or senator had to actually do something to earn news, not just spontaneously do a selfie video and vomit what was on their minds at the time.
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