The redefinitions politics have wrought

Hadley Arkes makes some excellent points here about the ‘new ethics’ of public and private morality as what?…..established by the Clintons…..and played out yet again most recently by the Spitzers. 

Namely…

What happened to chivalry and, yes, manliness?

He makes a good case for taking this question back to the beginnings of the abortion…er…”pro-choice” movement and seeing that the logic doesn’t hold when carried through to application to men who wind up in trouble.

What we have discovered in the last week is that the Clintons imparted lessons in our political life that have indeed taken hold. That a governor, caught in Spitzer’s scandal, would even think for a moment that he had any honorable course other than resigning, would have been regarded as astonishing even into the 1990’s. That Silda Spitzer could have urged toughing it out would indicate that she is the child now of another, newer ethic. Is the calculation here that the family itself had a better chance of weathering the scandal if the husband succeeded in holding to political power? Is the family to be judged, not by the ethic it exemplifies — or degrades — but by the political position it may still command?

Or is the playbook really that of Hillary Clinton? All of the talk about standing by your man was so much persiflage, self-serving banter. She had invested in him, she had stock in him. If he went down in impeachment, that would put the mark on the whole family; it would have foreclosed her political life. That she could be elected to the Senate and be the candidate to beat for the presidential nomination are themselves signs of the stunning success of their judgment and their tenacity.

Tenacity, no question. Judgment, open for debate. Calculation is more the word.