What is it about men in politics that leads so many of them to commit embarrassing acts of moral terpitude? Maybe we should all try voting only for women for a while to see if things improve. Or would the good ole' girls, if they ran everything, just settle to the standards set by the bad ole' boys?
I suspect they would do better. It's unimaginable that Christine Quinn, the only woman in the New York mayoral race, would flash photos of her erogenous zones to admirers. She's too smart to be so self-destructive.
Then again, Anthony Weiner is plenty smart. If stupid sexual behavior could be blamed on brainpower's limits, we'd be dissecting Michele Bachmann's sexual proclivities, not Weiner's.
Let's not go there. Rather, consider this: Maybe it's power itself that prompts people to behave badly.
A couple of years ago Dutch psychologist Joris Lammers conducted an online survey of readers of a business magazine and concluded that the likelihood someone would engage in scandalous sexual behavior increased as a person rose in an organization's hierarchy. People at lower levels would think about risk and danger, Lammers wrote, "but power leads to this disinhibited sense that you can get what you want and should take risks to get it."
That might explain why Eliot Spitzer thought he could get away with wire transfers of thousands of dollars to a prostitution service even though he had prosecuted people for exactly that, and why Mark Sanford figured he could detour from the Appalachian Trail to South America in pursuit of a gubernatorial soulmate.
Or maybe it's not the power that corrupts the person as much as flaws in the personality that's drawn to power.
Studies have suggested that an extraordinary share of politicians have symptoms of the psychological disorder known as narcissism. Look at how Narcissistic Personality Disorder is defined by the American Psychiatric Association in the "DSM," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Narcissists, the DSM says, display patterns of grandiosity and arrogance; they're "intrapersonally exploitative," exaggerate their importance, have a sense of entitlement and require excessive admiration.
Does this sound like any politicians you know?
Jim Kouri, an ex-cop now working in conservative politics, goes further. Kouri studied FBI research into the traits of serial killers and extrapolated the findings to political officeholders. Both, he concluded, often display such traits as feigned outrage, vanity and callousness, and often lack a shame mechanism.
"While many political leaders will deny the assessment regarding their similarities with serial killers and other career criminals," Kouri wrote, "it is part of a psychopathic profile that may be used in assessing the behaviors of many officials and lawmakers at all levels of government."
We're electing psychopathic narcissists? No wonder Congress can't get anything done.
Of course, this is straying a bit afield, into gross generalizations unfair to many dedicated public servants. But it's often useful to weigh extreme views for the points where they may illuminate truth.
After all, we like candidates who project a sense of certainty that they can fix society's problems, and certainty is just a step shy of arrogance. We want our leaders to be special — so what if they see themselves that way? We're not surprised when politicians exaggerate their own achievements; that's just campaign rhetoric. Usually we don't know any better, anyhow, because we haven't taken the time to grasp the complex issues that confront public officials.
There was a time when Americans imagined political figures to be greater than they really were, and molded their perceptions of presidents and senators into the figures they hoped to find. The Roman poet Ovid gave us the myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with the statue of a perfect woman he had created, because it was only she who could fit his ideals. (From this notion, by the way, came Shaw's play "Pygmalion," now being staged wonderfully in Williamstown, and the musical "My Fair Lady".) That's how many Americans saw Lincoln, the Roosevelts and Eisenhower.
The explosion of media over the past half-century has brought us face-to-face with our leaders. Now we can't imagine them to be better than they really are, and we haven't liked what we've seen. We've been disappointed so often by so many that it's hard to believe in any.
But there should be room to find our leaders in the space between a demand for perfection and an expectation of psychopathy. They ought to be allowed human foibles; we ought to be spared gross misbehavior.
The problem isn't that most of our politicians are men. It's that they're all human. We're a flawed species. In nature, we depend on natural selection to allow the best to survive. In democracy, it's up to the voters.