Gary Condit, Feminist Icon & Maria Cantwell, President?

by Mike Seely, contributor

One piece of propoganda that struck me as most corny during my brief yet poignant experience as Maria Cantwell’s deputy press secretary during Campaign 2000 was an Al Gore poster featuring the following quote from “Tron” himself:

“We have only begun to work for working families.”

It was not long after that I learned that a research guru of ours was in on the crafting of this buzzword while on staff in the Clinton White House. Much as I loved the guy, I wanted to wring his neck for having a hand in that cheesy round of wordsmithing, as it irrevocably turned up the volume on the role of family in American politics.

Thanks to Gary Condit and his tacky travails, perhaps now we can turn it down. Frankly, the voting public must shoulder at least partial blame for the sexual forays of the Condits, Clintons and Kennedys of the world. For too long, we have virtually demanded a walk down the aisle and 2.4 kids from those who represent us in D.C., a ridiculous expectation of a personality type that has proven to lack anything resembling predisposition toward monogamy. And because such philandering is so overwhelmingly a male problem, Condit may well prove to be the most compelling argument to date for the election of the first woman President.

First off, let’s look at the nature of the beast. Elected public servants who are truly committed to their profession willfully allow their lives to be dominated by 7 a.m. briefings and midnight war-room sessions over stale beer, conditions which are hardly conducive to family life.

Furthermore, supporters and staffers inevitably place gutsy, macho pols on a pedestal, creating an environment ripe for sexual manipulation. Couple this with the timetested theory that the more time you spend with a person, the more attracted you are to them, and you get Clinton-Lewinsky or Condit-Levy.

To illustrate the second layer of this philandering-to-feminism theory, while Lewinsky’s physical shortcomings were trumpeted to a cruel extent from the media mountaintops, shockingly glowing descriptions of Levy’s looks should strike the average heterosexual male as blatantly inaccurate. “Raven-haired beauty?” Come on. Neither Clinton nor Condit was painstakingly seduced by a luscious Hollywood actress, but both were rather easily seduced by gals who’d fit right in with the Bridge and Tunnel crowd.

Conversely, accounts of women in Congress so easily cheating on their husbands are few and far between, which would appear to make them better suited to tend to the work of their constituents, unfettered by the fleshy foibles that plague the blokes.

But perhaps the perfect political beast is the single pol, a real-life version of Michael Douglas’ American President. Or, better yet, a single female, someone along the lines of the already real-life Senator Cantwell, a policy-obsessed wonk who has never been wed.

Of course, for such perfect political robots to emerge, the voting public must give up its poll-tested desire for the Rockwellian politician/family man. If we’re unwilling to do that, we deserve all the Condits we can handle without making an ethically germane peep.

Formerly Senator Maria Cantwell’s Deputy Campaign Press Secretary, Mike Seely is a Seattle-based writer whose work has appeared regularly in The Stranger, Seattle Weekly and Seattle Magazine, among other publications.