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Varieties of Political Collapse

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For connoisseurs of political failure, the New York City Democratic primaries were an elegant buffet:

  • Christine Quinn’s pathetic failure was that of the inept sellout — it was her race to lose and she lost it (and how!)  I’m not sure that her facilitating Bloomberg’s third term had to be fatal, although maybe it was going to be, but she certainly wasn’t going to win a Democratic primary on a “more of the same” platform.  Her vote against ended stop-and-frisk, in particular, should be a lesson that risk-aversion is its own risk.  She apparently needed a weatherman to know which way the wind blows — her campaign was like Lieberman ’04 if Lieberman wasn’t always drawing dead.
  • Anthony Weiner is obviously the more lowbrow form of pathetic, failing to even crack 5% of the vote after briefly leading in the polls.  (And, by the way, it’s impressive that Quinn first lost her lead to a charmless, scandal-ridden nonentity.  Her campaign was so bad you wonder if Mark Penn was running it behind the scenes.)  The latest sexting that made him a permanent laughingstock was apparently consensual and I’m generally of the view that people place too much emphasis on that stuff.  In this case, though, even I have to concede that Weiner’s behavior was so puerile and undisciplined it’s hard to object to the it-matters-because-it-matters tautology as applied here.
  • Spitzer is a candidate of much more substance and accomplishment than Weiner.  But I’m with Pareene: “he’s also partly responsible for the two-tiered legal system in sex work in which guys like Spitzer pass laws making sex workers’ lives more difficult and dangerous but face no consequences themselves for soliciting their services. I’m not prepared to “endorse” him, especially when there’s nothing wrong with Scott Stringer, his opponent.”  I don’t believe that Spitzer’s behavior merited criminal sanctions if I was writing or enforcing the laws, but Spizter doesn’t have access to that defense.  And while I tend to be libertarian on the issue of criminalizing sex work, I feel particularly strongly that there’s no decent defense of criminal sanctions against sex workers; if paternalistic regulations are required, they should be directed against the people who procure the services.  Given that Spitzer reversed this priority, I think taking is behavior into account is more than fair.

 

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