New York City may not be the center of the universe, but it's been the center of a lot of news lately in the baseball and political spheres. Three huge figures in the city are in the midst of trying to rehabilitate their careers: former congressman Anthony Weiner and former governor Eliot Spitzer are running for office for the first time since they each resigned due to sexual indiscretions, and Yankees third baseman Alex Rodríguez is trying to return to the major leagues for the first time since the bombshell Biogenesis investigation implicated him in the latest MLB steroids scandal.
Yet they're getting very different receptions in the Big Apple. While Weiner and Spitzer are regarded as frontrunners for mayor and city comptroller respectively, A-Rod remains public enemy number one. To be sure, Weiner and Spitzer have their detractors—Weiner especially, after last week's revelations of previously unknown additional sexting. But the overall narrative surrounding them has been redemptive, even positive. Both of them have depicted themselves as deeply flawed men who are nevertheless trying to face the world again, make good to the voters they let down, and rebuild their lives. For the most part, the media (except, as always, New York tabloids) has accepted this narrative (again, at least until this past week's events with Weiner). Most importantly, though, polls have shown that voters have accepted it. Two polls last week gave Spitzer the lead in the comptroller race, and Weiner was surging ahead, capturing 26% of the vote in a crowded field, before last week's information came to light. Heck, even after the world knew that he fell off the fidelity wagon a second time, a poll found Weiner hanging onto second place—and therefore a slot in the runoff.
This couldn't be more different than A-Rod's situation; everyone—from fans to the media to even his employer, the New York Yankees—is in agreement about disowning the former superstar. Since he was linked to the PED-supplying clinic Biogenesis, reaction has ranged from mere vitriol to calls for him to be banned for life. The Yankees have allegedly explored ways to dump him from the team entirely, and they're not exactly trying to hide their disgust with him. Yet akin to Weiner and Spitzer, everything A-Rod has done since his "scandal" has pointed toward one thing: a desire to get back to playing Major League Baseball to help a team that desperately needs him. His deeds to this end include tweeting about his progressing rehab, seeking out a doctor to ascertain if he is healthy enough to play, and turning down a plea bargain from MLB that probably would have ruined his 2013 but given him a clean slate for the rest of his career. Yet A-Rod has been unanimously lambasted for all three of these actions. It's at the point where A-Rod, who hasn't played an inning for the Yankees this year, is singlehandedly responsible for ruining their season.
This discrepancy is baffling to me. Weiner, Spitzer, and A-Rod all had very real failings. In fact, most people would probably consider Weiner's and Spitzer's sins to be greater than A-Rod's. So why is A-Rod the most villainous of the three? Why are his actions to redeem himself not seen that way, while Weiner's and Spitzer's (which could easily be more cynically spun as attempts to grab back a hold of power) are welcomed? What is so especially heinous about A-Rod?
You can say that we respond differently, more emotionally, to sports than to politics. Baseball players like Alex Rodríguez are seen as heroes. Politicians don't engender the same adoration; in fact, they're boring and often not exactly beloved in the first place. So it makes sense that people would feel more personally betrayed when a hero cheats than when a politician does it; to a certain extent, it's expected when a politician is a letdown. That's a plausible explanation—but it's not a justification. A love for sports can blind people into thinking they're important, but it is, as many a Little Leaguer must be told, only a game. Cheating at a game is not a cause for moral outrage; breaking one's marriage vows and, potentially, destroying one's family are certainly much greater offenses. This perspective should at least cancel out the greater distance a ballplayer must travel than a politician to complete his fall from grace.
You can say that, while New York may hate A-Rod, it's not like they're in love with Weiner and Spitzer either. Even if the city elects them to the jobs they want, it might simply be because they were the best options in two underwhelming fields. Indeed, the most recent NBC 4 New York/Wall Street Journal/Marist Poll found that 55% of New York City Democrats had an unfavorable opinion of Anthony Weiner—which means the city's registered voters probably think even worse of him. But remember—this poll was conducted after the new revelations about Weiner's other sexting. Before last week, Marist found that 52% of New York City Democrats were favorably disposed toward Weiner, and 59% said he deserved a second chance. Even more were willing to forgive Spitzer; 67% said he deserved a second chance, and 62% said his past transgressions wouldn't affect their vote.
My point here is not to say that Weiner and Spitzer don't necessarily deserve second chances, or that New Yorkers who think they do are wrong, foolish, or amoral. Instead, my point is to ask—what percentage of New York voters do you think would say that Alex Rodríguez deserves another chance? While I wait for my friend Tom Jensen over at Public Policy Polling to ask the question for real, I've got to guess for now that the answer is "not many." Yet what these polls prove is that there is a vein of forgiveness among New Yorkers that A-Rod is just not tapping into. Even if voters don't like Anthony Weiner today—and even if they are still somewhat divided over Eliot Spitzer—many more of them were at least at one point willing to have open minds about them. That's already a departure from attitudes about A-Rod.
What I will say is that New Yorkers owe A-Rod a little consistency. It's second-chance season in the city that never sleeps, and it's unfair for Gotham to apply it selectively. If New York wants to be rigid and unmerciful, that's fine—it certainly has the reputation of the world's toughest city in which to get by. But then it must turn away Weiner, Spitzer, and Rodríguez all with the same dismissive wave of the hand. For now, put Biogenesis in perspective and let A-Rod walk the long and difficult comeback trail on his own. Unlike Weiner and Spitzer, you're stuck with him for four more years regardless.
Showing posts with label New York. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York. Show all posts
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
History Shows It's Game Over for Sanford and Weiner
Political comebacks have been in vogue lately. First Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor who was the laughingstock of the nation after an extramarital affair in 2009, won the recent Republican primary in the special election for the South Carolina First District. Then, in last week's New York Times Magazine, erstwhile congressman and sexter Anthony Weiner revealed his interest in the New York City mayoralty.
There seems to be a consensus that, not only are Sanford's and Weiner's comebacks possible, but also that they wouldn't be unusual. This couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, if you look at the history of politicians attempting to come back from scandal, Weiner faces extremely long odds, and Sanford is extremely lucky to have gotten as far as he has.
We at Baseballot dipped into the archives and identified 82 federal and statewide elected officials over the past 20 years who have faced scandal—sex or otherwise—while in office. Only 10 can be said to have definitively survived the charges leveled at them. Four more (Bill Clinton, Kathy Augustine, Scott DesJarlais, and John Swallow) remain inconclusive. That means 68 of the 82 (83%) at some point fell from power as a result of their sins—whether via resignation (38), removal (5), retirement (14), or repudiation by the voters (11). This is the population we're really interested in, as it includes Weiner and Sanford.
Out of those 68, 66 never held elected office again. That's an abysmal 97% attrition rate. The two success stories include only one who successfully returned to his previous position: Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, who was removed in 2003 following a politically popular decision to defy a court order to remove the Ten Commandments from public property. (The second, former Michigan congresswoman Barbara-Rose Collins, managed to win a couple local elections to the Detroit City Council.)
This doesn't even include people who weren't holding office at the time of their scandal, such as former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, who it's safe to say would've been run out of town on a rail if he were still a senator. The 66, however, do include Newt Gingrich, who has arguably made a comeback by doing as well as he did in the 2012 GOP primaries, as well as Sanford and Weiner themselves, whose fates are yet to be determined. It also includes 58 disgraced ex-pols who never even attempted comebacks, although this fact in and of itself is instructive, in my opinion. Still, peel away these quibbles, and politicians who left office in disgrace still have a poor .286 batting average (2 out of 7) when they try to come back from obscurity and regain public office.
My findings conspicuously clash with a prominent recent study that found that most scandal-plagued politicians actually pull through just fine. Political scientist Scott Basinger compiled a database of 237 naughty congressmen and found that, while they have a lower political survival rate than their unblemished colleagues, they still returned to Congress more often than not. Specifically, 73% of embattled congressmen stuck it out and contested another general election (versus 91% in the control group); 81% of those went on to win, making for a total survival rate of 60%.
Without Basinger's full data set, I can't say for certain why his findings are so divergent from mine. I'd probably point to three key differences in our methodology. First, I looked at all federal and statewide elected officials, while Basinger limited himself to US congressmen. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Basinger went all the way back to 1973, while I stopped at 1993. I tend to believe that more recent data are more reliable—even cases from 20 years ago are of limited value in the age of social media, if you ask me—but Basinger's doubly large sample size could certainly account for our disagreement.
Third, while I don't know how Basinger conducted his research, mine consisted mainly of a heck of a lot of Googling. I'm almost certain that I missed out on a few scandals, especially going back to the 1990s when the archives of the World Wide Web grow thin. Still, because of the nature of internet research, I'm fairly confident that I documented all of the most high-profile scandals of the past 20 years. Basinger, in contrast, doubtlessly included even the most obscure misconduct in his database. Again, while more data points are usually good, in this case it might be more instructive to look solely at the high-profile cases. They are the ones most closely relatable to Sanford and Weiner, and they predictably prove more damaging to politicians' public personas. It's probably not helpful to skew our predictions for two notorious adulterers with politicians who coasted to reelection after abusing the franking privilege, for instance.
Indeed, I completely trust Basinger's methodology and his findings, and I'm perfectly willing to believe that 60% of overall offenders tough it out and go on to live completely normal and healthy political lives. Indeed, a decent slice of my dataset did that very thing. I'm even willing to admit that my dataset is flawed in that it probably undercounts the number of politicians who defied calls to resign and weathered the storm (again, it's easier to find internet archives of big news events like "SENATOR X RESIGNS"). My research may very well be inconclusive about this cadre.
But it doesn't matter, because we're talking about politicians who didn't survive—who, like Weiner and Sanford, fell to the deepest depths of shame and ignominy—and then climbed back to a position of prominence, power, and popularity. About them, there can be little doubt that full-blown comebacks from rock bottom do not happen. Basinger does not address this specific type of case in his study, leaving my data—66 out of 68, remember—as our only guide.
The reason that the media's examples of political comebacks—meant to convince us that Sanford and Weiner really can do it—actually bear no resemblance or relationship to Sanford's and Weiner's utter implosions is that there almost literally are no political phoenix stories. All of the most famous "comeback" stories—Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy, Wilbur Mills, David Vitter—are of politicians who never resigned in the first place. They recognized that their best strategy was to deny, defer, or deflect guilt as quickly as possible and move on. By the time they faced the voters again, their transgressions were either forgotten or overshadowed.
But for those who admit fault—or, perhaps more accurately, admit that they ought to be punished for it by resigning or otherwise leaving office—the path to public forgiveness is much less clear. If you're a scandalized politician, at least you still have your office and a platform from which to build yourself back up (including the significant electoral advantage of incumbency). Step down, and you're nothing but a broken man. Leaving office in disgrace has been a black mark from which there has almost never been any coming back. The media and 24-hour news networks may love comeback stories, but there's little evidence the public does.
We've taken our time to come back around to the bottom line for Weiner and Sanford, so here it is: they're probably finished, even if they don't know it yet. For Weiner, going from disrepute to the extremely powerful position of New York City mayor in the space of two years is just too big of a jump. Even the one ex-representative who returned to local government did so to city council, and she endured an ethics investigation, not Weiner's sensationalist sex scandal and its attendant national humiliation. A comeback by Weiner would be unprecedented in modern American politics.
Sanford, while still an unlikely candidate, may have slightly better odds. For one thing, he has already won one election—the GOP primary—which is half the hurdle. For another, he holds a key advantage over Weiner: he never resigned. Despite the equal amount of ridicule and embarrassment he faced with his "Appalachian Trail" saga, Sanford actually served out the remaining two years of his term as governor and was effective at fading out of the spotlight rather than going out with a bang. However, polls indicate Sanford is still badly underperforming a generic Republican, and, after this week's revelations of further family troubles resulted in his abandonment by the NRCC, the former governor is now looking decidedly like an underdog. All in all, I would be surprised to see him buck history here.
There seems to be a consensus that, not only are Sanford's and Weiner's comebacks possible, but also that they wouldn't be unusual. This couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, if you look at the history of politicians attempting to come back from scandal, Weiner faces extremely long odds, and Sanford is extremely lucky to have gotten as far as he has.
We at Baseballot dipped into the archives and identified 82 federal and statewide elected officials over the past 20 years who have faced scandal—sex or otherwise—while in office. Only 10 can be said to have definitively survived the charges leveled at them. Four more (Bill Clinton, Kathy Augustine, Scott DesJarlais, and John Swallow) remain inconclusive. That means 68 of the 82 (83%) at some point fell from power as a result of their sins—whether via resignation (38), removal (5), retirement (14), or repudiation by the voters (11). This is the population we're really interested in, as it includes Weiner and Sanford.
Out of those 68, 66 never held elected office again. That's an abysmal 97% attrition rate. The two success stories include only one who successfully returned to his previous position: Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, who was removed in 2003 following a politically popular decision to defy a court order to remove the Ten Commandments from public property. (The second, former Michigan congresswoman Barbara-Rose Collins, managed to win a couple local elections to the Detroit City Council.)
This doesn't even include people who weren't holding office at the time of their scandal, such as former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, who it's safe to say would've been run out of town on a rail if he were still a senator. The 66, however, do include Newt Gingrich, who has arguably made a comeback by doing as well as he did in the 2012 GOP primaries, as well as Sanford and Weiner themselves, whose fates are yet to be determined. It also includes 58 disgraced ex-pols who never even attempted comebacks, although this fact in and of itself is instructive, in my opinion. Still, peel away these quibbles, and politicians who left office in disgrace still have a poor .286 batting average (2 out of 7) when they try to come back from obscurity and regain public office.
My findings conspicuously clash with a prominent recent study that found that most scandal-plagued politicians actually pull through just fine. Political scientist Scott Basinger compiled a database of 237 naughty congressmen and found that, while they have a lower political survival rate than their unblemished colleagues, they still returned to Congress more often than not. Specifically, 73% of embattled congressmen stuck it out and contested another general election (versus 91% in the control group); 81% of those went on to win, making for a total survival rate of 60%.
Without Basinger's full data set, I can't say for certain why his findings are so divergent from mine. I'd probably point to three key differences in our methodology. First, I looked at all federal and statewide elected officials, while Basinger limited himself to US congressmen. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Basinger went all the way back to 1973, while I stopped at 1993. I tend to believe that more recent data are more reliable—even cases from 20 years ago are of limited value in the age of social media, if you ask me—but Basinger's doubly large sample size could certainly account for our disagreement.
Third, while I don't know how Basinger conducted his research, mine consisted mainly of a heck of a lot of Googling. I'm almost certain that I missed out on a few scandals, especially going back to the 1990s when the archives of the World Wide Web grow thin. Still, because of the nature of internet research, I'm fairly confident that I documented all of the most high-profile scandals of the past 20 years. Basinger, in contrast, doubtlessly included even the most obscure misconduct in his database. Again, while more data points are usually good, in this case it might be more instructive to look solely at the high-profile cases. They are the ones most closely relatable to Sanford and Weiner, and they predictably prove more damaging to politicians' public personas. It's probably not helpful to skew our predictions for two notorious adulterers with politicians who coasted to reelection after abusing the franking privilege, for instance.
Indeed, I completely trust Basinger's methodology and his findings, and I'm perfectly willing to believe that 60% of overall offenders tough it out and go on to live completely normal and healthy political lives. Indeed, a decent slice of my dataset did that very thing. I'm even willing to admit that my dataset is flawed in that it probably undercounts the number of politicians who defied calls to resign and weathered the storm (again, it's easier to find internet archives of big news events like "SENATOR X RESIGNS"). My research may very well be inconclusive about this cadre.
But it doesn't matter, because we're talking about politicians who didn't survive—who, like Weiner and Sanford, fell to the deepest depths of shame and ignominy—and then climbed back to a position of prominence, power, and popularity. About them, there can be little doubt that full-blown comebacks from rock bottom do not happen. Basinger does not address this specific type of case in his study, leaving my data—66 out of 68, remember—as our only guide.
The reason that the media's examples of political comebacks—meant to convince us that Sanford and Weiner really can do it—actually bear no resemblance or relationship to Sanford's and Weiner's utter implosions is that there almost literally are no political phoenix stories. All of the most famous "comeback" stories—Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy, Wilbur Mills, David Vitter—are of politicians who never resigned in the first place. They recognized that their best strategy was to deny, defer, or deflect guilt as quickly as possible and move on. By the time they faced the voters again, their transgressions were either forgotten or overshadowed.
But for those who admit fault—or, perhaps more accurately, admit that they ought to be punished for it by resigning or otherwise leaving office—the path to public forgiveness is much less clear. If you're a scandalized politician, at least you still have your office and a platform from which to build yourself back up (including the significant electoral advantage of incumbency). Step down, and you're nothing but a broken man. Leaving office in disgrace has been a black mark from which there has almost never been any coming back. The media and 24-hour news networks may love comeback stories, but there's little evidence the public does.
We've taken our time to come back around to the bottom line for Weiner and Sanford, so here it is: they're probably finished, even if they don't know it yet. For Weiner, going from disrepute to the extremely powerful position of New York City mayor in the space of two years is just too big of a jump. Even the one ex-representative who returned to local government did so to city council, and she endured an ethics investigation, not Weiner's sensationalist sex scandal and its attendant national humiliation. A comeback by Weiner would be unprecedented in modern American politics.
Sanford, while still an unlikely candidate, may have slightly better odds. For one thing, he has already won one election—the GOP primary—which is half the hurdle. For another, he holds a key advantage over Weiner: he never resigned. Despite the equal amount of ridicule and embarrassment he faced with his "Appalachian Trail" saga, Sanford actually served out the remaining two years of his term as governor and was effective at fading out of the spotlight rather than going out with a bang. However, polls indicate Sanford is still badly underperforming a generic Republican, and, after this week's revelations of further family troubles resulted in his abandonment by the NRCC, the former governor is now looking decidedly like an underdog. All in all, I would be surprised to see him buck history here.
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