Besides a broad and dedicated (and lucrative) fan base among the wholesome conservatives and Evangelicals in the flyover states, each figure is a relatively new guest in the foyer of the American popularity machine — and each is presently combating a much older sojourner: the spectre of the American sex scandal.
I ask the forgiveness of those fortunate enough to hitherto remain oblivious to the rumors. In the 17-year-old popstar’s case, there is talk of a one-night stand resulting in the clandestine fathering of a child three months ago. In the 65-year-old politician and pizza mogul’s case, the Virginia-based political news publication Politico has alleged that two women were verbally and physically harassed, oftentimes in a sexual manner, during their tenure under Herman Cain’s chairmanship at the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s.
The inevitability of a sexual sort of bump in the road toward success for virtually any American, I tell myself, must have less to do with a sudden, popularity-triggered onset of Bacchic revelry on the part of the accused and more to do with a craving among us for a catastrophic — if also familiar and humanizing misstep — by those magnetic personalities who can seem to do no wrong.
But I must wonder how these beleaguered figures calculate the tradeoffs.
Sure, the press becomes more negative, but press is still press. The amount of exposure itself likely increases, and it bleeds into channels where the magnates might have lacked a presence beforehand. By my own logic, this column is complicit in bolstering Cain’s popularity, for which I apologize, but we must be well assured that some poor saps in the Cain campaign and in the Justin Bieber complex are presently tasked with spinning their patriarch’s sexual indiscretions — real or imaginary — into as much of a victory as can be had.
So beyond mere opinion columns, we feast on the language of moral fallibility in gossip rags, on the morning news, in the hubbub of the line for Starbucks and in the plenitude of online forums where the next generation’s vanguard of religious loonies do God’s work on the web.
The saps have done well — Cain and Bieber alike have acknowledged to the press a surge this past week in campaign donations and album sales respectively. As in, real U.S. dollars have been given to these gentlemen in excess of what they could ordinarily have expected.
Alas, my beef this week is not with Mr. Cain, nor with Mr. Bieber, nor even with the societal contradictions surrounding the reward of one’s alleged philandering with even more money and popularity. No, instead, I deplore the inanity of GOP politics.
I had truly hoped for a genuine conservative challenging of President Barack Obama’s governing to arise, one which I could neatly frame and thoughtfully engage with. I had truly hoped the Republicans would harness their recent knack for closing ranks far more effectively than Democrats — which I attribute to there being a multitude of ways to progress toward the future, but only one routes back toward the Dark Ages — to offer Americans a coherent view of where they would guide the nation.
Instead, we are energized over determining if, and please oh please, tell us why exactly Cain groped two women in the 1990s. At the same time, Gov. Mitt Romney, despite being the most electable candidate and the least seeming like a cartoonish parody of a lovechild of Mr. Rogers and Ronald Reagan, must now wage a similar media war to change the substantial number of minds of people in his party who learned at their megachurches this week about how Mormonism is a cult.
I of all people ought to be thrilled at the prospect of the GOP’s national discourse bogging itself down in the utterly stupid, narcissistic and almost Faulknerian town-square moral castigation of 100 years ago, and believe me — I am.
But it disappoints me as an American. And it makes for a boring election.