The NPR Politics Podcast - Have You No Sense Of Decency?

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

The U.S. has entered an era of post-shame politics, where politicians are willing to endure embarrassment, criticism and negative attention in order to survive scandals. We talk about the modern history of politicians weathering controversy — from Bill Clinton to embattled Republican Rep. George Santos.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and senior political editor and correspondent Ron Elving.This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Michael Summers, a 72-year-old retired school teacher from Nahalem, Oregon. When COVID started, my red healer dog Squishy and I started walking, and we're about to go out and hit our 2,000th mile mark. Wow. This show was recorded at 109 p.m. on Tuesday, February 21st, 2023. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but Squishy and I will still be walking the beautiful Northwest. Enjoy the show. We will. Squishy is a superb dog name. Top five dog name. That's awesome. That's wonderful.

I don't even want to know the history of why they named that dog. It probably does have a story. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent. And today on the show, we are talking about shame or should I say the lack thereof, shame in the political world. Tam, this is something you've been reporting a lot on in recent weeks. Why now? The inspiration comes from Congressman George Santos from Long Island, New York, who lied about almost every major plot point in his life, including such things as being Jewish or having his mom die on 9-11. And that led me to posit the question, is this a new era

in politics? Are we in a post-shame era of American politics where you can just put your head down and power through and say, the media sucks and I'm going to stay? Yeah. And Santos obviously is an extreme example of this, but he's not the first example. Ron, can you kind of trace back when this era of post-shame politics really began? I would say one clear demarcation point would be Bill Clinton's candidacy for president in 1992 when he was hit with a couple of torpedoes of womanizing and accusations of draft dodging that would have killed anybody else that we had ever seen running for president in the past. And he toughed it out and did well in New Hampshire and just kept right on going.

And that's not to mention the fact that he was impeached in his second term for having had an affair with an intern in the White House and then misrepresented that in grand jury testimony. So it was not limited to his 92 campaign. And, of course, later on, that was referenced pretty blatantly and openly by President Trump when he was on his way to being president in 2016, and the Access Hollywood tape seemed to be a huge torpedo for his campaign. He sailed on.

And one thing that you learn from a case like Trump or Santos or some others is that there's immense power in deciding that the rules don't apply. Yes. And we should note that Clinton and Trump, between them, were impeached three times total and acquitted by the Senate each time and were, in many respects, more powerful after that acquittal. with former Representative Anthony Weiner. Can you tell us about how he is viewing, he's somebody who did step down after political pressure, how he's viewing just the current era and then specifically Santos? Yeah, he sees Santos as someone who has very little to lose and plenty to gain from staying in. And he believes that George Santos is going to be able to tough it out and stick it out. And Santos has implied that he is going to be able to tough it out and stick it out. And Santos has implied that he's planning to run for reelection. Anthony Weiner, I should explain, it was 2011 and he tweeted a picture of his boxer briefs with himself in his

boxer briefs. And it was a close up. And he then lied and said he had been hacked and someone had put this out. It wasn't him tweeting it. It turns out, of course, he had not been hacked and he was trying to direct message it to a woman who was not his wife. And then to be clear, he went on after leaving Congress to try to run for mayor of New York and then lost terribly in part because more sexting allegations came out. And then ultimately he actually went to prison for sending an indecent image to a 15-year-old. And he seems to think, like, agree with this general premise that people are more willing now to go through, be rung through the mud, but stick it out. Let's listen to what he told you. We seem to be in a national version of that schoolyard game, Top This, that if you do want to get into the shame hall of fame,

you have to do a lot more than you had to do even 10 years ago. You would think that he would be in the hall of fame, but a lot has happened in those 10 years, in fact. All right. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we're back, obviously, the elephant in the room here is partisan differences with a lot of this. We're going to get into that and a lot more after the break. And we're back. So, Ron, I do want to zero in here on former President Trump, his ability to survive the Access Hollywood tape getting published a month before the presidential election is still really hard to fathom. I'm curious what your takeaway is from that election result in 2016.

And then more broadly, what is it about a politician that decides which politicians will kind of be able to push through these sorts of scandals and which ones will kind of bow to the political pressure? There seems to be a factor of thickness of skin. There seems to be a factor of people who have been in the public eye in such a rough and tumble way in the past that they're ready to take even a blow as severe as this. And they already have, if you will, a defensive system built up around themselves. So one theory in the past has been that the person who decides whether or not a politician can survive a sex allegation, anything having to do with sex, is that politician's spouse. So that Hillary Clinton was absolutely essential to how Bill Clinton toughed it out.

Melania Trump, absolutely essential with her, oh, that's just locker room talk. That's just the boys. That helped Donald Trump enormously, particularly with women voters. So this is something that also factors in, in addition to the personality factors that are clearly paramount in deciding whether or not somebody can just sail on. I think there's also another difference here. And I talked to Tim Miller, who is a former Republican who worked on the Jeb Bush campaign in 2016. And he said that there is a difference in the media ecosystem that politicians exist in. Because part of how former President Trump came out of this and said, like, they can't take me down is he came out and he said, the establishment and the media are trying to hurt me. They're trying to take me down. And throughout his presidency,

he talked about witch hunts. And there was a sort of a ready audience of Republican voters and and right wing media that were happy to go along with that narrative. On the other side, as much as people and Tim Miller is the one who outlined this for me, but as much as people want to say that the mainstream media is in the tank for Democrats, when it comes to a juicy scandal involving Democrats, all of these news outlets report the heck out of these scandals sort of, you know, without favor to either party. And that means that Democrats face a lot more pressure than a Republican would face. The coverage of George Santos has been much more extensive on MSNBC and CNN than it has been on Fox News. And also Democratic voters consume this mainstream media more than Republican voters. That's what I was going to talk about, right? Yeah. It kind of, completely changes how, because the news outlets that are reporting more on this stuff are consumed by the party's voters differently, then that seems to make it so the politicians in those parties

have to act differently because of the scandals. Is that right? pressure from within his own party, within the Senate, to step aside. Same for Andrew Cuomo. The allegations against them are quite different. But in the end, the pressure from within their own parties was more than they could take. That was the same for Anthony Weiner, by the way, who heard from people like Nancy Pelosi that not only was he harming his family, he was harming his fellow Democrats. And he said, I just couldn't do my job. Problem is that if you want to be successful in politics, you need to be able to represent your neighbors and your constituents. It's really hard to do that when quite literally no one wants to be seen with you.

He just says that in such an understated way. Quite literally, no one wants to be seen with you. And quite literally, no one did want to be seen with him. And there's a reason why George Santos isn't showing up to do his committee work. His fellow Republicans quite literally don't want to be seen with him. But the numbers being what the numbers are, there's not the same sort of pressure to push him out because that would affect the balance of power in the House. Yeah. I mean, at the State of the Union, right, Senator Mitt Romney literally said to him, another Republican, you shouldn't be here, basically. of things and literally has lied about so many things. He had enough time in his day to position himself and waited out on the aisle at the State of the Union. So every senator, every cabinet member, the president of the United States would walk right next to him. And, you know, he was

trying to shake hands. And Mitt Romney came and was like, oh, no. Later, Santos said, lots of people have told me to go to the back, people of privilege, and there's no way I'm doing that. Ron, can you talk about where this goes? I mean, looking ahead at 2024, do you see the current moment as peak shameless, or can we somehow enter a new era? I don't know how it gets more shameless, but where are we headed? One should probably expect it to be a plateau of shamelessness. I don't know how it gets more shameless, but where are we headed? One should probably expect it to be a plateau of shamelessness. I don't know that we can top what George Santos is getting away with at the moment or, for that matter, what Presidents Trump and Bill Clinton got away with at certain moments in their presidencies.

I don't know if we want to even think about how that would be topped. There are different kinds of crimes other than personal crimes, there could conceivably be this kind of discussion about President Trump's actions on January 6th and whether or not shame comes into that question. But right now, it's hard to imagine that we're going to hit a lot more great heights above where we are, but it's also hard to see how this lesson is not being learned by an entire generation of George Santoses waiting in the wings to get into politics and having the impression that this is the way the game is played. And Miles, I think that there is an important question here about consequences.

What does it matter? Who cares if politicians are shameless, right? Like lots of people believe that politicians are in it for all the wrong reasons. They're in it for themselves. They lie all the time. So why does it matter? Is there any consequence for a lack of self-policing in politics? And I asked this question to Laura Brown, who is a political scientist here in Washington, D.C., and she said that there are consequences in sort of the degradation of trust in American institutions. Most people, when they think about politics, they think about our institutions,

they think about Washington in general, they believe that all politicians are corrupt and everything is rigged. And it's all a lie. And she, Ron, actually ties it back to January 6th and says that if people believe that it's all rigged anyway, then they might as well rig it in their favor used for effect, that it is not necessarily the opinion of every American voter that every politician is corrupt. I think that there are still people who have belief in some politicians, maybe not the most famous ones, but people that they know a little closer to their own level, more local. And in some cases, people who are national figures. They still want to believe that not everyone is corrupt. So if there is still room to, based on that faith, a larger conversion for a larger number of Americans,

that there is some integrity left in the system, that's something at least to build on. All right, well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. that's something at least to build on. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.