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" Some day in the future, and it may be the near future, we&amp;#039;ll have to explain to children what &amp;quot;scandal&amp;quot; used to mean. Fifteen years ago, when public figures committed acts that were considered publicly shameful, they were expected to leave office and retire from public view to &amp;quot;spend time with their families.&amp;quot; Now a scandal is, if anything, a mild career blip. Mark Sanford is back in office as if his hike in Appalachia had never happened. Eliot Spitzer has decided to run for comptroller in New York City against the madam he used to employ. And Anthony Weiner is currently in the lead in the race for New York City mayor while simultaneously being the subject of an exhibition at the city&amp;#039;s Museum of Sex. Meanwhile in Toronto the mayor who was allegedly caught smoking crack not only didn&amp;#039;t resign; he saw a slight improvement in his approval ratings. Nobody seems to care any more what politicians do in their spare time, at least not when it counts.  It&amp;#039;s an interesting question how far this diminution of scandal will go. This past week I&amp;#039;ve been considering a simple thought experiment: What would happen now if Obama were caught sleeping with somebody he shouldn&amp;#039;t in the White House? The answer is, probably, not much. Oh, there&amp;#039;d be a shit storm, and Jay Leno would crack some jokes (although Letterman would have to go easy considering his own recent infidelity). Michelle would no doubt go back to Chicago. But what about Obama&amp;#039;s career? Would the immigration plan fall through? Would Obamacare suffer a terrible setback? Would Obama be forced, like Clinton, to waste two years in office fighting impeachment charges, answering questions about &amp;quot;oral-anal contact&amp;quot; and what the definition of &amp;quot;is&amp;quot; is? Highly doubtful. America has grown up too much since then.  Much has happened since 1998 to change the voters&amp;#039; relationship to their leaders&amp;#039; misdeeds. Sheer overexposure has diminished the force of shame for one thing. Keeping private things private simply isn&amp;#039;t possible the way it was during the Kennedy years, say. Technology has educated us that politicians are human beings, and in two ways. Smartphones enable politicians to take pictures of their dongs and social media allows them to send those pictures out to ordinary Americans with unprecedented ease, and therefore they are caught more easily. But the Internet has also left ordinary people with less chance to bolster their smug superiority. Everyone has a picture of themselves at least drunk online. Everyone has a trace of some scandal in the digital ether. That&amp;#039;s why Ellen DeGeneres can have a regular segment called &amp;quot;You Posted That on Facebook?&amp;quot; culled from her audience.      The contrast between the Bush and the Clinton years may also have chilled everybody out. Fine upstanding citizen Bush, with no hint of scandal to his name, but &amp;quot;restoring honor and dignity to the White House&amp;quot; turned out to be an anthology of national disasters. Clinton, the scandal factory, knew how to run a government. The lesson of those differences? Eight years of peace and prosperity are probably worth a blowjob.  The resignation of General Petraeus was the stupidest of all recent scandals. There was a case where the prurience of the residual American puritanism was obviously at odds with the interests of the country. I mean, the man who is responsible for the occupation of Afghanistan should have other things on his mind than whether somebody is going to catch him in bed with his biographer. Of course now Petraeus is involved in another scandal \u2014 overpayment from his gig at CUNY \u2014 which is much more serious. Misuse of funds, to me, is infinitely worse than sleeping with the wrong woman. The latter only affects him. The former affects his job.  A recent piece of research has put the exact price on a sex scandal, and it&amp;#039;s, all in all, pretty reasonable: 5.3 percent of the vote. This is very good news. Because Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner could be great public servants, no matter how embarrassing they happen to be. What happened between Clinton and now is that the stakes got a lot higher. Given the problems facing the world today, who can afford any more to vote for a moral idiot rather than the brilliant creep? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a23445/end-of-scandal-spitzer/>