It seems like every month another politician gets caught with his pants down. It is always the men. Which could be another reason to elect women but that is another story.
Elliot Spitzer hired prostitutes. His successor David Paterson admitted to extra-marital affairs on his first day in office. In the Senate last year Larry Craig and David Vitter had sex scandals. And the list goes on and on all the way to President Clinton (the first) and Monica Lewinsky.
Elliot Spitzer
To turn this litany of bad behavior into numbers, without doing to much research, lets stipulate that there are about ten promiscuous politician events a year that make it into the papers. To put that in perspective we have to know the size of the universe. Again lets make it easy and estimate. Add up all of the Governors, Congress-people, Senators, Cabinet members, Top General and Big City Mayors and there are about a thousand leaders in public life who would make the national news if caught with their pants down.
Larry Craig
Do the math: 10 out of 1000 is 1%. Not too promiscuous. But the wise reader will say “Yes but this is only the ones that get caught. There are many more who get away with it.” How many more? Nobody knows, but we can estimate a range. On the low end we can say that because the press and the competition are so alert half of the philanderers are caught. So the total is 2%. Or we can say that for every cheating male politician caught there are nine more who don’t get caught. In which case 10% of the top politicians are cheating, lying, oversexed scoundrels. 10% seems possible, but surprising for two reasons. First it is lower that the average cheating rate for the entire population. The national cheating rate is variously reported to be from 20 to 35%. And second; these men are under constant scrutiny from a press craving any scandal and their political rivals looking for any advantage and nine out of ten of them are getting away with it.
Monica Lewinsky
As is often the case the numbers, even the rough approximations above, tell us a different story than the impression left by the stories we hear on the news. Yes some politicians have sex when they shouldn’t with people they shouldn’t but it is not as prevalent as we thought.