DESPITE WHAT ENID WALDHOLTZ MAY THINK, life is not the Jenny Jones program. Her five-hour, teary-eyed press conference last month deserves an Emmy for stamina and strength, but in presenting herself as her husband’s unwitting victim she failed the most important test of a politician: personal accountability.
Nor is she alone. In the five scandals that have tainted the 104th Congress, the guilty have refused to shoulder any blame for their misdeeds. They have shamelessly revived the double standards for men and women, blacks and whites. And in the case of Republican offenders, they have made a mockery of their campaign promise to promote individual responsibility.
Victimology is seedy enough on talk shows, but it is despicable in Congress, where, at least in theory, the buck stops. Even Bob Packwood warned in 1992 that with “cynicism about people in public . . . at an all time high, there must be accountability and responsibility for official actions and conduct.”
Indeed. But the Oregon Lothario broke this vow when he blamed his bufloonery on everything from the bottle to the Ethics Committee to embittered women. The only thing the Anglo-Saxon senator couldn’t do was play the race card.
Rep. Walter Tucker, however, could, and did. Convicted of extortion by a racially mixed jury, the Baptist minister insisted he was a victim of prejudice: “There was Marion Barry before me. There was O. J. Simpson before me. There was Mike Tyson and Mike Jackson. You may as well call me Mike Tucker. ”
He forgot to include Mel Reynolds. The former two-term representative and Rhodes scholar, convicted of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old schoolgirl, still contends he was just another black man brought down by the system.
“You’re in a fool’s paradise if you think race doesn’t play a part in this prosecution, because it does,” he said, warning he would not crawl if ” shackled like my slave ancestors.”
One can hardly blame him for trying. Such pleas worked for O. J. Simpson. Thi s time, however, there was no Mark Furhman, no ill-fitting glove. Instead, an F BI-reco rded phone call caught Reynolds panting for sex with a 15-year-old Catholic virgin. “What did I hit — the Lotto?” he exclaimed.
Tucker, videotaped by the FBI pocketing thousands of dollars from a lobbyist, says, “God will vindicate” his name. Reynolds had put his faith in the less spiritual appeals process.
Now comes Rep. Barbara-Rose Collins, starring as the latest victim of the week. The Democratic congresswoman from the burned-out streets of Detroit is under investigation by the FBI and the ethics committee for everything from decorating her house with campaign funds to pocketing scholarship money intended for inner-city youth.
In a press conference, Collins said, “I ask you, is this gender bias or is this racism?” Her chief of staff echoed these remarks to THE WEEKLY STANDARD: ” I know the media’s racist pure and simple.” But, in this instance, most of the allegations against Collins come from African-Americans. Even the black-owned $ IDetroit Chronicle beseeched her to jettison the race card.
Faced with such reprobation, Collins tried to take the victim role to new heights, whining to the Detroit News: “Racists have always been able to find Uncle Toms.” Yet a black starlet of Collins told THE WEEKLY STANDARD: “If she was a white member, she would have been hung from the highest yardarm on the Capitol grounds.”
The same double standard is evident in the Waldholtz case. What male politician, through a veil of tears, could claim he stole an election because his wife had duped him? In playing the damsel in distress, Waldholtz contradicts the core message of her own campaign and the Republican revolution: that each of us, whether surviving on welfare or a trust fund, must be responsible for our lives.
None of this is to say circumstances don’t contribute to our sins. Of course, racism and sexism still exist. But while our environment certainly helps to explain our mistakes, it cannot shield us from our crimes.
With so much of America’s civil society unraveling, politicians must own up to their bad deeds as well as their good ones. Not only is this the right thing to do, it may be their only hope for political survival: Voters, who can still distinguish between Montel Williams and C-SPAN, have already rallied their representatives and fellow jurors to boot three of Congress’s so-called victims from office. Time is running out for the remaining two.
David Gram is executive editor of The Hill.
