Private Life and Public Office

To begin with, I personally feel that the press emphasizes too much on the private lives of our leaders and on the candidates when they are running for office. On page 233 of this article it says, “Journalists argue that they are only responding to what the public wants, and if the only test is what the public reads or views they may be right….and that the press pays too much attention to the private lives of politicians.” The article uses the Clinton – Lewinsky sex scandal as an example, and while he did lie about the affair, I really did not listen or read too much on it mainly because I really did not care to know about his personal life. There have been affairs in Washington D.C. for many years and as long as it does not affect the person’s job it is his or her own business. While affairs are not a part of my own personal ethics, I understand that not everyone shares the same ethics as I do, and they are the ones that have to live with themselves, not me. I totally agree with the article on page 231 under the Moral Skepticism section with, “Who is to say what is right or wrong, moral or immoral, in private life.”

I also agree with the theory of political recruitment. I think that some people do not enter politics because of how the media goes back practically to the day they were born and probe into their lives looking for all the skeletons in their closets. Everyone has skeletons, secrets that we are not proud of, but yet we did it and want to keep that part of our lives locked away and share it with people that we know love and trust. The media finds out these secrets and expose them during the campaigns, and I don’t really think that is fair. We all are human, we all have made our own mistakes, but we learned from them and moved on. On page 230, the article says, “The question is not whether some decide not to seek office because of the possibility of public exposure, but which kinds of people decide not to seek office because of it.” The paragraph continues to explain the types that do and do not seek political life, and I think the ending sentence to the paragraph is good with, “…we should consider the prospect of public exposure a favorable effect on recruitment.” Bearing this in mind, I think that some people do chose not to run for office because they have too many skeletons hiding, and so I have to agree with Thompson’s beliefs and theories.