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Jessica Cutler and the values of Washington

The following comment posted at Wizbang is typical of what many others are wondering:

Jessica Cutler, the original creator of the Washingtonienne blog that caused all the buzz, expresses the same thought in her interview with Richard Leiby:

So why is this news and why are we making a big deal about it? Because there is a huge gap between how voters think people on Capitol Hill are behaving, and the way they really behave.

Why should there be such a gap? Didn’t people hear about Monica Lewinsky, Chandra Levy, and a variety of other Washington sex scandals? Shouldn’t they know by now that a large percentage of important and semi-important men in Washington are having sex with women in their twenties? Don’t they know by now that a large percentage of female interns and other low paid female workers in resume building jobs are the opposite of pure and virginal?

No, people don’t know this because it’s not what they want to believe. They want to believe that Washington is full of people who behave consistently with conventional middle class values. These values dictate that you should work hard, be honest, believe in God, be moderate in the consumption of alcohol, remain a virgin until you get married, and thereafter remain faithful to your spouse.

These values are held most dearly by those in the middle of the American class structure. This includes those who deserve the term “middle class” (think school teachers), and those who are members of what Paul Fussell, the author of Class, calls the “high proletarian” class (think high paid blue collar workers). As one moves away from these two classes, to the upper-middle class (from which most government interns with resume building jobs come from) or the middle and low proletarian classes, these conventional middle class values are no longer as strictly adhered to.

No one gets elected to public office without claiming adherence to these values. There are many who would imagine that there is a big difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to “values.” Republicans call these values “family values” and use them as part of their campaign platform. But Democrats campaign based on these values too! Is there any candidate, in either party, who admits to being an atheist? Is there any candidate who tells the public that he sleeps around with many different women? Absolutely not! Such an admission would be fatal to one’s political career.

Democrats who complain that Republicans are too religious need to closely examine their own party members. Didn’t President Clinton proudly walk around with his Bible and make a big deal about going to church on Sundays? I think that a lot of his appeal to the liberal elite is based on their assumption that he’s an atheist at heart, and that the Bible and the church attendance were just a necessary stunt to trick the middle and lower class voters. They prefer a President who pretends to believe in Christianity in order to get votes over one, like George W. Bush, who genuinely believes in the religion. Many consider genuine belief in Christianity to be scary.

Out there in middle America, there are married couples, voters, who have only had sex with one person in their entire lives, and that’s their spouse. Are such people a tiny minority of the electorate, a sizeable plurality, or maybe even a majority? I won’t attempt to seek an answer to that question, but it’s clear that elected politicians believe that such people, or people who aspire to be such people, are a substantial percentage of the electorate. And most of these voters naively believe that the majority of people running our government behave in accordance with conventional middle class values. When a story of sexual impropriety on the part of a member of Congress or a government official makes the news, these voters believe that they are reading about a single bad apple amidst a tree of good ones.

It isn’t just the naïve goody two shoes Christian voters who give the people in Washington far too much benefit of the doubt. Even the jaded members of the press are guilty. Take, for example, the Chandra Levy/Gary Condit story. If the facts of the case had been the same, except that instead of being a U.S. Representative, Condit was a used car salesmen, one whose brother is a convicted felon, one who has friends in biker gangs, one who is into very kinky sex, one who forbids his girlfriend who’s young enough to be his daughter from carrying around any identification, everyone would have been screaming for him to be arrested and put in jail as soon as possible. But because he was a member of Congress, everyone assumed that all the suspicious details and his obvious motive to get rid of her must be merely a coincidence. I ask, what’s the difference between a used car salesman and a Congressman? Only that the Congressman is a better liar. Everyone says how dishonest politicians are, but deep down, people want to believe they are honest, and ignore facts to the contrary.

The reason why people are interested in this scandal is because they don’t believe that half the young women working in government behave like Jessica Cutler. But Jessica says that they do. Jessica says that there are “millions” of “slutty girls” on Capitol Hill. She says that a “lot” of her friends are “way worse” than her.

If parents believed Jessica, they wouldn’t let their daughters work in Washington. But their daughters are old enough to make their own decisions, you say? Ha! Lets see the young interns and young staff assistants try to live in Washington on only $25,000/year. Without parental support, there wouldn’t be so many young people willing to take these positions. Washington would be a different place if parents believed the stories.

In order to keep the myth of Washington’s virtue alive, when F, the “chief of staff” of a government agency is outed, he will be fired, in order to say to America, “This is the only guy in all of Washington paying to have sex with twenty-something female government workers. Washington is now 100% pure and moral once again. God bless America.” And people will buy it.

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Check out this photo of Jessica Cutler with Wonkette. I think that Jessica looks better in the amateur photo than she does in the one taken by the professional Washington Post photographer.

posted Sunday, May 23, 2004