Friday, July 10, 2009

My Morning Wooten

I almost didn't dive in this morning. As I told someone earlier, Jim's more "crazy uncle" than "lunatic" this morning. Lunatic always sells better.

But I suppose I can't pass this one up.
Run, Sarah, run. Actually, all candidates should resign to run for higher office. All four of the presidential and vice presidential candidates last year, including Palin, held onto their jobs until they got something better.
As the story of Sarah Palin's sudden resignation just gets weirder, Jim stubbornly tightens up his bubble. He may be right. Maybe she did resign early to set up (a disastrous) run in 2012.

But as The Mudflats points out, history tells a different story (ed. note - I don't normally cut and paste whole hog but it's the only way this makes sense. Make sure you do the courtesy of visiting the original site)

On a hunch, I reviewed online lists of all the men and women who’ve been elected governor of their state since the year 1900. Pored over them for a few hours. Over 1200 politicians have taken that first-term oath of office. Some soon died in office. Many resigned to accept other positions in government, including Spiro Agnew who was “tapped” by Nixon after being the Governor of Maryland for about five minutes. On a handful of occasions, a first-termer was dragged off to the slammer or impeached. One was incapacitated by a nervous breakdown and one left just as impeachment came knocking on his door. So—how many out of over 1200 just up and quit before the end of their term?

Three: Jim McGreevy, Eliot Spitzer and Sarah Palin.

In case you don't remember, McGreevy quit when it was discovered he was having an affair and Spitzer was making it rain with call girls.

Governor's don't usually resign for weird, esoteric reasons like "needing to pass the ball".

5 comments:

Sara said...

McGreevey didn't really resign because he had an affair. He resigned because he had an affair with a man who was a state employee. This is only important because a) it shows how intolerant we were and are towards closeted gay politicians, and b) I sincerely doubt he would have been forced to resign rather than serving out his term had the affair been with a female. If Mark Sanford can hang on to his seat after the infidelity shitstorm, McGreevey could have.

griftdrift said...

Interesting. I think I may have hit on one of those editorial choices (leaving out the gay angle was on purpose) where both the left and the right might see agenda.

Sara said...

I figured you left it out on purpose, but I felt like that lessened the impact of the argument you were making (about there only being 3 others who've quit mid-term) if we acted like it was just a "plain old" affair without that extra salacious angle that made it resignation-worthy (in the eyes of some). It's interesting that just a few years later, nobody forced Larry Craig to resign even though he pled guilty to a crime in connection with his attempted infidelity with another man. Perhaps that's just because Craig refused to admit he was gay or had ever had sex with another man, so the voters could be persuaded to just wait out his term. McGreevey decided to go public with the truth, and paid the price of his seat for it.

Kenny J Lowry said...

Sh*t on a stick …

Unknown said...

i think even an affair with a woman might have turned out poorly for mcgreevy if he had appointed her to a high level position for which she was rather unqualified--the sanford thing did not really settle down until an audit cleared him of using state money to facillitate his affair--i realize nj is not massachusets, but i would expect them to tolerate someone being gay more so that oklahoma...