Republican enemies of mine, as well as Republican friends, as well as some non-Republicans with an ambition to scrupulous fair-mindedness, often react to my book You Don't Know Me: A Citizen's Guide to Republican Family Values, which details 110 instances of Republican sexual hanky-panky or serious misconduct or worse, with something like: "What's the big deal? Don't Democrats do exactly the same things? Aren't they just as hypocritical? Aren't they just as guilty as Republicans are?"
This was the tact that Oregonian book columnist Jeff Baker took when he reviewed You Don't Know Me for his newspaper. Baker (who, Republican or Democrat, is definitely also something other than completely scrupulous in his practice of journalism) devoted much of his allotted space to discussing the behavior of John Edwards and Bill Clinton rather than the actual content of my book. (See "Adultery on Par with Rape, Incest, Pedophilia? Oregonian Columnist Jeff Baker Says Yes," August 25, 2008)
My answer to this response from fair and unfair-minded critics alike is two-fold (I gave this response to Baker in a telephone interview but he didn't, for some reason, include it in the review). First, I concede that there are probably just as many adulterers in the Democratic Party as there are among Republicans (the proportion is probably pretty much the same in every population group), but with this difference: Few if any of the proven Democratic philanderers have been out aggressively preaching family values and criticizing their opponents for not living up to same. Of course there are always exceptions. But the overriding theme of You Don't Know Me is conservative Republican hypocrisy. Second and more importantly, a majority of the cases in my book involve actual criminal behavior. There are forty-six cases of pedophilia alone enumerated therein, but only twenty-two of what I call "garden variety adultery."
So my curiosity was stimulated a couple of morning ago when I heard that two new political sex scandals had just broken in the news, one involving a Democrat and the other a Republican, because they might provide a good basis for comparison. The Democrat is Rep. Tim Mahoney (D-Fla.). The Republican is former New York State assemblyman Chris Ortloff.
What is Mahoney guilty of? According to news reports on Monday, Mahoney, who represents Florida's 16th Congressional District, the West Palm Beach area, paid $121,000 to a former campaign staffer named Patricia Allen to avoid a threatened lawsuit against him for sexual harassment and intimidation. Mahoney and Allen had been having an affair. Allen reportedly wanted to break off the affair when she heard that Mahoney, who is married with one child, was also having relationships with other women, and he told her he was going to fire her if she carried through on that threat (she did and he carried through with his). Allen, by the way, turned out to be right in her suspicions--the AP reports today that a "person close to" Mahoney's campaign has given them details of a second affair the Congressman was having at the time.
Just so I am not accused, in this case anyway, of sparing the rod for a fellow Democrat, let me quote what the good Congressman had to say to his young staffer (the following from a recorded tape provided to ABC News).
"You work at my pleasure. If you do the job that I think you should do, you get to keep your job. Whenever I don't feel like you're doing your job, you lose your job. And guess what? The only person that matters is guess who? Me. You understand that? That is how life really is. That is how it works." Mahoney apparently didn't learn from Bill O'Reilly's example the folly of talking to an employee in this manner in a telephone conversation that can be recorded (see the transcript of Andrea Makris' complaint against O'Reilly in the Appendices section of You Don't Know Me).
Mahoney's Congressional seat was previously held by Republican Mark Foley. Mahoney won the seat in the 2006 election after it was revealed that Foley had engaged in a sexually suggestive email correspondence with a 16-year-old House page and he resigned. Mahoney, it has to be admitted, did campaign on a family-values-like promise to restore honor and morality to the district--"Restoring America's Values Begins at Home" was his slogan. Mahoney it turns out, also hired the same lawyer as Foley to represent him in his negotiations with Allen. But it also has to be said, or at least can be, for what it's worth, that Mahoney was a life-long Republican who only switched party registration in 2004.
What did Mr. Ortloff, who represented Plattsburgh, New York in the state assembly for 20 years and is now a Pataki-appointed member of the state parole-board, do? Ortloff was arrested in a Plattsburgh-area motel Monday when he arrived there for a sexual liaison with a minor he thought he had arranged on the Internet. He had child pornography and sexual paraphernalia on his person at the time of his arrest. His case is reminiscent of that of Roy Atchison, a Republican Florida prosecutor who flew all the way to Detroit for an assignation with a five-year old (see again my Jeff Baker blog).
"He was always the tough-on-crime guy in the Assembly who wanted to increase penalties for all kinds of sex crimes," The New York Post quoted a former associate as saying. Interestingly, Mark Foley, during his time in Congress, sponsored a major piece of legislation to increase federal penalties for sexual involvement with children. Republican legislators attempting to legislate against their own transgressions is a minor theme of You Don't Know Me.