If Craig had tried the truth

September 1, 2007

When Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested, his first instinct was to blame the police for trying to “entrap” him. When Craig held a press conference this week to defend himself, his second instinct was to blame The Idaho Statesman for causing him undue stress.

Ezra poses a hypothetical that I’ve been pondering the past few days: what if, instead of lashing out, Craig’s crisis-management strategy had simply been based on the truth?

What would happen if Larry Craig came out as a gay man, apologized for his tortured life in the closet and the unseemly things his personal conflicts made him do, and then said that, nevertheless, he’d always been a good and dedicated senator to the people of Idaho, and he meant to retain his seat and keep fighting for the upward redistribution and failed wars (or whatever) that first turned him onto public service?

He might lose the next election, of course. But maybe he wouldn’t. And maybe he’d tap into an unexpected wellspring of libertarian attitudes and relative tolerance. Why not try?

To be sure, this approach has far more merit than, say, the wide-stance strategy, but in this case, I’m hard pressed to see how it would have helped. Indeed, absurd rationalizing probably made matters worse, but I suspect the truth would have led Craig to resign anyway.

For one thing, he pleaded guilty, which effectively sealed his fate. For another, Craig may still be in denial about his sexual orientation, and probably isn’t anywhere close to being able to come out of the closet.

Moreover, as unfortunate as this may be, homophobia is still a major problem in today’s Republican Party. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) gets caught up in a prostitution scandal, and the party establishment says it’s “unfortunate.” Craig gets caught up in a gay-sex scandal, and the GOP leadership calls it “unforgivable.” As Josh put it, “If you’re a Republican and you want to misbehave sexually, make sure it’s with a chick.”

As for Ezra’s point that Craig could point out how reliable he’s been on “fighting for the upward redistribution and failed wars,” but that leads to Craig’s other problem: he’s from Idaho, where a conservative governor can appoint a conservative replacement to advance the same conservative agenda.

With that, I might add one small caveat to Josh’s maxim: If you’re a Republican and you want to misbehave sexually, make sure you come from a state with a Democratic governor.

CNN just featured a psychologist who said that any one like Craig who has hidden the unself-accepted aspects of his or her sexuality for many years may want to be “found out”, just to relieve the tension and internal conflict. She was commenting on why he chose to plead guilty to anything doing with his arrest (two months after his arrest — he had plenty of time to think about it) if he didn’t want to be found out.

I guess people believed his guilty plea and not his denials.

  • As Josh put it, “If you’re a Republican and you want to misbehave sexually, make sure it’s with a chick.”

    I believe the axiom: He can only get beat if he’s caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl;>

  • Yeah, I guess it’s a little of an academic exercise to think about stuff like what you’re writing about here, but there’s a real question of what he’s going to do now. Go into blackmailing other congressmen by threatening to implicate them in gay sex with him? Turn it around and trade off his scandal to become a sort of gay icon (or a stealth, Liberman-esque gay icon, apparently misleading people on behalf of the Republicans) in a few years? Just fade into obscurity?

  • As Josh put it, “If you’re a Republican and you want to misbehave sexually, make sure it’s with a chick.”

    This just in! Condoleezza Rice, Liddy Dole and Mean Jean Schmidt caught in ménage à trois. GOP establishment yawns.

  • What kills me is that this guy would live his life as a lie and feign disgust at the suggestion of homosexuality all to keep his cushy job, with the great pay, and the unbelievable perks. Just another example of why there should be term limits for these people…it all becomes about self-preservation and job security instead of being true to yourself or your constituents.

  • Torture, war, a million Iraqi dead, four million Iraqi exiles/driven from their homes, the shredding of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, billions in corporate corruption and theft in scam Iraq no-bid contracts, and on and on. But none of this raises the moral indigination of Republicans and the right wing media and its relgious fundamentalist supporters. But a sexual event in which no one was injured and they rise to raving indignation and the accused hyprocite is soon deposed; witness Ted Haggard and now Larry Craig. There’s a lesson here for how to get rid of these tyrants lest we lose our entire, highly damaged, republic.

  • Oh fine, I only wrote about this four days ago, but go ahead and cite Ezra and not your regular reader and commenter. I see how this works.

    Besides, the argument isn’t that it was likely to have saved him, but he was screwed in any case, so he might as well have gone with the truth. Had he done it correctly, not only could he have gotten the sympathy of the gay and lesbian community, as well as people sympathetic to those issues (which wouldn’t have helped him much in Idaho, but would have helped); but he could have helped Idaho Republicans understand the situation better. As I said at the time, many Republicans oppose the “Gay Agenda” and gayness in the abstract; but aren’t necessarily against gay individuals that they know. That’s the way these people are with everything. They’re hardline conservatives until it personally affects them, when they suddenly understand the other side of things and adopt our point-of-view on that issue. These people lack empathy, but once they can personally relate to a situation, everything changes. But his denial only made things worse. If you act guilty and deny what you did, then you’re admitting that it was wrong. And that won’t help anyone understand what he was going through.

    Had Craig come out, stood on his record and insisted that the man that did those things had been gay the whole time, it could have brought at least some Idaho Republicans to his side. And at least he’d have gone out with a little dignity and style, rather than being laughed at for his denial that no one believed. Again, it’s not likely that this would have saved him, but his denial only made him a bigger joke. But then again, I do think it’s quite possible Craig still hasn’t come to terms with the whole gay thing anyway, and think he made a huge mistake by making his denial before I could finish my post on the matter. When will these people learn to wait until Biobrain speaks before they commit to anything?

  • I think he may have survived had he told the truth, then went for the pillow punching, scream your mother’s name, gay cure. Rational people wouldn’t have believed a word of it, but the wingnuts would have eaten it up.

  • Craig says he’s going to try to get his “guilty” plea reversed, so we haven’t heard the last from him yet.

    He’d probably be better off to leave it alone and just drop out of sight for a while.

  • I have to disagree on this one. Soliciting sex in an airport bathroom, presumably with the intent of having sex in the airport? I don’t think that’s one of those things that goes away with a simple confession. I think we have a right to expect more out of adults. The hypocrisy, the denial, the blaming of others only make a bad thing worse. But this doesn’t seem to be the type of thing one gets caught doing the first time. After all, he had to be the agressor to be arrested.

  • I heard that you can cure homosexuality just by being really upset and thinking a lot; withdrawing from the world helps.

    [joking]

  • Where’s Jack Bauer on this?

    I, Justices Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and countless other self-appointed experts on national security (mostly TV news reader/interviewers, and editorialists) want to know what the fictional character thinks about whether gayness can be cured.

    Who should we ask? The writers? Kiefer Sutherland?

  • “He might lose the next election, of course. But maybe he wouldn’t. And maybe he’d tap into an unexpected wellspring of libertarian attitudes and relative tolerance. Why not try?”

    In Idaho? Hmmm. Well if another opportunity to test that hypothesis ever arises, be sure and let me know how that works out.

  • A actually feel kind of sorry for Craig. He’s clearly very conflicted about his sexuality and can’t deal with his desires. If only he didn’t funnel his self-loathing into an anti-gay political agenda

  • First he blames the cop, then he blames the paper, then he blames the courts who found him guilty–if he admitted to being gay, he’d then blame SOCIETY for stultifying him and causing him all this duress in soliciting “so little – of something which he needs so much!” (Brokeback Mountain).

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