So, what do we learn from the Tweet-My-Wiener Affair?

First, a ground rule: No giggling while reading this post.

Second, let me say this: Weiner!

It's just fun.

So, anyway, let's talk about the Weiner scandal, and political scandals generally. Here's the conventional wisdom, which you've heard a million times: "The cover-up is worse than the crime." Turning this into a fully-formed thought, the logic seems to be, "If you just admit to wrongdoing right away, you'll get in less trouble than if you try to cover up what you did and then end up admitting it. At that point, you have to deal with the consequence of the crime AND the cover-up. That's worse."

Eh...not so sure about this.

First of all, there's a third possibility here: The scandal breaks, you successfully cover up your misdeeds, and the cover-up holds. In short, you get away with it. The people who preach that "the cover-up is worse than the crime" are assuming that the cover-up can't hold. But sometimes it can, and it does. (Think Larry Craig...who denies to this day that he propositioned a cop in a public restroom. You may not believe him, but the evidence against him was never so strong that he had to hold a teary, Weineresque press conference.)

Second, sometimes you only need the cover-up to hold for a little while. If you can stonewall for a while, eventually the story will settle down, people will move on, something else will pop up and grab headlines, and your weenie pics will get pushed to the sidelines. Even if the full truth comes out some day, it may not be as damaging to you as it would have been if you'd copped to it right away.

The Clinton White House understood this. That's why Mike McCurry, Clinton's former press secretary, described his scandal management strategy as follows: "Telling the truth...slowly."

Think about the Monica Lewinsky scandal. When that broke, Dick Morris did some polling for President Clinton. Morris determined that if Clinton came clean about everything that was likely to come out eventually--the relationship, his untruthful testimony in the Paula Jones deposition, his coaching of Bettie Currie--the American public would likely demand his resignation. So, Clinton waited, lied, cast himself as the victim, accused Ken Starr and Congressional Republicans of attempting a coup, and so on. Eventually, all of Clinton's dirty secrets came out...but by then public opinion had shifted, and he survived.

Contrast this with Chris Lee, the Congressman who sent his "check out the guns" pic to a Craigslist chick. Chris Lee came fully clean and resigned the same day, apparently feeling that the spotlight on himself and his family was too bright and too hot. If he'd managed to stonewall for another week, he might still have his job--just like Rep. Weiner.

Footnote: The archetypal "cover-up is worse than the crime" scandal is Watergate. People always say, "If Nixon had said, right away, that he didn't know anything about the break-in, but that everybody even remotely associated with CREEP would be summarily fired, everything would have worked out fine. Instead, he tried to cover up for his friends and associates. That's what cost him the presidency. He should have distanced himself from those guys and let justice run its course."

Well, here's the problem: The guys responsible for planning and executing the Watergate break-in had been committing crimes and pulling dirty tricks (e.g., hiring gays to kiss on camera at the Democratic convention) on Nixon's behalf for years. If Nixon had immediately fired them all and left them to their fate in the court system, it's safe to assume that almost all of them would have spilled everything they knew in exchange for leniency. And if that had happened, Nixon would have been gone a lot sooner than the summer of 1974.

Anklenote: Looks like Jeff Greenfield wrote pretty much the same story you just read on my blog. The main difference is that he got paid 41.2 gazillion dollars for it, and I got nothing. 

Comments

[supra vaiders]

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[Belstaff Icon Jackets]

Very, very nicely done!