I am sick and tired of political scandals.
In my ideal world, people would only read about scandals in National Enquirer. Scandals wouldn’t be seen on the news. They wouldn’t be viewed as news at all; they would be guilty pleasure bathroom reading material.
In our world, scandals aren’t just on the news – they are the news. If you turn on CNN, there is virtually no chance that you’ll hear an informative conversation about underemployment, the urgent need to break up Amazon.com, the environmental benefits of tariffs and reduced international trade, or the prison-industrial complex. You will probably become a Stormy Daniels expert, though.
When you do a good job at work, your boss doesn’t say: “That doesn’t count because I read you were a jerk to your husband last night.” That makes no sense. But that’s what politicians have to deal with when people mistake scandals for relevant news.
Picture it: it’s 2021. President Elizabeth Warren successfully brought every soldier back to the United States. President Warren just shook hands with Putin and both leaders agreed to shut down our nuclear submarine programs and let the subs sink harmlessly to the bottom of the ocean.
I will rapturously applaud President Warren. If a scandal comes out that she is a terrible person behind closed doors, I will not care. There is nothing she could do or say or tweet that would make me dislike her as a leader. Her personal flaws and sins can not change the fact that she brought us world peace.
I suppose there’s limits, though, right?
There has to be a threshold where a politician’s personal evil-doing is so ghastly that you can’t vote for him in good conscience. The outstanding film “Chappaquiddick” explores this threshold.
The story begins on an appropriately sorrowful note. On a lovely summer evening in 1969, senator Ted Kennedy got drunk with a young lady who was not his wife and flipped his car over into the water. Somehow, Kennedy escaped. His passenger did not.
This is not so good. What makes this accident go from sad to horrible is that Senator Kennedy checked into a posh hotel and didn’t call the cops until the next morning. Meanwhile, poor Mary Jo Kopechne slowly suffocated as she franticly breathed the remaining oxygen that was inside the car.
The Senator (Jason Clarke) isn’t particularly troubled about the woman he just killed. He isn’t even scared that he will have to go to prison, even though he definitely would have served time if he had been poor or non-white. Ted is concerned that he – the last surviving Kennedy bother – has just spoiled his chance to become President.
Family patriarch Joe Kennedy assembles an absurdly accomplished team of great minds (including Ted Sorensen and Robert McNamara) to come up with a damage-control plan to save Ted Kennedy’s career. And they do a darn good job.
The best and brightest minds of the Democratic party should have been solving America’s problems; instead they were working as scandal spin doctors. The scenario is darkly funny, and director John Curren mines the situation for a lot of laughs.
The comedy reaches a surprising crescendo when Senator Kennedy dons a fake neck brace at Mary Jo Kopechne’s funeral to try to gain sympathy.
Don’t worry, Democrat readers: This isn’t an anti-Kennedy hatchet job. “Chappaquiddick” is an admirably even-handed film. Curren really does make us feel for Ted Kennedy. He never encourages us to judge the Senator.
The film definitely doesn’t encourage us to judge the voters of Massachusetts, who largely looked past the scandal and reelected Senator Kennedy seven more times.
There is absolutely no defense for what Ted Kennedy did on that terrible summer night in 1969. It is one of the worst personal scandals in US history. But the scandal does not diminish Kennedy’s legislative achievements. They have nothing to do with each other.
Next time a political scandal comes on your TV, please consider that you are watching meaningless tabloid trash, definitely not the news.