Monday, March 11, 2002
If it hadn't been for Bill Clinton, Congressman Gary Condit, D-Calif., might have been looking forward to his eighth term in Congress. But an America fed up with the extra-marital relationships of senators, representatives and, most famously, the president of the United States, were downright angry at Condit whose entanglement with a missing 24-year-old congressional intern was the straw that broke the public's back.
Nowhere was this truer than in the Central Valley district that voted Condit out of office during last Tuesday's California primary election.
If Condit had told the truth about his relationship with Chandra Levy -- where have we heard that before? -- perhaps he could have simply joined the pack of adulterous legislators who had 'fessed up, apologized to friends and family and went back to doing almost whatever they had been doing before morality reared its intrusive head.
But Condit, for all of his alleged political savvy, was clearly a slow learner. The more he stone-walled police and press, the more his name became talk-show fodder, the brunt of late-night television jokes and an embarrassment to the conservative Democratic voters of his largely agricultural district. The man who had called for Clinton to account for his behavior didn't want to account for his own. Although police have said that Condit is not a suspect in Levy's May 1, 2001, disappearance, his refusal to be forthcoming about his contacts with the young woman only suggested that he had something to hide.
Invincibility? After a 30-year political career, he should have known better. There must be something about certain politicians that makes them think themselves invincible.
There were no other issues in the election. California Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza, who beat the incumbent by some 10,000 votes, sees pretty much eye-to-eye with his former friend philosophically. Both are considered centrists. The essential difference between them, however, was Levy.
At one time, Condit was one of the California Democratic Party's golden boys. But as it became apparent that he had become a political liability and a constant reminder of Clinton's misdeeds, his former supporters abandoned him. Cardoza was endorsed by California's U.S. senators Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein. And when California Gov. Gray Davis publicly took Condit to task for not being forthright, it was not expected that he would even run for re-election.
Yet such was the man's hubris that he ignored the warning signs and filed for the primary one hour before the deadline. He would have saved his community and the Levys several months more grief if he had decided to sit this one out.
If there is a lesson to be learned from all of this, perhaps it is a reminder of Abraham Lincoln's words about not being able to fool all of the people all of the time. No one likes being thought of as a fool.