To care or not to care

Megan McArdle has adopted an official position on the Kerry Kerfuffle: I don’t care. I don’t care so much that I wish I could hit myself in the head wtih a hammer right now until all memory of this story falls out and makes room for something useful…. It’s mildly interesting from a sociological standpoint ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Megan McArdle has adopted an official position on the Kerry Kerfuffle:

Megan McArdle has adopted an official position on the Kerry Kerfuffle:

I don’t care. I don’t care so much that I wish I could hit myself in the head wtih a hammer right now until all memory of this story falls out and makes room for something useful…. It’s mildly interesting from a sociological standpoint –are these guys all having affairs with their interns?– but in the final analysis, who the hell cares? Not me. I’m going to go have a stiff drink and try to forget I ever heard about this. Not that I imagine my drinking companions will let me. Sigh.

I mostly agree with Megan’s first sentence, in that this sort of information would be unlikely to affect my vote. However, I will confess to being interested in a) how this story became a story, and; b) whether Kerry will be able to ride it out. My gut-level responses are a) Lehane and b) yes. On Megan’s socioligical question regarding fascination with interns, David Plotz penned a Slate essay during the Chandra Levy disappearance that’s worth excerpting cause it’s true:

Washington’s interns are valuable more for psychological reasons than economic ones. Though Hill rats would never admit it, interns decynicize D.C.; Washington thrills them (at least for the six weeks till their disillusionment). They may be calculating and ambitious, but they remind their beaten-down editor, their dispirited chief of staff, their venal executive director of why what they do is important and interesting and exciting. Their idealism is fuel for the city. This vitality is also why it’s so easy to understand the not-infrequent affairs between female interns and powerful men. (Though there are no good numbers on this, anecdotal evidence suggests that females are a growing majority of D.C. interns.) The intern is attracted to the man for obvious reasons: The interns are young, they’re hormonal, and they’re political junkies. To them, a second-rate congressman looks like Mick Jagger. And why are the men infatuated? It’s not just because the interns are young and sexy. It’s because the interns still honestly believe in Washington, believe that a congressman is just as important as he thinks he is. In a jaded city, that faith is the rarest and most enticing quality of all.

UPDATE: Sorry about the technical errors in the first version of this post.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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