Quote of the Day (Richard Burton, on Reputation--With Application to the Political Scandal Du Jour)

"I rather like my reputation, actually, that of a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter, a drunk, a womanizer; it's rather an attractive image."--Richard Burton, quoted in Gene Shalit, Great Hollywood Wit: A Glorious Cavalcade of Hollywood Wisecracks, Zingers, Japes, Quips, Slings, Jests, Snappers and Sass From the Stars (2003)

With reputations, it’s all about where you make them and how long the impression lasts. Burton, of course, had wide latitude in Hollywood, where four is probably the median number of marriages and the number of affairs is exponentially larger. There, a reputation as a sexual swordsman gives you a certain cachet.

But in politics, better known, in James Carville’s formulation, as “show business for ugly people”--well, that’s another story. There, depending on the stage of the career, a reputation is made and re-made repeatedly. You might think you can simply move on and upward, without anyone remembering what you did along the way. Not so.

Or, as Robert Penn Warren’s political boss Willie Stark says in All the King’s Men: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”

Herman Cain is encountering this great truth right now. Did he commit sexual harassment, or engage in some similar louche behavior? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we’ll never know.

But it was a major, major mistake for him to embark upon this campaign without thinking that settlements with two women while he was president of the National Restaurant Association would not come to light. A recent summary from The Huffington Post on his most recent accounts of the matter include an inordinate number of “I do not recall” or its variants.

His campaign’s response to the revelation bears all the marks of a disarray he surely would not have tolerated as a business executive, but I’m afraid he has only himself to blame. If he was indeed innocent, he should have told his inner circle from the start so they could immediately launch an effective defense. (The beginning of the campaign would have been best to reveal this, but it seems as if his handlers knew 10 days ago that members of the media had this story, and the responses are still changing.) If he was guilty as claimed, his decision to begin an epic, cross-country campaign will come to be seen as an act of hubris on the order of John Edwards’ similar one before the 2008 campaign, when he already knew that Rielle Hunter loomed in the background.

There is also the matter of audience. Burton’s reputation as a “spoiled genius” only enhanced his credibility in his best roles in Becket, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Equus--world-weary men haunted by their pasts. If the current claims are true, the conservative voters in the Republican primaries will not be anywhere near as understanding with Cain as Burton’s audience was.

Whether or not the accusations turn out to be accurate, the press have not covered themselves in glory. The initial accounts came from two anonymous sources, which, unlike a courtroom, does not allow the quarry to confront his accusers. Unlike Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton, we don’t even know the substance of what is claimed, never mind the truth of the matter.

What we do know is this: risking a hard-won reputation built up over a lifetime on a campaign for President requires a level of ego unknown to the average voter, though perfectly normal in show business and its ugly sister, politics.