Pro-tip for any wannabe politicians out there: You probably don’t want to get yourself involved in any situation that involves the phrase “drunk teen party.” And you definitely don’t want to get yourself photographed at one of those parties. Sounds pretty obvious, maybe, but no one appears to have given that simple advice to governor-wannabe Doug Gansler.
According to the Baltimore Sun, Gansler stopped by a beach week house party in June to talk briefly with his teenage son. He claims to not remember whether he saw any underage drinking, but just look at that photo up there: does that look like sober teen behavior?
At first, Gansler said that even if the kids had been drinking, it wasn’t his job to intervene. “Assume for purposes of discussion that there was widespread drinking at this party,” Gansler told the Sun. “How is that relevant to me? … The question is, do I have any moral authority over other people’s children at beach week in another state? I say no.” After the Internet freaked out on him, Gansler walked that statement back a bit, and admitted to making a mistake in not investigating whether the teens were drinking.
The teen party scandal comes not long after Gansler was called out for having a 16-month overdue speeding ticket. (Gansler insisted that he never received the ticket and wasn’t driving the vehicle.) And then there’s the fact that state troopers accused him of reckless backseat driving. While none of these situations really warrants the label of “scandal,” they add up to a pretty unflattering picture. I’m betting he won’t bounce back; what do you think, readers?
I don’t really like the guy, nor the privileged teens whose families can rent a 7-bedroom house on the shore their kids can abuse and trash in their drunken, fecklessness, stupor. His condoning of this kind of behavior reeks of privilege writ large. In my mind, the drinking is the lesser ethical question. If these were youth of any other demographic than white-privileged, the reaction would be harsh and uncontroversial. Instead, it is debated as if the ethical breaches of the situation were…debatable.