Unsavory Pictures
Mayor Forced Out of Office
By Daniel Muniz

Anyone who aspires to run for public office in the future should seriously consider the actions that they are taking today.

Former mayor Carmen Kontur-Gronquist of Arlington Oregon found out the hard way when her constituents would rather discuss her panties instead of the pressing issues involving the local community.

What created a national sensation was a MySpace web page the former mayor created. The account was blocked to the general public but available for her friends to view. However, for a brief time, it was open for the whole world to see. Eventually, racy photographs of Kontur-Gronquist only in her underwear blazed through the net. The national news wires salivated at a juicy story of a half naked female mayor and splashed the pictures and the story in their news releases. The ridicule created a local backlash which then forced her out of office.

What had happened was three years before she was elected mayor she had some pictures taken of herself in her bra and panties. As the fire department’s executive secretary, she thought that the fire truck inside the rural fire station would be a great prop for a sexy lingerie photo shoot.

Kontur-Gronquist was outraged when her pictures created a national sensation. In an interview, she stated:

“That's my personal life. It has nothing to do with my mayor's position.”

“I'm not going to change who I am. There's a lot of officials that have a personal life, and you have people in this community who have nothing better to do than scrape up stuff like this.”

Source: The Associated Press

What Carmen Kontur-Gronquist doesn’t seem to grasp is that digital pictures on the Internet no longer affords a person a private life. Whatever is floating out in cyberspace always has the chance of making itself very public. And if she doesn’t want people gawking at her bra and panties and only talking about her underwear instead of the real issues affecting her municipality, she should not have put such photographs on a MySpace account or on anywhere else in cyberspace. The safest thing is not to have them at all if you are seeking public office.

Unfortunately, some people have allowed themselves to lapse into a false sense of security. They sincerely believe that their friends will safeguard such explicit pictures and not circulate them to the public. Sadly, lots of people have learned the hard way that their friendships were not as authentic as they once thought.

And they also have been duped into thinking that social networking sites are as secure as they promote themselves to be. Anyone who has ever worked with software knows that glitches and bugs and recklessness are inevitable. There is just not a way to stop a mishap from eventually happening.

But more to the point is that it is now becoming more commonplace across the country for a lot of women to either show the whole world pictures of themselves in their underwear (or wearing nothing at all) or reserve such viewing only to their friends. However, some people have an expectation of privacy even when such digital photographs are on the Internet. As luck would have it, too many people have discovered the brutal truth; that it is next to impossible to have such privacy in cyberspace. It doesn’t take much for such material to become widely disseminated.

So should Kontur-Gronquist’s constituents be focused on the issues or on her panties?

There are plenty of candidates and elected officeholders who can weather through storms of scandal if they can find the right scapegoat to deflect any unsavory media attention. It happens all the time and there are plenty of corrupt politicians who are sitting in office right now because of how deftly they circumvented their personal and public problems. Accordingly, their constituents don’t care and continue re-electing them.

But the one thing that candidates and elected officeholders cannot withstand is ridicule.

Ridicule will tear down any politician because he or she instantly becomes an embarrassment to the electorate and to their supporters. Our history is littered with so many tales of insignificant incidents that snowballed into a crisis that was too big to handle. And it was totally irrelevant what the incident was, it is just that the press made too big of a deal of it. The result was that the politician became too radioactive and their public support quickly evaporated.

And that is the harsh reality that every candidate must be willing to examine.

The hardest thing is that some people do not realize that they will some day run for office while others who have such aspirations feel that what they are doing today is so trivial that it won’t impact them in the future.

In Kontur-Gronquist’s case, there are millions of women who love to show the whole world pictures of themselves only wearing their bra and panties and a lot of them like to wear a heck of a lot less for such digital images. Even though that social norm is slowly evolving, the public is going to have a hard time accepting that from their politicians unless they are movie stars.

The bottom line is that stuff like this is poison. It should be avoided altogether before seeking office because the repercussions are severe.

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