Romney and the Duchess

They’re still talking about it on cable news – whether Mitt Romney blew his campaign out of the water with his remark about 47 percent of Americans being dependent victims. And then there are the topless photos of Kate Middleton, now the Duchess of Cambridge, which have hit print in Europe.

What’s the relationship here? In Romney’s case, he thought he was speaking to a specialized audience about campaign strategy. The Duchess was just trying to get a little sun, and wasn’t playing to an audience at all, or at least, thought she wasn’t.

The price of fame keeps going up. When you’re really famous, you can run, but it’s almost impossible to hide these days. It’s a reality that those folks find themselves having to learn to deal with. And everywhere they go, whatever they say, they have to wonder whether there’s a data-gathering device nearby. And now, everyone has them. Still, the Duchess did have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and it’s hard to blame Prince William, who saw his mother essentially killed by paparazzi, for being angry.

I of course have less sympathy for Mr. Romney, who is actively seeking as much publicity as he can get. He should know by now that everything that comes out of his mouth is probably going to be within range of a smartphone – and fair game. Did he really blow his campaign up? The thing that will probably keep him viable is our woefully short attention span. We still have those debates yet.

I haven’t seen the pictures of the Duchess, but I think I’m safe in guessing that they offer no anatomical surprises, and that the world will move on.

All that said, these incidents demonstrate to me how increasingly rare safe places are for people with fame, beauty, political power or ambition, and/or money. And with cameras and microphones attached to everyone like new physical appendages, even we common folk are getting a taste of this problem.

Safe places, where we can wear as much (or as little) as we want or say what we want to say, are disappearing faster than the Brazilian rain forest – and I hope we start figuring out how to preserve them in our own lives, because famous or ordinary, we all need them.