A partisan guide to cheating

A couple of years ago, during 2007’s spate of political sex scandals, I wrote a piece for The New Republic arguing that the headline-grabbing imbroglios said a great deal about where the political parties were.

Cheating, of course, knows no party. But while the scandals of Republican Senators David Vitter and Larry Craig involved the sorts of locales–the brothel and the closet–that predated the sexual revolution, the affairs that disgraced New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey and Mayors Gavin Newsom and Antonio Villaraigosa involved that classic temptation of the post-revolution era, the workplace affair.

I make no moral distinction between the two, just a stylistic one: In the post-Stonewall era, one can enjoy consensual gay sex at places that are vastly more comfortable, not to mention less illegal, than a Minneapolis restroom. In fitting with the GOP brand, Craig and Vitter were philandering fogies, while Newsom (affair with a colleague) and Villaraigosa (affair with a reporter) were sleazy modern cliches. (Bill Clinton, the great triangulator, managed to split the difference: He strayed at the office, like a good Democrat, but his paramour was an unpaid intern).

The pattern worked, sort of, for the biggest scandal to happen since: John Edwards’ extramarital squeeze was officially in the candidate’s circle in her professional capacity–how genuine is open to debate–as a videographer.

But my theory took a big hit when New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned after getting caught up, Vitter-like, in a prostitution scandal. By my lights, he should have been shtupping some comely young lawyer on his staff, which an ex-Attorney General like Spitzer had to know was the safer route. And now comes Nevada Senator John Ensign, the bible-thumping conservative. The fogey, premodern route would have been for Ensign to follow in the footsteps of Pat Geary, his fictional predecessor, who frequented a Corleone-controlled brothel in the second Godfather movie. But instead, Ensign had to go and dally with a campaign aide–the wife of an office staffer, no less. Who does he think he is, a liberal?

Perhaps we can chalk this up as a winning moment for bipartisanship.