Nothing makes headlines like a good scandal. And if sex is involved, especially if there are tons of hot gruesome details, you can bet they’ll be plenty of them. Social critic Bill Maher, blogging for the Huffingtonpost.com this past week, made light of the spate of sex scandals bedeviling the Republican Party since the beginning of the year. “By the time you hear about one, there's been another. Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Bob Allen, Vitter, Craig... It's like ‘Clue’ only the answer is always ‘A Republican...in the washroom...with his cock.’”

The so-called party of “family values” has endured some real sordid controversy of late, popularized mostly by Senator Mark Foley (R-Fla.), Senator David Vitter (R-La.) and Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho).  Senator Foley was found to have sent lewd and obscene emails to underage male congressional pages. Senator Vitter was forced to admit to soliciting prostitutes after his name appeared on a phone list obtained from the so-called D.C. Madam, thanks in large part to the efforts Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, as he proudly told MSNBC’s Dan Abrams. Senator Craig, after pleading guilty to charges of solicitation of an undercover male police officer for sex in a Minneapolis airport restroom, may now be subject to a Senate Ethics Review. All three politicians frequently espoused “traditional values,” something that prompted Flynt to declare, “Payback’s a bitch”.

Senators Foley, Vitter and Craig are hardly the only American politicians whose names have lent themselves to sex scandals, however. Republicans have hardly cornered the market in terms of extramarital liaisons. Democrats love the lovin’ too. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome, in what California Republicans had snidely assailed as “San Francisco values”, engaged in an affair with his close friend and re-election campaign manager’s wife, according to a report last February in The San Francisco Chronicle. Mayor Newsome, most commonly known for his efforts to give marital rights to the city’s same-sex couples, was confronted by Alex Tourk, husband of Ruby Rippey-Tourk, after Mrs. Tourk admitted to the affair as part of a drug rehab program she was undergoing. What a way to repay the man who kept you employed.

Fellow Californian, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, himself had an affair with a younger woman. Villaraigosa, 54, separated from his wife of over 20 years, Corina, in June to continue his affair with a “smokin’”, according to William Booth of The Washington Post, 35 year-old TV anchor for NBC-Telemundo, Mirthala Salinas.  If you’re going to be the mayor of Los Angeles’ girlfriend, you better be smokin’.   

Analysis of the Villaragosa and Newsome affairs begins to reveal the anomaly that is the American Zeitgeist. Whereas both stories easily made news and both men drew rather stern criticism, especially from their political opponents, neither man’s administration seemed to actually be threatened at all. Newsom’s approval ratings among San Francisco voters remains above 70 percent, a figure that The San Francisco Chronicle asserts is “unusually high” for a politician as relatively new to his position as Newsome is.

“Although his relations with the Board of Supervisors have deteriorated over the past year,” wrote the newspaper when the scandal broke in February, “no competing candidate has emerged for this year's mayoral race.” This turn of events comes even despite the results of an opinion poll administered by that same newspaper that showed 60 percent of people said Newsome showed a “lack of judgment” with regard to the affair. Not only that, but at the time of the affair Newsome was also in the process of divorcing his wife, Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle.    

In the case of Villaragosa, a man who used to have the words “Born to Raise Hell” tattooed on his shoulder next to a caricature of The Devil, the situation might be considered equally as puzzling. LA Times writer Steve Lopez called Villaragosa the “Don Juan who calls himself our mayor.” Lopez added that “the last time the mayor stepped out on his wife she was battling cancer. Talk about a character issue.” He quoted Jaime Regalado of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs who claimed LA women voters would “never vote for him again.” With such public scrutiny looming, Villaragosa’s political demise seemed imminent. But what happened? Two days after Lopez wrote that column, Regalado was quoted as saying, “Right now, [Villaragosa’s] popularity is really stratospheric. It's going to take a hit, but he's still a rock star.” Even The Washington Post wrote that despite the controversy, “Villaraigosa is a rising star for the Democrats, one of the party's most visible Latinos,” who’ll likely be running against current Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010.

There truly is more bounce in California then all ya’ll combined.

Further complicating this question of exactly why and precisely how much Americans concern themselves with who their officials are taking to bed is that, when viewed through a historical perspective, politicians extramarital affairs should hardly shock the collective conscience. In one of the more refreshing and nuanced op-ed pieces in some time, entitled “Prudent, not prude, reaction to Vitter's 'sin'”, MSNBC’s Brian Alexander writes, “Unsanctioned sex and political figures have a very long history in our country.” Even a minimalist review of American history seems to prove Mr. Alexander’s claim is dead on.

Republican President Warren Harding had an affair with a woman, Nan Britton, 29 years his junior. He was 51 and Ms. Britton 20. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, upset that his wife, Eleanor, was strangely uninterested in having sex with him, sought satisfaction outside the marriage. An attractive woman named Lucy Mercer, Eleanor's social secretary, became his “New Deal,” so to speak. Benjamin Franklin, in addition to being a Founding Father, also fathered an illegitimate child, as did Grover Cleveland, although it was 10 years prior to his presidency. One of Franklin’s fellow founders, our third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, has long been rumored to have had several illegitimate children with one of the slaves on his Monticello plantation, Sally Hemings. Talk about reaping what you sow.
Even decades after his assassination, John F. Kennedy is still equally if not more so renowned for his elicit affairs. In 2003, a former White House intern, Mimi Fahnestock, claims she had an affair with JFK from 1962 to 1963. This comes in addition to JFK’s other numerous affairs, including, most notably, sex icon Marilyn Monroe.  Not to be outdone, President William Jefferson Clinton introduced Americans to some new uses for cigars in 1995 during affair he had with then White House intern Monica Lewinsky, now a graduate of The London School of Economics. Clinton was impeached in 1998, but acquitted by Congress in 1999, in a media feeding frenzy that was severely, forgive the expression, overblown.

One could hardly think that Americans are somehow not used to politicians and their varied affairs. So, why does it seem as though Americans are still shocked when they find their representatives’ names in the paper for consorting with people outside their marriages?

Naomi Schaefer Riley, writing in the Wall Street Journal this past August, wondered aloud why the recent spat of sex scandals amongst the G.O.P power elite were even newsworthy in the first place. “Republicans are looking less and less like the party of family values and more like the party of sexual scandals,” she declares. Still, Riley believes the American populace should hardly be so taken with such matters. “After all,” she opines, “we live in a culture awash in sex. Television, movies, billboards, the Internet. After watching a few minutes of MTV, is it really so shocking to find celebrities or even prominent politicians engaging in these sorts of activities?”

Arianna Huffington, posting on her blog in February, castigated the mainstream media’s coverage of Mayor Newsome’s affair. “Why is this a public matter?” she asks rather directly. Huffington noted that instead of covering the deteriorating situation in Iraq, and the continued socio-political unease throughout the United States and the world, “the media are willing to use up their precious air-time oxygen with pointless crap like this.” Huffington, a native of Greece, is dumbfounded by what she views as the Americans media’s “never-ending cycle of public voyeurism.” “Unless a politician has broken the law,” she says, “there is only one legitimate answer to the illegitimate probing of private lives: ‘It's none of your business.’”

Yet again, the words of Bill Maher ring truer than most. Commenting on contrasts between the United States and France on his HBO program Real Time in May, Maher says of the French, “They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private.” Maher points out that in France’s recent presidential election, one of the candidates, Ségolène Royal, is a female socialist who has four children and has never married. Imagine if a woman like that ran for political office in this country? Hillary Clinton gets called a “bitch” just for being assertive. Maher also notes that Madam Royal’s opponent, “Conservative” Nicolas Sarkozy, lives apart from his wife. “And the people are okay with that,” says Maher, “for the same reason they're okay with nude beaches; because they're not a nation of six-year-olds who scream and giggle if they see pee-pee parts!”

In his aforementioned commentary, Brian Alexander puts it a bit differently. “One does not have to condone extramarital affairs, or visiting prostitutes…to realize that many people often fail to live up to the ideals they set for themselves and others. Ideals are a vision of perfection, a goal. But many people, maybe most of us, cart around some personal desire for an indulgence we may regret later, but cannot resist right now.” By considering the human element, Alexander may in fact have hit at the heart of the issue.

In a democracy, the people elect their leaders. Consequently, their leaders will have the same inherent instincts and drives as they do. As in fact, we all do. We’re only human. Our leaders are not the pristine archangels the public sometimes unfairly makes them out to be. Or as Alexander puts it, “The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution never mention sex or the private lives of politicians, but they are full of great ideas.” Perhaps one such idea that the Founders would have agreed upon, an idea that we should all agree upon, is that what happens in the State House, stays in State House.