July 11, 2007--Très French

I remember a time when the very fact of having been divorced was a killer virus to being elected President. True, Adlai Stevenson had other problems—he was terminally boring and was running against Ike. But having been divorced didn’t help.

But then along came twice-married Ronald Reagan and he changed everything. His reputation for earlier randiness may have even contributed to a climate in which Bill Clinton’s popularity soared as the public learned more and more salacious details about his trysting with Monica.

Now we have something quite different—a long list of viable Democrat and Republican candidates who have had private lives that seem, well, French.

Forget Newt Gingrich who is huddling in the wings waiting to be called back into service. Sure he was carrying on with one of his staffers while vilifying Clinton from the floor of Congress and endlessly on TV—that’s the normal kind of hypocrisy we have come to expect from our political leaders. Look right now at poor Senator Vitter who was busy making speeches in the Senate about the sanctity of marriage before racing back to his office to get phone sex from the DC Madame.

I’m talking here about front-runner Rudy Giuliani who first married his cousin; then fooled around with his press secretary while married to Donna Hanover, wife number two or three; and then moved on to openly take up with Judy Nathan, dump Donna via a press conference, got kicked out of Gracie Mansion, and moved in with a gay couple before making an Honest Woman out of Judy—who we know is now already, in her fantasies, redecorating the White House.

I’m also talking about Barack Obama, as far as we know married just once, who has a wife who, on on the campaign trail, rather than looking up at him adoringly with The Gaze while he delivers his stump speech, continuously makes fun of him—not just about how difficult it is to get him to take out the garbage (standard stuff) but how full of himself he is, how abstract and detached he can be--In other words, she says the same kinds of things about him in public that his political opponents whisper and pundits proclaim.

And then of course there is the leading non-candidate, former Senator and actor Fred Thompson who many Republicans on the right hope will soon swoop in and rescue them from the secular likes of Rudy and, until yesterday when his campaign imploded, John McCain who can’t be trusted because he supports campaign finance reform—please explain that one to me.

But how will the Religious Right contort themselves to overcome the fact that Thompson, in the words of the staid NY Times, has a “trophy wife”? (Article linked below.) Yes she’s accomplished, yes they have a couple of cute kids, but still she’s about 25 years younger than he and the Internet is filling with pictures of her, with her permanent tan, in “form-fitting” gowns. Nothing worse than that has appeared yet—but stay tuned. As a hint of things to come, former rightwing Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, on his MSNBC TV show compared Mrs. Thompson to a stripper!

On the other hand, as we thread our way through our national and personal obsessions these domestic arrangements might ironically wind up helping Rudy and Fred and Barack (though he is in danger of getting wimped out by his Mrs.): For every estranged family-values oriented voter there may others who see these guys to be cool. On the Web site Footballguystalk.com, one poster wrote, after learning about Thompson’s babe of a wife, “I think he’s my new idol!”