Appetite for Scandal Altering Political Menu

The nation’s capital pulsates with seamy rumors of politicians behind closed doors. A Harvard historian predicts that congressmen, knowing that smut publisher Larry Flynt is about to disclose the names of the allegedly unfaithful, would be crawling home to have difficult family discussions. Meantime, pundits are predicting an extended era of “sexual McCarthyism,” with political opponents, not to mention the media, prying into candidates’ sexual peccadilloes like never before.

But as unseemly and ominous as it all sounds, it’s as likely that scandal in the White House, outings in Congress and demands for affidavits of marital fidelity may signal not a beginning but a turning point in the era of public roiling over politicians’ sex lives that began with Gary Hart’s Monkey Business and may have peaked with Bill Clinton’s behavior.

Clearly, the vast majority of voters now are anesthetized to garden-variety sex scandals. On the December weekend that the House voted to impeach President Clinton, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 79% of Americans disapproved of the attention being paid to the issue of “whether elected officials have had extramarital affairs.”

If there is an appetite for sex scandals in the 2000 election, it may be within some Republican circles where conservatives believe moral values expressed through candidates’ personal lives should be a part of any campaign debate.

“There will continue to be an interesting double standard that hurts Republican candidates more than Democrats,” said Stu Rothenberg, publisher of a newsletter that analyzes congressional races.

“People in the Republican base hold all elected officials to a tougher standard on sexual ethics. The Democratic base tends to be more accepting.”

But political consultants and analysts agree that the politics of purity may have inalterably damaged the quality of public officials by narrowing the field of individuals who are willing to subject themselves to the intense, increasingly sexual, scrutiny that goes along with public life.

Democrat Cancels Run After Ethics Questions

For example, a wealthy Democrat with a desire to be Louisiana’s next governor recently called political advisor Ray Strother. He was eager and all set to run.

Tested by Strother, the man said he had the $3 million it would take to mount a serious campaign; he was strong on the issues; he was even ready to weather revelations about his rehabilitation for drug abuse.

But then Strother, once an advisor to former Sen. Hart and President Clinton, asked, “Is there anything else a private detective could find on you . . . ?’ ”

After a talk with his wife, the Democrat called Strother the next day.

“He didn’t want to go through with it,” Strother said. “Neither one of them did.”

GOP consultant Ed Mahe said sexual disclosures do not have to be career-enders, but they continue to be marriage-enders.

“Not many people want to have to say to a spouse, ‘Here are the one or two things that might come out. Does that bother you?’ Maybe only Hillary Clinton could stand it,” he said.

Mike Bowers, who was attorney general of Georgia for 15 years, learned last year that revelations of sexual misdeeds can be costly.

A rising GOP star and hero among social conservatives, Bowers was a front-runner for his party’s nomination for governor.

He had gained national attention in the 1980s for defending a state law against sodomy that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

But his standing slipped after he admitted, in the face of swirling rumors, that he carried on a decade-long affair with his secretary. Although he lost the election, he did surprisingly well. Ultimately, he said, he lost because he couldn’t raise money from conservatives.

“Was I personally hypocritical? Yes,” Bowers said in a recent interview. “Do I bear responsibility for what I did? Yes. But if we [Republicans] keep this meanness up, we’re going to get to the point where we have a couple of kinds of people running for office: people who have never lived life, never experienced the vicissitudes of the human condition, or people who are so thick-hided they lack the sensitivity to lead in a democracy.”

This is not to say that Democrats are above making an issue of infidelity.

Utah Atty. Gen. Jan Graham, a Democrat, sent affidavits to the five members of the state’s all-GOP congressional delegation a few days after the House impeachment vote demanding that each one sign an oath that he had been faithful to his spouse.

The state’s two U.S. senators and three representatives were then confronted with the same question by the Salt Lake Tribune. Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin G. Hatch balked at the adultery question but answered dryly: “Flat-out no. Not before marriage and not after marriage.” The others also denied straying from their marriages.

Have we come to this? Will candidates soon be forced, as former Clinton counsel Lloyd N. Cutler suggested in a recent opinion page article--perhaps a bit bitterly--to file disclosure forms not just about their financial status but also about their sexual history?

Partisans and reporters who troll through politicians’ private lives tend to justify their snooping, citing concerns about hypocrisy, lying and the importance of character.

Yet most voters cast a discriminating eye--rather than a negative vote--when these matters arise, particularly if the indiscretion was committed long ago.

Last year, for example, three GOP representatives who had eviscerated Clinton for his sexcapade with Monica S. Lewinsky were reelected even though each one of them had been forced to admit their own indiscretions: Henry J. Hyde of Illinois was outed for having an affair 30 years ago; Dan Burton of Indiana for fathering a child by a woman other than his wife; Helen Chenoweth of Idaho for an affair with a married man. All three were in solidly Republican districts.

Political consultants Mahe and Democrat Geoff Garin say the obsession with marital infidelity shall pass. Like concerns over excessive drinking, spotty war records, illegal baby-sitters and marijuana smoking, the focus on adultery will soon fade, they said.

“Now when you do your debate prep,” said Garin, “you always prepare for the ‘pot question,’ but it almost never comes up.”

Yet some conservatives plan to continue scrutinizing politicians’ private lives. Indeed, those most likely to have their privacy invaded or get a hypocrisy check mid-campaign are Republicans running in tough primaries and in need of funding from conservative groups, according to political analysts of all stripes.

Already, GOP presidential prospects Lamar Alexander, Texas Gov. George W. Bush and former Vice President Dan Quayle have offered, mostly without prompting, declarations of fidelity to their spouses. (GOP contender Sen. John McCain of Arizona may become a test case of his party’s priorities in 2000: He has both war heroics and philandering in his past.) Charles Cunningham, a political strategist for the Christian Coalition, said that, while his conservative group won’t demand affidavits of fidelity in 2000, candidates’ private conduct should be part of any political debate.

“When you hold candidates to higher standards, you get what you expect,” he said. “Part of being a good leader is having a moral stature and standing . . . “

Fidelity to Become an Issue in 2000

The Rev. Lou Sheldon, head of the 1-million member Traditional Values Coalition, based in Anaheim, will ask candidates for the first time in 2000 if they’ve been faithful to their spouse and perhaps put that information in the coalition’s 2000 voters’ guide. He rejects the criticism that this is “sexual McCarthyism” or that people don’t care.

“The issue that is important to voters is not sinning in terms of infidelity,” he said. “The issue is what are you doing with it. Are you lying like Clinton and letting it fester? Or are you like our friend Henry Hyde who didn’t run away from it?”

Yet Sheldon didn’t want Louisiana Republican Bob Livingston to step down last month after the speaker-designate admitted past extramarital affairs in anticipation of Hustler publisher Flynt’s revelations. (Now, because Livingston’s wife, Bonnie, appealed to Flynt, he has decided against ever revealing what he had on the congressman.)

Trent Lott, the Senate majority leader from Mississippi, suggested to a Capitol Hill newspaper that perhaps public officials with such “skeletons in their closets . . . shouldn’t be in this business.”

Political analyst Allan Hoffenblum of Los Angeles disagreed: “California isn’t Mississippi.”

Hoffenblum, who publishes a guide that tracks and handicaps congressional campaigns in the state, ticked off numerous cases of candidates ensnared in scandals involving homosexual liaisons, underaged girls--you name it--who went on to win. This type of politics, he insisted, doesn’t play in California. Ken Calvert, for example, a Republican from Riverside, won reelection in 1994 despite a publicized encounter with a prostitute.

“The majority of Americans are much more tolerant on issues involving the personal lives of candidates than they have been in the past, and politicians get the message,” said Hoffenblum, who also advises Republicans.

Perhaps the only likely exception is sex scandals that involve bald-faced lies about ongoing indiscretions.

Best-selling historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who predicted bleak family times for the congressmen on Flynt’s list, said that while the country has long been willing to overlook the human foibles of politicians, “there still is a very passionate group of people in the country who feel as if this battle [over sexual purity] has to be fought.”

Although tolerance on the whole is up, Goodwin said, “the issue of sex” is still a live one for some Americans.

“I think it’s partly a struggle against the 1960s and changing mores in the modern age.”