Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

Roe isn’t about choice, it’s about freedom.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

“woke” is the new caravan.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

This really is a full service blog.

Everybody saw this coming.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

You are here: Home / Open Threads / You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way

You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way

by | 68 Comments

This post is in: 

Today’s Gingrich implosion got me thinking: has any prominent politician ever truly recovered from a sex scandal? I might have this wrong, but for my money, after impeachment got going and all the talk about Gingrich’s marriages and affairs got going, his career as an important national player was over. Spitzer is on teevee but I doubt he’ll every be governor, or anything like that, again.

Diaper David Vitter doesn’t count, he was a nobody before and he’s a nobody now.

Reader Interactions

68Comments

  3. 3.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I guess you could quibble over Barney Frank’s prominence, and how much Bill Clinton recovered, though as much as he drives me crazy, I think barring that stupid amendment he could’ve won a third term.

    ETA: Giuliani?

  4. 4.

    PurpleGirl

    How could we forget Wilbur Mills of Arkansas (Washington Post Archive)

    Congressman Wilbur Mills and Stripper Fanne Foxe – 1974

    A chance encounter between police and a speeding car on October 7, 1974, eventually ended the career of one of America’s most powerful congressmen. When police stopped the automobile of Arkansas Democrat Wilbur D. Mills, one of Mills’s passengers, a burlesque performer with the stage name Fanne Foxe, dove into the Tidal Basin – and into Washington folklore.

    Before long the details of Mills’s alcoholism, extramarital relationship with Foxe, and bizarre behavior were splashed onto the front pages. Mills lost first his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee and then his seat in Congress, choosing retirement in 1976 rather than a difficult reelection campaign.

  9. 9.

    MAJeff

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    Given Barney Frank, we could also state Gerry Studds. Dude was the outed and censured by the House, and continued to be re-elected. Sure, it may require quibbling over “prominent,” but it ain’t nothing.

  12. 12.

    James E. Powell

    @Doug Harlan J:

    It certainly damaged the end of his second term, which should have been triumphant, and it probably cost Gore the election.

  13. 13.

    Warren Terra

    Barney Frank and Ted Kennedy (sex being the least of the problems in his debacle, but not no part of it) both managed to regain prominence and respectability. And I haven’t heard what’s happening with Scott Brown’s senate seat; might Frank still run for it?

  15. 15.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I’m not clear on how public Rudi’s philandering was in ’97, when he was re-elected mayor, but I think he and HRC would’ve been neck-and-neck for the Senate seat in 2000 (not a New Yorker, just my long distance memory). Rudy flamed-out so fast in 2008 his personal life never really became an issue.

  16. 16.

    jfxgillis

    Doug:

    I was going to say Earl Long and Grover Cleveland, but someone beat me to the latter.

    Ted Kennedy.

    Rudy Guiliani.

    I think your hypothesis might be better stated as “has any politician risen in power” after a scandal.

  17. 17.

    ruemara

    I’m willing to have a sex scandal, if it involves lucrative interviews on tv shows and then my own E network tellyshow.

  19. 19.

    Suffern ACE

    I don’t think Rudy really did recover from the sloppy divorce. While he was term limited out, so was Bloomberg, but at least Bloomberg managed to convince the council to vote him a chance for a third term. Maybe it’s personality, or money, and Rudy had burned so many bridges that the divorce was the final straw. I don’t think he would stand much chance of getting voted back in.

  20. 20.

    PeakVT

    @James E. Powell: There are a lot of things that could arguably have cost Gore the election, given how close it was in Florida. Ultimately, it was the stupid fucking electoral college that made him lose, since Gore received more votes.

  21. 21.

    Violet

    @Doug Harlan J:

    I’m not so sure. He can raise money and what not, but I’m not sure he is what he was before.

    Well of course he’s not what he was before. He was President of the United States. Now he’s just a former President.

    I think he maybe doesn’t have quite the clout he used to have, but that’s due to a lot of things. Time passing just in general. He’s aged and he’s had some serious health crises. Heart surgery is known for changing how patients’ brains work, in many cases. Then there’s also the unprecedented situation of his wife running for President, and Bill, the former President, out campaigning for her, and then her losing to that newbie, Obama. Some of Bill’s actions during the campaign left some bad feelings and changed how people thought of him a little.

    All of that is tied up in “not sure he is what he was before.” Only a tiny bit of that, imho, is due to the sex scandal.

  22. 22.

    jl

    ma ma where’s my pa?

    Supposedly Cleveland told his staff to ‘tell the truth’.

    I think that was in his first campaign for president, and he was elected

    (excuse me, Wiki break)

    Ok. He won. Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!

    Lost next election, then ran and won for a second term four years later. Only pres with two nonconsecutive terms.

    So, yes it can be done.

    Cleveland was paying child support for the love child, so maybe that made the difference.

  23. 23.

    Suffern ACE

    @Doug Harlan J: Do you think Roger would be interested in having a fling with ruemara? And ruemara, how badly do you want to have a fling with Roger?

  25. 25.

    stuckinred

    @Doug Harlan J: I’m not sure what you mean? His presidency survived. He’s semi-fat and happy. What would it look like if he had “truly recovered”?

  28. 28.

    jl

    @stuckinred: Maybe we need to specify that the politician’s popularity was actually damaged or threatened by the sex scandal. Then we can eliminate this outlier, the Big Dawg.

  32. 32.

    ChrisNYC

    I think Clinton counts. Gennifer Flowers happened during the 92 campaign, complete with audiotaped conversations. Maybe that’s why the impeachment wasn’t fatal, because people knew when they voted, BOTH times, about BC and infidelity.

  33. 33.

    jl

    @Caz: Are we talking actual sex scandal? Or just accusations of a sex scandal. If accusations count, I raise you one Thomas Jefferson.

  34. 34.

    Violet

    How about Warren Harding:

    Harding got around. One mistress, Carrie Phillips, took $20,000 in hush money from the GOP while Harding ran for president. Another, Nan Britton, bore Harding’s child in 1919 while he was a senator. After Harding became president he continued to ‘entertain’ Britton, sometimes in a small anteroom just off the Oval Office. After Harding’s death she wrote a bestseller, The President’s Daughter, telling all.

    From Presidential Sex Scandals.

  35. 35.

    existential fish

    @Doug Harlan J:

    Whatever you say about Bill, it’s not the sex scandals that have brought him down – hell, he even recovered from the disaster that was the South Carolina primary.

    Most peons don’t recover from sex scandals because they’re easily replaceable. Ex-Presidents are not replaceable.

  36. 36.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    @jl: And consider that was the time when sexual mores were far more stricter. I believe Gingrinch’s greatest crime was his failure to get Clinton.
    Newt’s sex scandal put him in the eyes of the true believers a traitor. He was never forgiven by the Freepers, they wanted Big Dog’s head on pike.

  37. 37.

    jl

    I forgot about Jackson’s bigamy with Rachel Donelson Robards. Wiki says he fought duels over accusations of bigamy against his marriage.

    The troubles with marrying, and apparently living with, a woman before she divorced her husband was early in his career.

    But then Wikipedia says it was public knowledge that her first husband was abusive, and granted a separation on those grouds (whether before or after she started living with Jackson isn’t mentioned).

    So, I raise people one Andrew Jackson.

    Seems like the country was more tolerant in those days, unless Bill Clinton and Weinner represent a return.

  39. 39.

    lacp

    I think it’s a mistake to call a sitting US Senator a nobody. Particularly one who you can count on to vote against everything you’re in favor of.

  40. 40.

    jl

    Wikipedia entry on Jackson:

    “Rachel died of a heart attack on December 22, 1828, two weeks after her husband’s victory in the election and two months before Jackson took office as President. Jackson blamed John Quincy Adams for Rachel’s death because the marital scandal was brought up in the election of 1828. He felt that this had hastened her death and never forgave Adams.”

    Thanks for bringing up this topic. I realize now that the US is much purer, with stricter sexytime standards for its politicians than in the 1820s or 1870s, and am glad I live in such a moral upright country. (snark)

  42. 42.

    Jeffro

    @cthulhu: There should be a game and/or website that lets you match up candidates from different eras and elections and then somehow lets them ‘compete’ to see who wins. Think 1968 Nixon vs 1996 Clinton, or even change the outcome of the primaries and run 2008 Obama vs 2008 Huckabee. Fun for the whole family! ;)

  43. 43.

    eemom

    actually, it was something I came to admire about Bill Clinton — that he could wake up every morning and be President, face the cameras, and do all that Presidentin’ stuff, with a straight face…..all the while knowing that EVERYBODY out there knew he came on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress.

    (Also too, wasn’t there some talk of a distinguishing characteristic on the presidential p*nis?)

    Anyway, the point is — that’s chutzpah.

  44. 44.

    Anne Laurie

    James Buchanan was arguably America’s first openly gay president:

    For fifteen years in Washington, D.C., before his presidency, Buchanan lived with his close friend, Alabama Senator William Rufus King.King became Vice President under Franklin Pierce. He became ill and died shortly after Pierce’s inauguration, four years before Buchanan became President. Buchanan’s and King’s close relationship prompted Andrew Jackson to call King “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy”, while Aaron V. Brown spoke of the two as “Buchanan and his wife.” Some of the contemporary press also speculated about Buchanan’s and King’s relationship. The two men’s nieces destroyed their uncles’ correspondence, leaving some questions about their relationship; but the length and intimacy of surviving letters illustrate “the affection of a special friendship”, and Buchanan wrote of his “communion” with his housemate. In May 1844, during one of King’s absences that resulted from King’s appointment as minister to France, Buchanan wrote to a Mrs. Roosevelt, “I am now ‘solitary and alone’, having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone, and [I] should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.”

    Last I heard, the best explanation historians have for why Jackson’s accusations didn’t sway the voters is that overt homosexuality was just so far outside the mental framework of the eligible voters (white, male, middle-class) that it was just overlooked, rather like Jefferson’s children with Sally Hemmings. The Very Serious People who had reason to know that Buchanan made a nuisance of himself to good-looking young men at Washinton dinner parties had their own reasons for protecting ‘one of their own’, and the rank & file Buchanan voters could dismiss such vile calumnies with the same ease Palin supporters dismiss all evidence that she’s a vain, ignorant grifter.

    Lesson: Nothing’s a scandal until the current arbiters of Conventional Wisdom say it’s a scandal.

  45. 45.

    Tom

    Glad to know that a sexual scandal, or lack thereof, had nothing to do with Buchanan being the worst President in American history.

  46. 46.

    lol

    @Mr Stagger Lee:

    Gingrich resigned because losing seats in 1998 was the last straw for a GOP membership that very nearly got fragged him in a power struggle just a year or two before.

    The DC press corps was compliant enough to kill any stories about him nailing a House staffer during the impeachment hearings until months *after* he resigned.

    And hell, he still became Speaker of the House despite the whole “cheating on and divorcing his 1st wife while she had cancer” thing. Of course, that wasn’t really a scandal in the eyes of the press corps – just more of his odious background.

  47. 47.

    rob!

    @Doug Harlan J:

    I’ve heard the song covered twice (Sheryl Crow, The Dixie Chicks), plus Bob has THREE alternate versions on Tell-Tale Signs, all good in their own way. Something about that song seems to just WORK, no matter how its done!

    The whole “corner I painted myself in” verse would fit the GOP, as well.

  50. 50.

    Eric k

    Charlie Wilson, dude got caught doing Cocaine with naked playboy playmates in a hot tub

  53. 53.

    Suffern ACE

    But no one was prepared for theLandmark story that appeared on the Fourth of July. “Jim Hunt is Sissy, Prissy, Girlish and Effeminate,” the headline
    screamed. The story began, “Is Jim Hunt homosexual? Is Jim Hunt bisexual? Is
    he AC and DC? Has he kept a deep dark political secret in his political closet all
    of his adult life?”
    No sane person believed Hunt was gay. But no reporter or editor in the state
    ignored the charge either.     The story appeared on the front page of the state’s
    papers the next day. The News & Observer headline blared, “Pro-Helms
    newspaper publishes rumor that Hunt had gay lover.”

    Non-scandal scandal, I know. But he did come back to public life and served two more terms as governor.

  54. 54.

    Bobbo

    @PeakVT:
    Well, not even arguably. Clinton left office with high approval ratings – how could thst translate into a loss for Gore? Although there is the fact that the D.C. press hated Clinton, even before Monica, and they arguably transferred that to Gore, and then the constant press-led assault on Gore’s honesty made the vote closer than it would have been. So only in the most convoluted sense could it have cost Gore the election.

  56. 56.

    Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal

    does fucked in the head count as a sex scandal? because that would mean bush, reagan, et al

    i suppose in the traditional sense, andrew jackson,clarence thomas, chuck robb at least he kept it in the state with miss virginia, youthful indiscretions henry hyde.

  57. 57.

    Amanda in the South Bay

    @Eric k:
    Hehe, when I read your comment, I mentally inserted “Tom Hanks” in place of “Charlie Wilson.”

  59. 59.

    Elie

    I wouldnt count out Elliott Spitzer just yet. Yeah he is arrogant and a sexual risk takes (obviously). But the dude has the goods. He can get things done and after a year or two, nobody is going to remember or care about his private sexual behavior (hopefully he can keep himself together if he gets another whack at office)

    Its not like I LIKE him as a person, but like I said, I think he has the goods and I want him on our team..

  60. 60.

    Anne Laurie

    @Tom:

    Glad to know that a sexual scandal, or lack thereof, had nothing to do with Buchanan being the worst President in American history.

    You just made the ghost of Millard Fillmore cry.

  61. 61.

    Shalimar

    Diaper David Vitter doesn’t count, he was a nobody before and he’s a nobody now.

    And that is the problem with your question. When a sitting US Senator isn’t important enough to count, then you are excluding 99% of the politicians who have been involved in sex scandals and your sample size becomes too small to draw any conclusions from.

  63. 63.

    parenthetical

    I would say Arnold Schwartzenegger survived the *first* scandal, Gropegate, just fine. This second one, not so much, but there were years in between.

  64. 64.

    cthulhu

    @Rosali: Was there really even a scandal in her case though? Wild accusations from highly questionable sources, yes, but I never got a sense there was any truth to it.

  65. 65.

    cthulhu

    @Jeffro:

    There should be a game and/or website that lets you match up candidates from different eras and elections and then somehow lets them ‘compete’ to see who wins. Think 1968 Nixon vs 1996 Clinton, or even change the outcome of the primaries and run 2008 Obama vs 2008 Huckabee. Fun for the whole family! ;)

    Too bad most polling data of the past isn’t all that complete otherwise it would be fairly easy to create a system for modeling fantasy elections. Actually I’m surprised Nate Silver hasn’t done something like that. Maybe he has…

  66. 66.

    elmo

    Jerry Springer became mayor of Cincinnati several years after resigning the city council over having written a check to a prostitute. Later polls indicated he could have won a senate seat in Ohio, if he were willing to give up his TV show.

  67. 67.

    Modusoperandi

    Today’s Gingrich Implosion. Now I’ve got a band name. All I need is a band.

  68. 68.

    Varanus

    Yeah, I was just going to mention Jerry Springer. Seems he gave an amazing speech to the Ohio Democratic party in 2005. It’s a shame his show became a chair-throwing, paternity-testing CrazyTown. From what he says on politics, Springer’s an old-school hard-core progressive that’s a fairly endangered species these days.

    Oh, and before his Cincinnati mayoral campaign, he cut a few commercials with a local car dealership. His tagline? “You can even pay by check!”

Comments are closed.