A look at the three GOP front runners

[CatWoman]

Did you guys hear Lou Dobbs the other night? He cited a poll which gave the names of the three below as front runners for Election 2008:



McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while, according to The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, "aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich." McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife's family money. In 2000, McCain managed to deflect media questioning about his first marriage with a deft admission of responsibility for its failure. It's possible that the age of the offense and McCain's charmed relationship with the press will pull him through again, but Giuliani and Gingrich may face a more difficult challenge. Both conducted well-documented affairs in the last decade--while still in public office.

Giuliani informed his second wife, Donna Hanover, of his intention to seek a separation in a 2000 press conference. The announcement was precipitated by a tabloid frenzy after Giuliani marched with his then-mistress, Judith Nathan, in New York's St. Patrick's Day parade, an acknowledgement of infidelity so audacious that Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer compared it with "groping in the window at Macy's." In the acrid divorce proceedings that followed, Hanover accused Giuliani of serial adultery, alleging that Nathan was just the latest in a string of mistresses, following an affair the mayor had had with his former communications director.

But the most notorious of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, "Let Our Family Represent Your Family." (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy: "We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.

Despite the scandalous details, whether the press will air them is still an open question. When it comes to personal morality, liberal commentators have long argued that the press has one standard for Democrats and another for Republicans (and another one entirely for the Clintons). It's possible that the mainstream media will fail to apply the same scrutiny to the known transgressions of Gingrich, Giuliani and McCain as the Times did to rumors about Hillary Clinton's husband. But for that to happen, the press will have to resist four powerful political dynamics that will almost certainly be pushing to get the story out.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0607.benen.html

[paparush]

1. I don't see Jeb's name

Isn't W just going to pass the baton to the Jebster?

[tridim]

2. Lets preemptively impeach all of them

Fair is fair, right?

[The_Casual_Observer]

3. Apparently allen's dixie fetish has cost him.

He's off the list.

[Bucky]

4. "managed to deflect media questioning about his first marriage"

Marriages are complicated things. There are probably moreso if you spend several critical years of your children's growing up years locked up and being tortured in a brutal POW camp. It is nobody's, repeat, fucking nobody's business why McCain's first marriage failed. I will work my ass off to make sure he isn't the next president, but it's got nothing to do with the difficulties he's had in his personal life. This sort of thing is bullshit. Let the fundies trash Newt and Rudy and McCain for their failings. That's not my game and it's not relevant.

[johnaries]

6. I would agree with you, except the issue is HYPOCRISY, not

the marriage itself. The important thing here is that McCain was committing adultery on his first wife, and yet he like all Republicans run on "family values".

[trumad]

5. He forgot me----

I never committed adultry--but my ex did.

[Bandit]

7. 'I never slept with her.'"

Now if Clinton had used that terminology things would have been different. Even though the Prosecution was quite specific in what constituted sex the American public disagreed. To America oral sex is still sex even if the law doesn't think so.

[LibDemAlways]

8. Just for the record, even though George Allen

isn't on that list, he, too, had an apparently messy divorce in his past with still-sealed records. Gotta love those repuke family values.