You know, the men who were caught cheating on their wives that have long been forgotten. Spitzer was wrong, but weren't they as well? Why are both still in office while Spitzer has resigned? Spitzer was wrong but I'm still trying to figure out how it is that he resigned within days yet Larry Craig and David Vitter are still in office. The GOP was rolling on the floor laughing this week when Spitzer went down but I'm almost surprised that Fox didn't interview Newt Gingrinch, Vitter or Craig and have them tell us about the evils of sex outside of marriage and how it's destroying America much the way the media has used Bill Bennett when they are seeking moral guidance on one issue or another. It's a tricky game to understand who is supposed to resign in disgrace when you see this.
Meanwhile while Wall Street and the GOP were all laughing Americans shoveled $200 billion to Wall Street all based on a guarantee of $200 billion in subprime loans that nobody was ever going to buy. Funny, isn't it? Ha, ha, ha. Joke's on us.
As Joe noted below, a day devoted to talking about the adultery of a Clinton superdelegate isn't what the Clinton campaign needs right now. More from ABC. Why? Because it reminds people of big, public, political adultery scandals, like Monica, and makes people potentially less likely to want to go there again in terms of putting the Clintons back in the White House. It doesn't matter if YOU think Ken Starr was a witch hunt. A lot of Americans were kind of fed up with all sides during that business, and any talk of adultery may remind them that Camelot wasn't all fun and games, or rather, too much of it was. Jacki Schechner, who is now blogging with us, delved into the Monica-thing a few days ago on her blog here.
As an aside, one of our readers mentioned that it doesn't help Obama that the news is now not about his Mississippi win. That's true. But I think this hurts Hillary more, and here's why. The media would most likely downplay Mississippi anyway - it's a majority black state, not many delegates, Obama was expected to win anyway, doesn't really advance his delegate lead over Hillary that much, blah blah blah. But, I think Spitzer hurts Hillary, the challenger, more than the front-runner. Why? Because the news cycle is about Spitzer rather than her. Hillary needs to shake things up, to change the dynamic somehow, if she's going to get the superdelegates to switch away from the current front runner, the guy with the most elected delegates. You can't do that when the news is focused elsewhere. And worse, when it's focused on adultery, an issue that just invites the media, and 3rd parties, to ridicule you. Imagine Jay Leno and Jon Stewart. There aren't a lot of jokes you can make about Obama and adultery, but the Clintons? This doesn't help her.
UPDATE: Joe just pointed out to me that the Washington Post article includes Clinton-oriented Spitzer jokes that are already coming out of Leno and Letterman, as I suspected would happen:
Jay Leno joked Monday night that Spitzer's scandal "means Hillary Clinton is now only the second angriest woman in the state of New York." David Letterman offered a Top 10 List of excuses Spitzer might cite, including the No. 1 excuse: "I thought Bill Clinton legalized this years ago."
This is why this scandal will hurt Hillary more than Obama.
From Peter Baker at the Washington Post, an examination of the impact of Eliot Spitzer has had on the Clinton campaign -- and another way to look at 3 a.m. phone calls:
This certainly is not the way Clinton's strategists would have mapped out this week on the campaign trail. They want voters to be thinking about that 3 a.m. phone call in terms of who is ready to handle a crisis in the White House, not in terms of where an unfaithful husband might be catting around town.
