There's been risque tickling. Raunchy twittering. Emailed photos. Stolen sex tapes. It seems like sex scandals involving Washington politicians are piling up faster than the federal debt.
In the latest episode of Washington's unseemly take on Sex and the City, Democratic Representative David Wu of Oregon is resigning after allegations by an 18-year-old woman that she had an "unwanted sexual encounter" with the congressman, who is separated from his wife. Wu denied the charges.
Six weeks earlier, it was New York Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner, stepping down after admitting he'd sent lewd photos of himself through Twitter, and lied about it.
There have been two other scandal-related resignations from Congress this year, both of them Republicans - a rare recent example of bipartisanship in this city.
This stew of alleged philandering is the last thing Washington needs when public opinion about elected officials is "relentlessly negative", to use the words of the Pew Research Centre, and hostility towards the Government is strong.
"It probably confirms people's worst suspicions about the political class," says Karlyn Bowman, a public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute. "The public has long associated politics with corruption and banality."
At least House leaders are honing their skills at nudging politicians out the door when the whiff of sexual impropriety starts to swirl into a vortex.
One day after House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi requested an ethics committee investigation into the allegations about Wu, the seven-term Democrat pledged to resign once the debt-ceiling crisis was resolved.
Oh, that. The debt crisis.
When talk of philandering plays out against the backdrop of the threat of a historic government default, it seems all the more tawdry.
"I'm convinced that if Bill Clinton had been messing around with Monica Lewinsky during an acute economic downturn, things would've turned out very differently," says Eric Dezenhall, a crisis management consultant. Instead, the economy was booming, and Clinton managed to survive impeachment and emerge in his post-presidential life as an elder statesman.
Weiner spent 10 days denying he'd sent improper tweets and another 10 clinging to his job after he acknowledged he'd done it after all.
Former senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards completed the sex, lies and videotape trifecta by cheating on his cancer-stricken wife while offering himself on the campaign trail as a devoted family man. He's facing charges of misusing campaign dollars to cover up the affair, and there's another lawsuit over a purported sex tape he made with his lover.
"I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic," Edwards said in 2008 when he acknowledged the affair - at that point still lying about the fact that he had fathered a child with the other woman.
In a June survey by the Pew Research Centre, 57 per cent of Americans said they thought politicians "just get caught more often because they're under greater scrutiny". Just 19 per cent said elected officials have "lower moral standards than ordinary Americans".
- AP
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