In a blog entry at Madame Noire, Charing Ball addresses the allegations of adultery against GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. She says that people love a good scandal involving politicians, especially conservatives, because they tend to elevate or exaggerate their moral stature.
… And it’s not just a Black Republican thing: Bill Clinton, David Vitter, Anthony Wiener, Arnold Schwarzenegger and that low-down dirty dog John Edwards all had their personal sexual affairs scrutinized by the public. Because more than we hate a lying politician, we can’t stand a cheating man. In fact, we hate adulterous politicians more than we hate the ones that go to jail for embezzlement, the ones, who trample over our civil liberties and the 25 or so politicians, who have been embroiled in tax scandals over the past two decades. In a Utopia, or at least in a politically mature place, all of those offenses should be worthy of some sort of impeachment yet it is always the wandering eye, or penis, that does these men in.
Part of the reason is that politicians, as well as the general public, tend to elevate or exaggerate their moral stature, i.e. the conservative republican, who runs on a platform of family values. So when the realities of their marriages don’t jibe with their public personas, we feel that their moral hypocrisy ultimately is betrayal of our public trust. But I would be [remiss] if I didn’t mention at the heart of our discontent is something a little more individual. It is a proven fact that infidelity has been alive and well for many thousands of years before the media circus began to highlight the cheating politician. In fact, most of us have been cheated on and didn’t even have the political clout or the double digits in our Charles Schwab portfolios. The only difference is that we normally don’t get to inflict the type of torment on our own cheating partners that we can on high-profiled individuals. And that, my friends, is why we ultimately hate (but secretly love) the cheating politician.
Read Charing Ball's entire column at Madame Noire.