Adulterers and presidential frontrunners

Europeans are keen to know who their politicians are bedding, but that doesn’t usually sway their votes. Nicolas Sarkozy sailed into the French presidency in May, even though gossip about his marriage is a fixture of Parisian dinner parties. In Britain, political sex scandals seem more like an industry than a moral matter. When newspapers reported last year that John Prescott, then deputy prime minister, had been involved with his diary secretary, it took about a day for the woman to hire a publicist and sell her story to the Mail on Sunday — but Prescott held on to his post for another year. David Blunkett, while home secretary, could probably have weathered the media storm over his involvement with a married mother, who then had his child, if only he hadn’t fast-tracked a visa for her nanny.

In the US, the polls seem to be ominous for adulterers. In a Newsweek survey this year, 43 per cent of Americans and more than half of Republican evangelicals said they wouldn’t vote for a candidate who had an extramarital affair. A Gallup poll last year found that adultery was seen as worse than human cloning.

So why is Giuliani a frontrunner, with strong support from evangelicals? The answer isn’t in the polls, where people say what they think they should — it’s in bedrooms. The changing way Americans treat politicians’ infidelities reflects the changing way they handle such affairs in their own lives…

Excerpted from a piece by Pamela Druckerman in ‘The Guardian’, September 7