I’m pretty sure in Edwards’ case, the ‘cheating on your wife while she’s dying of cancer’ factor added some extra outrage.
That too, but I think that affairs admitted to can be put behind a candidate. Edwards just went way too far to try to cover it up, even played around with campaign finance laws.
:smack: I forgot about Edwards!
Yes, you are right that the coverup is often worse than the crime. Show contrition, make some proclamations about how you’ve learned from your mistakes, and get your spouse to agree that you have “worked on” your relationship, and you can survive.
It also helps to have some plausible deniability, meaning no pictures or social media postings (I’m looking at you Andrew Weiner). Even if you admit to the affair, enough low information voters will still question the veracity of the allegations if you never come out and say that you cheated, but instead talk vaguely of your imperfections as a human being.
You can admit to a specific affair, I think, as long as you seem to be coming forward, rather than just getting busted. Quite a few politicians have resigned their offices immediately after admitting affairs, and I think for those men, the path back to respectability is a pretty easy one. Mark Sanford is back in politics, after all.
Edwards was different, I think, because there was a baby that he was running away from, as well as the infidelity to his dying wife.
Paula Jones was May 1991, but you’re right that campaigning probably didn’t start that early back then.
Another point is that Hart’s affair seemed to be a surprise to his wife. It’s obvious Hillary wasn’t exactly surprised by Bill’s shenanigans. She treated his scandals as a political problem they had to tackle together, not a personal betrayal.
Perot did not help Clinton; this myth has been debunked many times lately. (There are many independent and unbiased links in that post. Also, some conservatives are starting to attack it.(here is the data backing up Pascoe, who worked on Bush 1988) I point this out because it seems to be a common GOP and far-left (both hate Clinton) explanation. But in reality, the answer to…
is that Bill Clinton was never photographed with another girl who was not his wife on his frickin lap on a boat called Monkey Business. He never denied adultery whereas Hart did, but like others said, the affairs in 1992 had been in the past; Hart happened too recently. He admitted it basically on 60 Minutes with his wife by his side; even for as taboo as adultery is and was, people privately could relate. Even 25 years ago, adultery was a rampant think as it is today. Hart proved that a picture is worth a thousand words.
Also, Bush Sr.'s approval were sub-40 in most of election season 1992; at that point, no one cares. That’s also where Carter was in 1980. Reagan, who had been divorced (which in 1980 was a big deal) won in a landslide. LBJ was at 40 or below in 1968, which is why Tricky Dick Nixon won then too. In 1987-1988, the incumbent Republican (for whom Bush was VP) had approvals that moved from upper 40s to mid 50s, where incumbent parties win re-election.
This wasn’t an affair, tho, was it?
He waved his dong in her face, and she wasn’t buying. Of course, it was his word against hers, and he was a governor and his people were all calling her a liar, etc…
I heard he had a child with one of the candidates running for President in 2016.
We hadn’t learned back then that women never lie about sexual assault. Now we know better. Clinton’s hatchet man James Carville was out there saying things like, “when you drag a 20 dollar bill through a trailer court there’s no telling what you’ll find” to the genaral guffaws of ‘progressives’ who now want to squash free speech to give women ‘safe spaces’ and who want to eviscerate the rule of law and convict men of sexual assault without due process because everyone knows that a woman would never lie about being assaulted.
No, women still lie if it’s a Democratic politician. That will never change. They can also be slut shamed, that’s still okay too.