Opinion: Back When ‘’In Bed With Lobbyists’’ Was a Metaphor

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It’s odd how one politician’s scandal tends to bulletproof the next politician who runs into the same kind of controversy.

Dan Quayle’s family connections got him a safe spot in the Indiana National Guard -- and, in 1988, a lot of press scrutiny. That probably cushioned the fall a bit for Bill Clinton when it came out that he got an ROTC student deferment and then bailed out on training when he got a high lottery number. And that in turn probably helped to mute public reaction to the news of George Bush using connections for a stateside National Guard billet, and his no-shows even there.

Bill Clinton with an un-inhaled spliff may make things easier for Barack Obama, who got out in front on his own drug use. Ronald Reagan was divorced, and John McCain’s divorce and Bob Dole’s before him haven’t even been an issue. [It was Giuliani’s two splits, and the manner of them, that tripped him up.]

And now there’s the New York Times story about John McCain and a woman lobbyist.

There’s some precedent there, too -– but this time the politician didn’t contradict the newspaper report: Bill Thomas, a Bakersfield Republican and Congressional veteran who ran in 2000 the House Ways and Means health subcommittee.

That year, as Thomas pushed and prodded and ramrodded to get a prescription drug bill through Congress, his hometown paper, the Bakersfield Californian, quoted unnamed sources to report that Thomas had a close personal relationship with a woman who lobbied for major drug and health care firms -– and that those sources had told the newspaper that Thomas’ chief of staff had said so to several people.

Thomas’ response, unlike McCain’s, was not a denial: ``Any personal failures of commitment or responsibility to my wife, family or friends are just that -– personal.’’ His public duties meant he had sacrificed ‘’perhaps too often to be as good a husband or father as I should or could have been.’’ Thomas stayed on in Congress another six years, wrapping up as the Big Cheese of Ways and Means.

But curiously, it wasn’t Thomas who cushioned the blow for McCain –- it was Clinton, again. Monica-gate, and the Republicans’ shabby shot at impeachment over it, have generally raised the bar when it comes to the power of sexual misconduct accusations. The public shrug to the New York Times story seems to show that the sexual innuendo part of the story, and public distaste for it, somehow made the lobbyist part of the story inconsequential.

Jesse Unruh, the fabled California Assembly speakers, said of lobbyists and fat cats –- and I tidy up his language here -- ``If you can’t drink their whiskey, take their money, sleep with their women and still vote against them in the morning, you don’t belong in politics.’’ Unruh did not anticipate a time when the ‘’they’’ would be the women.