Falling.(The Talk of the Town)(Eliot Spitzer)

For a country that Europeans like to patronize as hopelessly prissy (they think we're "inhibited, puritanical, and immature," Die Zeit reported last week), our ex-colonial republic has a talent for turning out politicians with exciting sex lives. The production line goes back at least as far as Hamilton and Jefferson, but it ramped up during the nineteen-seventies, when a long-sideburned, wide-lapelled knockoff of the nineteen-sixties caught up with Washington, and powerful congressmen with names like Wilbur Mills flaunted floozies with names like Fanne Foxe. An informal survey turns up a nice round number of nationally publicized, politician-generated sex scandals since then: fifty. Republicans were the principal players in most of them; a large majority involved members of Congress. The biggest romp of all, of course, featured a Democratic President, an intern, and a Republican impeachment. In the current Presidential campaign, the two remaining Democratic candidates, one of whom earned public sympathy for her spousal fortitude during that biggest romp, had their paths to the Senate cleared by other people's sexual misadventures. In 2000, Hillary Clinton's most formidable rival, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, was sidelined by several complications, including a spectacular affair that led to a noisy divorce and a scarcely less noisy remarriage. In 2004, Barack Obama caught a break when it emerged that his Republican opponent had taken his ex-wife, she claimed, to sex clubs in such fleshpots as New York, New Orleans, and Paris, where he tried to get her to perform with him in front of the other patrons. This year's remaining Republican, John McCain, has had more direct brushes with Eros. His marriage to his first wife overlapped his courtship of his second, and, more recently, according to the Times, aides fretted that his relationship with a pretty lobbyist had grown suspiciously warm. And now there is--or, rather, isn't--Eliot Spitzer, the newly minted former governor of the State of New York.

An alternative view of the matter is that the key variable is not the libidos of the politicians but the vigilance of the agencies, public and private, that keep a squinty eye on them. Francois Mitterrand got through twelve years as President of France without having to acknowledge that he had had two families all along. The new president de la Republique, Nicolas Sarkozy, has sailed through his exit from an apparently open marriage to a giddy romance with and wedding to an international supermodel without encountering any serious suggestions that any of it made him somehow unfit for office. By contrast, Bill Clinton's trivial (and, it must be said, sad and ungallant) dalliance so shocked the conscience of the House of Representatives that its Republican majority resorted to a remedy that had not come to a vote since the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

"Eliot Spitzer, one of the nation's most gifted and dedicated politicians, was hounded into resignation by a Puritanism and mean-spiritedness that are quintessentially American," Martha Nussbaum, the fearsomely distinguished (and quintessentially American) philosopher, ethicist, and professor at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed after the Governor threw in the towel. She went on:

My European colleagues (I write from an academic conference in Belgium) have a hard time understanding what happened, but they know that it is one of those things that could only happen in America, where the topic of sex drives otherwise reasonable people insane. In Germany and the Netherlands, prostitution is legal and regulated by public health authorities. A man who did what ...