Bad News Travels Fast, And Furiously

But contrast the near-instant disappearance of Spitzer with the more typical experiences of, say, Reps. Dan Crane (R-Ill.) and Gerry Studds (D-Mass.). Both men were censured by the House in 1983 for their respective affairs with congressional pages -- Crane with a 17-year-old girl, Studds with a 17-year-old boy.

Disclosure of a lesser transgression -- sending salacious e-mails to a page -- got Foley drummed out of Congress in a matter of days in 2006. But Crane survived, and Studds thrived. Crane apologized and managed to serve out his term, although he lost his bid for reelection in 1984. Studds, who admitted "a very serious error in judgment," continued to win reelection until his retirement from Congress in 1997.

Not all sexual scandals are created equal, of course. An informal list of some 50 scandals over the past 30 years involving sexual misconduct by high officials (a president, a Supreme Court nominee, members of Congress, governors, big-city mayors) includes a range of behaviors or suspected behaviors, such as having an extramarital affair, soliciting a prostitute, having sex with a minor, sexual harassment or fathering an illegitimate child. Of those, voters are most willing to forgive a philandering politician, says Frank Mankiewicz, who managed then-Sen. George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign.

"An affair at least suggests romance, even if it's very hard on the [non-cheating] spouse," says Mankiewicz, who is vice chairman of Hill & Knowlton, a public-affairs firm. Which is why, he says, Rudy Giuliani's political career survived his very public affair with (now wife) Judith Nathan while he was mayor of New York, yet Spitzer's alleged involvement with a high-priced call girl will end his career.

An additional factor, Mankiewicz says, is the degree of hypocrisy involved. "People said if Eliot Spitzer had been Edwin Edwards [the scandal-plagued former governor of Louisiana], he would have survived. If you've always been a bit of rogue, people are willing to say, 'Oh, that's just him.' But Spitzer was a stickler for rectitude," a candidate who ran on his law-and-order record.

Fiedler reduces this to a formula, saying, "The sharper the divergence between an official's public image and his private reality, the faster his fall."

He also cites a comment ascribed to Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who overcame a controversy about his involvement with a gay prostitute in the late 1980s: "Everyone in public life is entitled to privacy but no one in public life is entitled to hypocrisy."