Personal Aside: Great Scott! A Sex Scandal Looming at Last!

The Beautiful (?) Lobbyist.

Just when the presidential campaign had degenerated into arcane bickering over who stole whose words…whether Hillary pilfered Obama’s “I’m fired up!” rhetoric or how Obama appropriated the catchwords of the Massachusetts governor to defend his (Obama’s) reliance on vague, misty poetic allusions, the campaign has turned exciting with the prospect of a real sex scandal. Huzzza!

The “New York Times” uncovers the a supposedly good looking female lobbyist, a partner at Alkcade & Fay, Vicki Iseman, had spent a good deal of time hanging around McCain’s office eight years ago. And she accompanied him on her client’s (Home Shopping Network chief) Lowell Paxon’s corporate jet. There is even a hint of romantic interest by the two although both deny it.

Two conclusions I draw from this, the romantic angle first. More than a century ago, Benjamin Disraeli, the conservative leader of the British parliament and prime minister, was informed by an agent that his great enemy, William Gladstone, a thoroughly reputable and over-stuffed walrus of propriety, had fathered an illegitimate child. The agent was thrilled—but not Disraeli.

“This is the worst news I’ve heard,” Disraeli thundered. “If proof of Gladstone’s potency were to gain currency, his forces would sweep the country!”

I say this only jestingly. Obviously if McCain had chased around with a beautiful corporate lobbyist and it can be proven, he would not sweep the country. But it would tie up the over-70 male vote. However his denial and Ms. Iserman’s denial will leave some doubt. There is the angry backlash of McCain idolaters to this disclosure as a plus. Another McCain plus is that it would lead to even more egregious gestures of rectitude by The Pope of Hope which is succeeding in turning off some, not all, of the population as he saunters, loose-limbed, tie-less, on the stage twirling his hand mike. Hey, that’s odd. I cannot think of a negative for McCain in all this.

The second would be to fathom from whence the leak came. You start out by asking: who benefits? Well, poor Hillary is just about gone so there is little doubt that she isn’t going to benefit if McCain was playing knees-ies with a girl lobbyist on a corporate jet. So scratch Hillary. Which means scratching the guy who could have easily leaked it if it could possibly have benefited Hillary—Harold Ickes, Jr.,

The candidate who benefits is Obama. He is the one who has made a crusade about creating a bright new world where there are no lobbyists. It does away with the constitutional guarantee of redress of alleged grievance, but Obama’s people who sway to the calls for revolution aren’t interested in constitutional niceties anyhow.

Now why would Obama’s people do this? Well, just the other day Cindi McCain was the conduit by which Michelle Obama’s words were brought to the fullest national attention—you know them…the fact that this dew-eyed child of poverty, alienation and disaffection by old white racist America has had to wait until just now to be proud of her nation. You have to blame this absurd statement on Mrs. Obama’s disadvantaged education as a child of poverty—on her undergraduate days at Princeton and her graduate days at Harvard Law. A true victim of racism she is.

But to get back to the story, the McCain capitalization of the Michelle Obama statement coming to full exploitation by Cindi McCain stung. And Obama didn’t make it any easier…in fact made it worse…when in explaining it he changed the entire graphology of his wife’s statement, saying she meant she was now proud of the nation’s politics. That the ceiling did not fall in…the glass ceiling, I mean that has blocked Michelle from lawyerly advancement…with the Obama whopper is amazing but it did not.

Now a third point, only a hint. Who is so desperate to be of service to the Obama campaign, to rectify himself from the rotten judgment of picking Hillary to support, rather than Obama that he would need to get some credit from the Obama people? Why Rahm Emanuel, of course, who having owed his soul to the Clintons for allowing him to prosper politically and financially now has to scurry down the rope leading to the dock while the SS Hillary sinks slowly into the ooze. Anyone who knew the ropes of convincing the gentleman with the bad breath to collar Henry Hyde and warn him that his reputation was in dire peril for a lengthened episode a generation earlier would be up to this. And of this there is no doubt: the two co-conspirators who dine after each election at Manny’s and sometimes more frequently—David Axelrod of Obama and Emanuel of Hillary (but now a free agent—have much in common.

Emanuel doesn’t want to scurry down the rope to the dock without ingratiating himself to his soul’s next owner. And what a nice way to do it. With the Obama’s all nonplussed we give this old guy McCain who can’t even comb his hair a comeuppance. Or as Rahm would say…he who cannot enunciate a sentence without overuse of the “f” word…:How’s this for f------ justice? Obama needs to change the subject and with this you get a f------ two-fer, McCain and wife!”

In this scenario, the pietistic Axelrod who speaks very quietly without benefit of scatology, raises his eyes heavenward and smiles.