Four years ago, a promising young politician with boyish good looks was running for national office when his campaign was cut short by the revelation of one of the most sexless sex scandals in recent political memory.

Jack Ryan, an Illinois native who had made his fortune as an investment banker before returning to Chicago to teach at a tough, inner-city Catholic school, was the Republican nominee in the race to succeed the retiring Sen. Patrick Fitzgerald.

Ryan won his primary contest, but not before his sealed divorce records became a subject of public tongue-wagging. Ryan had been married to actress Jeri Lynn Ryan, best known for her work on “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Boston Public”. The two had one son together, and when they divorced in 1999, agreed to seal both the divorce and custody records.

Ryan released the divorce records during the campaign, but he and Jeri fought to keep the custody records sealed, arguing that public airing of the details could harm their then-9-year-old son.

This story continues below
Advertisement

The local Chicago media, bound and determined to fight for the public’s right to know the intimate details of candidates’ child custody hearings, sued to have the records unsealed. Lawyers for the Chicago Tribune and the local ABC affiliate succeeded in getting a California judge to release the records.

That’s when the national political scene learned that Jeri Ryan alleged in custody hearings that her husband had, on several occasions, taken her to sex clubs in New York, Paris, and New Orleans, and propositioned her while there, causing distress.

There were no allegations of infidelity or abuse, as rumors had suggested, and Jeri put out a statement of support for her ex-husband, calling him a “good man, a loving father, [who] shares a strong bond with our son.”

But it wasn’t enough to save Ryan’s candidacy from the fact that he had been caught in the rarest of political sex scandals — he was accused of not actually having sex in an incident with his actual wife. Several days after the media released the documents, Ryan dropped out of the race, leaving another promising young politician to campaign with virtually no opposition — Barack Obama.

Howard Wolfson was playing the most popular game of “what if?” this week, when he wondered aloud whether Hillary Clinton might have won the Democratic nomination had the media not studiously covered for John Edwards’ dalliances with his campaign videographer Rielle Hunter.

Had they been half as enthusiastic about uncovering Edwards’ sexual proclivities — which involved cheating on his cancer-stricken wife during a presidential campaign — as they had been about uncovering Ryan’s — which involved propositioning his own wife five years before his race for Senate — perhaps things would have been different for Hillary Clinton.

Indeed, if the press had been as unenthusiastic about the public’s right to know about Ryan’s sexual relationships as they were about the public’s right to know about Edwards’, perhaps there would have been no Sen. Barack Obama at all, and Clinton truly would have been inevitable.

To be fair, Obama was ahead of Ryan by a generous margin in early polls, but 2004 was a good year for Republicans, the two were running for a seat vacated by a Republican, and Ryan was an attractive candidate with a compelling life story that could have competed with Obama’s had he been given four more months to campaign.

Instead, Republicans were left scrambling for a nominee. When Mike Ditka turned the job down, the ever-helpful Alan Keyes came to the rescue, eliciting a collective groan from most Republicans. In fact, legend has it that Alan Keyes’ entrance into the 2004 Senate race is what first gave Obama his signature giant grin.

He had reason to smile from ear-to-ear. He went on to win his Senate seat with 70 percent of the vote, bolstered by his star-making appearance as keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, about a month after the Ryan scandal broke.

Obama had said during the primary that Ryan’s personal affairs were not something he would talk about but stopped short of asking other Democrats to avoid it, declaring: “"I’m not the policeman for what the media and everybody else does,”

He later called Ryan’s divorce records not “appropriate for debate,” calling on fellow Democrats to lay off. The Ryan campaign pointed out that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had already e-mailed numerous articles about the controversy to reporters on Obama’s behalf.

Obama insisted he was not being inconsistent.

While the media’s game changes depending on which letter is beside a politician’s name, it seems Obama’s game hasn’t changed much at all. He’s always been consistently inconsistent.

Mary Katharine Ham is the online editor of The Washington Examiner and a Fox News analyst.