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Two potential GOP Presidential candidates have fallen by the wayside
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South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford has hurt himeself and his party AP Photo/Mary Ann Chastain
So the plan was to continue to look at the GOP White House contenders for the 2012 election. After covering most of the front runners; Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, John Thune, and Sarah Palin. The plan called for looks at two other prominent candidates in John Ensign and Mark Sanford.
However both of these men have eliminated themselves from the running for virtually the same offense. They cheated on their wives, but more importantly to the political arena they got caught cheating on their wives.
While it is really nobody’s business if a politician cheats on his wife, or really if anyone cheats on their wife, the problem for politicians is that one has to compromise himself to cheat on his spouse. With that in mind voters think that he compromised himself for this, then what else would he compromise himself for?
This is especially troubling for GOP candidates who like to run on family values, and other traditional issues. In the end these two men have not only deleted themselves from a national campaign, but they have hurt the Republican Party by behaving in this manner.
Governor Tim Pawlenty summed it up best, “Anytime you have leading figures who are engaged in behavior that is sad and troubling and hypocritical, other people are going to look at that and say, ‘They don’t walk the walk,’ and so the words and the actions don’t ring true.”
While the GOP is already devoid of a centralizing national figure and leader, they now have a huge image problem. This is very much a country that has not had the wounds healed over from the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal that led to an impeachment fight hat made the GOP look petty.
While rational, intelligent people understand that the Clinton Impeachment was much larger than sex in the oval office, many voters out there are not either rationale or intelligent. In fact the majority of the voters probably do into fit into either of these categories.
We must remember that entire generations of voters now get their news from the comedian Jon Stewart. They do not view his daily show as a comedy show, but as a news show. The daily papers are sensationalized and untrustworthy, and the local news broadcasts are a complete joke.
So we have at least two generations of voters who are ill informed and cannot see issues beyond the graphic reports of sexual activity. These voters see the GOP as a bunch of old, stale, hypocrites since they run on a family issue platform and all the while are sleeping with some girl from a different country.
This is now a huge hurdle for the party to overcome.
