Why those sex scandals seem to skip Ohio

Updated 7:45 PM Tuesday, June 30, 2009

The nation is enjoying some sex scandals. Every place you turn, another politician is in trouble for doing something he ultimately describes as letting down his family, his staff, his supporters and his state.

The late-night talk show hosts rejoice. The news media get to lighten up for a while.

The latest embarrassments have been to Republican politicians, but the long-term trend is decidedly bipartisan.

The phenomenon of the sexually misbehaving politician occurs in the far west and the northeast, the southeast and the Mississippi Delta.

One entity is skipped: Ohio.

When Ohio has a scandal, it’s about lobbyists and booze and money and other such pedestrian stuff. Nobody ever has sex. When they shouldn’t, anyway. Or gets caught, anyway.

Why? Are we not a fairly typical place?

Not in politics. In that, we’re a little on the weird side.

Specifically, for the last several decades, Ohio politics has been dominated by people whom you can’t even imagine having an affair, at least if you know them.

John Glenn? Who met his beloved Annie in school, protected her through her shy youth and obviously delighted in her later in life?

Ted Strickland, the minister and psychologist and politician, and one of the most earnest men in the history of men?

George Voinovich? Out of the question.

Mike DeWine? Bob Taft? No and no.

These guys exude choir boy. Not that they’re preachy about it. They’re not.

Their commitment to family and to “traditional values,” including a pretty strong fix on the difference between right and wrong (that weakens in campaigns), doesn’t get expressed in fire-and-brimstone sermons from political mounts. It gets expressed in private lives led privately, despite public careers. It gets expressed without being expressed.

You couldn’t write a novel about politics that featured these guys. Nobody would believe it. That’s how far they are from the stereotype that is nurtured by the governor of New York who took the train to his trysts, the governor of South Carolina who went to Argentina to do it, the senator from Nevada whose special friend was on his payroll, the senator from Louisiana who paid, and the former president who did not have sex with that woman.

Sometimes people are shocked by the details, but seldom by the fact of scandal itself. Political enemies express a sort of shock, of course, but they are not to be taken seriously. They feel that if they can somehow tie the adultery to the use of taxpayers’ money or official duty, they can make a huge deal of the whole thing.

However, if sex scandal were to hit one of these Ohio guys, there’d be real shock, not Casablanca shock (to use an old-movie reference).

The above mentioned novel would have another problem, besides incredibility: It’d be boring. Sure, there’s a “storybook” quality to some of these romances, but there’s nothing novel about them.

Now, of course, not every single Ohio politician you can name fits into the choir-boy category. But so many do that the odds of the state having one of these juicy scandals in, say, any five-year period are bleak. There was Dick Celeste many, many years ago. Then was Marc Dann, who was still a largely unknown quantity when he self-destructed in so many ways. For all anybody knows, that might be it for a while.

In which case, Ohioans will have to bear with politics that’s about deficit spending and school funding, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives and all that. It seems unnatural.

— Cox News Service

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Maybe they have sex with 'Zombies' I don't think a Zombie would tell; Zom may not even know about it!

OddsR
2:31 PM, 8/22/2009

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It's not that it doesn't happen in Ohio, it's that for some reason it doesn't get reported when it does. Maybe Cox News Service should look into that.

bob
7:03 AM, 7/1/2009

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