Sex and Politics

There are only a few political affair storylines. Usually when the paramour comes forward, unless they have a lot of skeletons, that's pretty much it. The pol has to either come clean and resign or more often admit causing the proverbial "pain" in his marriage and then go back to fundraising and dating. I use the male pronoun because that's almost always the gender dynamic. But we've got a affair story down in South Carolina (i.e., the Palmetto Sex Farm) that turns a lo

t of the norms on their heads.

Start with the fact that the accused pol is female gubernatorial hopeful Nikki Haley. And her accuser isn't som

e person in-state folks have never heard of before. He's a very well-known conservative and insider-politics blogger, Will Folks, who at one point was the spokesman for Appalachian trail hiking Governor Mark Sanford, though well before the affair scandal last year.

Whether it should or not, I don't think there's any question that the gender inversion makes a big difference in terms of how the public and media responds to the allegations. And that's not the end of what makes this story just weird. The accuser turns out to be Folks himself, though he claims to be a reluctant one. According to Folks, rumors were circulating and he was getting questions about the alleged affair from the press (one publication has come forward to say they did ask) so he decided to come forward himself to confirm the "inappropriate physical relationship" himself. As yet though, Folks has provided no independent evidence of the affair other than to say that he has a long list of text messages and emails to document the relationship. But he has not released any.

Meanwhile, Haley is unequivocally and firmly denying the whole story. Just didn't happen. And that's where it stands. With no one seeming to know quite what to make of it. Given his political prominence in his own right, it's hard to imagine that Folks would make the whole thing up out of whole cloth. Why? is one question. But even more, if it turns out it's false, it would clearly be career-ending for him. And even if it's true, it's not like it's great for his image. On the other hand, if the two really had an affair, would Haley be quite so confident issuing such flat denials? Particularly if there's some record of the affair?