A woman president is not going to be Client 9 of the Emperor’s Club VIP sex service.
A woman president is not going to get arrested for soliciting sex in a rest room at the Minneapolis airport.
A woman president is not going to be caught sending hot text messages to young congressional pages.
Many voters may find these arguments persuasive in the wake of the Elliot Spitzer story: if you want to avoid losing your leaders to sex scandals, vote for a woman.
The voters most likely to be persuaded by this argument are, of course, women. And there are a lot of women voters in the Democratic primaries yet to come, and among the superdelegates.
The notion that Hillary could benefit from the Spitzer scandal goes against the conventional wisdom in the blogosphere today, which holds that it hurts Hillary because, as Matt Yglesias wrote, it will "make people worry about the fact that putting Bill Clinton back in the White House seems to raise the possibility of once again having a Democratic administration derailed by a sex scandal."
To say that many voters might find Hillary more appealing at this point is not to say that Barack Obama or John McCain is likely to be caught in a sex scandal. Either possibility seems extremely unlikely.
Of course it also seemed extremely unlikely that Elliot Spitzer would be caught violating the Mann Act.
The question is not whether we will see new revelations, but whether disgust over Spitzer’s destruction of his career will lead some voters to look to a woman for freedom from sex scandals.
