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 lot 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 some 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. Read More
First-time candidate Vaughn Ward was on a roll. Until he got caught plagiarizing a speech by President Obama and insisted that Puerto Rico was a foreign country.
We talked to lawyers who love nothing better than a good public corruption case, and none of them saw any serious impropriety — let alone criminality — in the White House’s alleged offer of a federal appointment to Rep. Joe Sestak to entice him to drop his challenge to Sen. Arlen Specter.
As we noted earlier, Carly Fiorina has suddenly leapfrogged into a big lead in the California GOP Senate primary — no doubt leading to corks spontaneously popping out of champagne bottles at the DSCC — apparently because she’s been able to run a big TV ad campaign for the last week or two basically unchallenged by her main opponent former Rep. Tom Campbell. But there was a candidate debate this afternoon where Campbell and conservative favorite Chuck DeVore got to go after Fiorina and try to reclaim the momentum in the race. Most of the attacks seemed to center on Fiorina’s not only being new to politics but actually new to voting too.
Conservative South Carolina blogger Will Folks is now saying that his claimed one-time paramour, Nikki Haley, and her campaign staff actually asked him for advice about how to handle the revelation of their affair shortly before he went public on Monday.
(or Get on That Horse and Ride)
As we keep up to date on the bizarre story of the alleged affair between South Carolina gubernatorial frontrunner Nikki Haley and South Carolina insider political blogger Will Folks, there’s another interesting part of the story. Remember that South Carolina is quickly becoming the pivotal early GOP primary state. And if all goes according to plan and these affair allegations don’t do her in, Haley could be the Republican Governor of the state in 2011/2012. And that would make her a critical kingmaker for the Republican presidential hopefuls. So if you want to succeed Barack Obama in 2013, you want to be her friend.
Sarah Palin already pledged her support for Haley against the adultery allegations. And today, apparently not to be outdone, Mitt Romney came out on Haley’s side, stating, “I stand four square by Nikki Haley.”
Another interesting thread of the story is that Haley was seen as a long shot in the campaign until just a couple weeks ago when Sarah Palin came to the state, endorsed Haley and rocketed her into the Tea Party stratosphere and a big lead in the polls.
The McCain and Hayworth fistfight continues, with this press release just put out by the Hayworth campaign …
SHAMEFUL McCAIL (sic) WEB BLASTED BY HAYWORTH CAMPAIGN
Phoenix, AZ (May 25) – U.S. Senate J.D. Hayworth spokesman’s Mark Sanders said, in response to the McCain web ad, regarding Congressman Hayworth’s statement: