"It’s odd how one politician’s scandal tends to bulletproof the next politician who runs into the same kind of controversy.

(After talk of Dan Quayle and others it gets to this):

     "And now there’s the New York Times story about John McCain and a woman lobbyist.

  There’s some precedent there, too -– but this time the politician didn’t contradict the newspaper report:  Bill Thomas, a Bakersfield Republican and Congressional veteran who ran in 2000 the House Ways and Means health subcommittee.

That year, as Thomas pushed and prodded and ramrodded to get a prescription drug bill through Congress, his hometown paper, the Bakersfield Californian, quoted unnamed sources to report that Thomas had a close personal relationship with a woman who lobbied for major drug and health care firms -– and that those sources had told the newspaper that Thomas’ chief of staff had said so to several people.

Thomas’ response, unlike McCain's, was not a denial: ``Any personal failures of commitment or responsibility to my wife, family or friends are just that -– personal.’’ His public duties meant he had sacrificed ‘’perhaps too often to be as good a husband or father as I should or could have been.’’ Thomas stayed on in Congress another six years, wrapping up as the Big Cheese of Ways and Means.

But curiously, it wasn’t Thomas who cushioned the blow for McCain –- it was Clinton, again. Monica-gate, and the Republicans’ shabby shot at impeachment over it, have generally raised the bar when it comes to the power of sexual misconduct accusations. The public shrug to the New York Times story seems to show that the sexual innuendo part of the story, and public distaste for it, somehow made the lobbyist part of the story inconsequential.