With all the sensational narratives surrounding the 2012 Republican primary race it's shocking that there's any time left for reporters to cover stories about the candidates' wives. But today two of the more interesting election-related headlines centred around the wives of two of the candidates. First it was revealed that ABC plans to air an incriminating interview with Newt Gingrich's second wife. The news isn't exactly a bombshell, but the interview has the potential to be. After all, Newt Gingrich rose to political stardom in the mid-nineties when he opportunistically spearheaded the crucifixion of Bill Clinton for his marital infidelity. Meanwhile, that whole time he had been engaging in an affair with a congressional staffer who was 23 years his junior. That staffer, Callista Bisek, would eventually become Gingrich's third wife, and to this day she remains glued to his side at every campaign rally like an inanimate appendage, with her painted-on Stepford smile and her helmet-shaped haircut.
Word on the street is that the second wife is still bitter after all these years, and could be looking to exact a little revenge through this interview. However, what makes the story an even bigger scandal is that Gingrich originally hooked up with his now-jilted second wife under arguably more nefarious circumstances than the Callista affair. Legend has it that Gingrich began an affair with his would-be second wife when his first wife became stricken with cancer. And just to add insult to injury, he surprised her by announcing his intention to seek a divorce while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery. Classy!
The second of today's new items about the candidates' wives came to us courtesy of the Santorum family, whose penchant for superlative weirdness I've already discussed at some length. Like her husband, Karen Santorum is outspoken in her opposition to contraception, abortion, and fornication. The Santorums stand-out, even among the arch-conservative religious right, since their anti-abortion stance allows for no exceptions, even in cases where the mother was raped or her health is at risk. During this campaign, Santorum cemented his status as the hands-down most reactionary and fanatical candidate to have ever made it this close to the presidency, when he suggested that states should have the right to ban the birth control pill.
But the latest news from planet Santorum is that Karen Santorum, the home-school-teaching housewife extraordinaire used to live a very different lifestyle than the one she and her husband would like to make mandatory throughout the country. It turns out that when she was in her twenties, she spent 6 years living in sin with her then-boyfriend, a sixty-something-year-old abortion provider and OB/GYN named Tom Allen, who was, and still is, an advocate to progressive issues. Everybody seems to be assuming - and I think it's a pretty safe assumption - that Karen and her doctor sugar-daddy were getting it in. And given the fact that they got together during that golden age that occurred after the invention of the pill and before the emergence of AIDS, it's probably also safe to assume that Karen was on the pill herself (although according to today's version of Karen Santorum, condoms would have been equally sinful).
Of course, no Santorum story would be complete without an element of creepy weirdness. So here's the kicker... Karen's boyfriend happens to be the same doctor who delivered her 22 years before they began collaborating in their own version of the baby-making process. Just to clarify: Karen Santorum's live-in boyfriend was the doctor who yanked her out of her mom's birth canal on the day of her birth.
As a Canadian, the mere fact that citizens are so familiar with the wives of all the candidates is still something I find a little bit bizarre, although I'm completely accustomed to it at this point. Like most Canadians, I couldn't give you the name of a single wife of a Canadian politician, not even the wife of Stephen Harper. But if they're anything like the wives of the current crop of Republican candidates, I'm afraid I might be missing out.
i heard a rumour once that harper's wife was in a lesbian relationship with her RCMP bodyguard, and that it's an open secret in Ottawa.