In more recent years, the political problem with such "scandals" has not been so much a question of morality as it has been of willful deception. What has harmed politicians caught up in allegations of sexual harassment or abuse has been the attempted cover-up, when candor at the outset may have taken much of the sting out of the accusations.

That was a key lesson of the botched Watergate affair. Richard Nixon was undone not only by the plot to break into the Democratic National Committee and the hush money payoffs to the burglars hired by the Nixon re-election committee. His aggressive efforts to cover up the whole mess was what nailed him in the end.

Nixon may be remembered by many Americans for having blurted out in an appearance at, of all places, Disney World in Florida, "I'm not a crook." And Clinton's dodges -- "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" and "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" -- will live long after him.

Given literacy levels among the lowest in the United States, what this adds up to is a populist brand of political warfare that often descends to the level of professional wrestling. In a small, largely rural state with only one real city, it also makes for fantastic - and highly entertaining - gossip. Almost everybody, it seems, has a neighbor whose second cousin knows an old boy who worked on the governor's dentist's car, and he says ...

During the 1990 Arkansas gubernatorial primaries, for example, lurid tales of lust and fornication were widely circulated about three of the four serious candidates—both Republicans, and, of course, Governor Bill Clinton. Only Clinton's Democratic opponent, an earnest good-government type perceived to have no chance, escaped suspicion. There was talk of whores, drunken orgies at duck-hunting clubs, illegitimate children, hush money, even suicides. One Arkansas politician was rumored to have had carnal knowledge of a convicted murderess inside her jail cell. Interracial sex, of course, is a topic of perennial interest. Indeed, it takes some effort to think of an Arkansas politician of note about whom scurrilous rumors haven't circulated.

For most Arkansas voters, evaluating this avalanche of smut has always been simple: your candidate is innocent, his or her opponents are probably guilty. The fact that political fault lines here tend to coincide with religious differences - hard-shell denominations to the right, "mainstream" churches to the left - makes it easy to caricature one's enemies as pious hypocrites. Otherwise, it would be tempting to suspect that many Arkansans harbor the secret belief that any politician—or TV evangelist, for that matter - who didn't have some rooster in him couldn't be much of a man.

But who would have dreamed that this stuff could be exported?

... both [Bill] Clinton and Gingrich have had major political experience to justify the credibility each has managed to sustain through their less admirable behavior of the past. Herman Cain lacks a similar record of political accomplishment as he seeks to wade through the current allegations of personal misconduct, heightening the hill he must climb to achieve credibility as potentially the next president.