Margarent Carlson has a great piece on the double-standard that leads to heightened focus on the personal lives of Democrats, while Republicans get a pass.

In “For Obama, It’s Public Character That Counts,” Carlson writes…

The tempest over dumb things must have every candidate asking: Should anything personally unflattering come out about me, will I be given a free pass like George Bush or hounded like Bill Clinton?

Republican or Democrat?

It depends. Are you a Republican or Democrat? Republicans can be suspected of driving under the influence (Bush), have two wives (Senator John McCain) or three (Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani), or have affairs too many to list and not be pilloried.

Part of this comes from a tradition of sin, repentance and redemption among Republicans’ most steadfast supporters. Fundamentalist Christians wept over reports that megachurch pastor Ted Haggard, who had advised the White House on issues like gay marriage, had paid for sex with a male escort and bought crystal meth. Bush shrugged off his own debauchery as acting “young and irresponsible when I was young and irresponsible.'’ His version of life begins at 40.

By contrast, Al Gore was punished because Clinton took a tumble for a girl baring a thong while bearing a pizza, although everyone knew Gore himself was too busy charting global warming to order a large pie with pepperoni, much less notice who delivered it. Back then, extracurricular sex trumped drugs in the pantheon of personal demons, even if you weren’t the one having sex.

…

Even if the country’s experience with Bush makes inexperience the cardinal fault next time around, Obama, a mere state legislator in 2002, was dead-on correct about the seminal issue of our time. He had no illusions about the brutal butcher Saddam Hussein but said he could be contained until, like “all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.'’

Obama predicted that “even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.'’ He said it could also “fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst … impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.'’

It’s quite a speech and prepared without old Washington hands. Lucky for us, Cheney and Rumsfeld never worked for Obama’s Dad. It could be lucky for us, too, if we don’t get diverted from Middle East terrorism and looming domestic crises. The private lives that interest us now are our own.

And here’s an excerpt from Obama’s op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday on ethics reform…

We must stop any and all practices that would lead a reasonable person to believe that a public servant has become indebted to a lobbyist. That means a full ban on gifts and meals. It means no free travel or subsidized travel on private jets. And it means closing the revolving door to ensure that Capitol Hill service — whether as a member of Congress or as a staffer — isn’t all about lining up a high-paying lobbying job. We should no longer tolerate a House committee chairman shepherding the Medicare prescription drug bill through Congress at the same time he’s negotiating for a job as the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbyist.

But real reform also means real enforcement. We need to finally take the politics and the partisanship out of ethics investigations. Whether or not the House ethics committee has been covering for its colleagues, the secrecy with which its members have operated has led people to question why legislators who are serving jail time were not caught and stopped by the committee in the first place. It’s led people to wonder why Congress cannot seem to police itself.

I have long proposed a nonpartisan, independent ethics commission that would act as the American people’s public watchdog over Congress. The commission would be staffed with former judges and former members of Congress from both parties, and it would allow any citizen to report possible ethics violations by lawmakers, staff members or lobbyists. Once a potential violation is reported, the commission would have the authority to conduct investigations, issue subpoenas, gather records, call witnesses, and provide a report to the Justice Department or the House and Senate ethics committees that — unlike current ethics committee reports — is available for all citizens to read.