Well, let's say Monday was a good day for Rudy Giuliani. He's now the only top Republican presidential candidate who hasn't had a regional campaign chairman resign after a same-sex lewd conduct arrest.
That's right- it came out Monday night that Sen. Larry Craig, a Republican from the very, very red state of Idaho, had been arrested for solicitation in June, in a mens' room at the Minneapolis airport, and quickly (and quietly) pled guilty. Somehow, no one noticed in the intervening three months.
Craig immediately resigned as Mitt Romney's honorary campaign chairman; this comes just two months after John McCain's Florida chairman, Bob Allen, stepped down after a similar arrest in a public restroom.
Craig's defense? He claims he "has a wide stance when going to the bathroom." Which isn't convincing, but is nonetheless a much, much better move than that of Allen, who claimed that he only offered to blow the undercover officer because said officer was a large black man, and "I didn't want to end up a statistic."
Craig, who is married with kids and will likely have a tough time explaining this to Napoleon Dynamite and the rest of his Idaho constituents, has been rumored to be gay for some time, by the sort of blogs that tend to spread that sort of thing, but has always denied it.
In all, it's the most embarrassing arrest at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport since the Whizzinator incident back in 2005. Though something tells me Craig wouldn't have minded being around for that...
Meanwhile, Fred Thompson isn't known to have any public-restroom-users on his rapidly-evolving campaign staff. On "Law & Order," he once fired an employee who was a lesbian, but it wasn't because she was a lesbian.
Posted by Stephen Silver at August 28, 2007 05:22 PM