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10. Arnold Schwarzenegger
Position: Former governor, R-Calif.
Financial responsibility: Oversight and approval of California's state budget, which saw its deficit swell to $45 million during Schwarzenegger's last year in office despite cost-cutting measures including state worker furloughs, eliminated holidays, a shortened school year and early "nonrevocable" parole for low-level prisoners.
Year of scandal: Current
Eighteen years ago, Maria Shriver did her husband a solid by making a cameo in the bloated, brain-bereft summer blockbuster Last Action Hero. This was a lousy way to repay her.
Not long after Schwarzenegger and Shriver announced they were separating, Schwarzenegger told the Los Angeles Times that he had an affair with a long-time member of the household staff and fathered a child with her before his first term as governor. That child is now believed to be 14 years old.
While Junior, Jingle All The Way and Schwarzenegger's role as Mr. Freeze in Batman Forever have all made Americans a little worse off for having known him and the $47.5 billion budget deficit during his stint as governor lead to a great deal of pain for many Californians, this may still be the most lives he's ruined at once. He and Shriver had been married for 25 years and had four children together. His mistress and their child had been living with this secret in private for more than half that time. Now Shriver's been on Oprah, Schwarzenegger's children have been interviewed and his mistress outed on the cover of the New York Post.
The end of Schwarzenneger's reign as governor last year was perhaps the one time in his public life he didn't say "I'll be back." Perhaps it doesn't apply when the existence he's terminating is his own.
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9. Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Position: Former director of the International Monetary Fund
Financial responsibility: Oversight of the world's financial system, which included calling for the replacement of the dollar as the world's reserve currency, directing aid to European countries during the sovereign debt crisis and criticizing the U.S. banking industry in the documentary Inside Job.
Year of scandal: Current
One day you're bailing out Greece, pondering the same action for Portugal and helping the eurozone to better-than-expected economic results; the next you're sitting in a cell in Rikers Island wondering who this fellow "DMX" was who had this cell before you and trying to figure out how the mobsters in Goodfellas sneaked a full Italian Sunday dinner into the place.
Flog the American public all you'd like for generally not knowing what the IMF does or why the solvency of European countries is important: They're not the ones who allegedly raped a maid in a $3,000-a-night room at the Sofitel paid for and left in your name, with biological evidence all over the place, and -- before you could high-tail it out of the country -- called to see if your cell phone had been left behind.
French leftists, who saw Strauss-Kahn as a strong challenger to Prime Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, cry fraud. Meanwhile, thousands of Spaniards shut down Madrid crying for easement of austerity measures and cash-poor Ireland and Portugal are still crying for help. Doesn't matter: All the American public sees is a big diplomat crying in his jail cell and, perhaps, having an orgy that used the same escort service that led to a former New York governor's resignation. Economic priority doesn't trump personal responsibility, which Strauss-Kahn knew all too well when he resigned his World Bank post.
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8. John Ensign
Position: Former U.S. Senator, R-Nev.
Financial responsibility: Member of Senate budget, Homeland Security and government affairs committees; Finance Committee, with positions on subcommittees dealing with health care, taxation, the IRS, social security, pensions and family policy; and the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, where he was a ranking member of its communications, technology and Internet subcommittee.
Year of scandal: Current
John Ensign decided to resign back in March as the Senate's Ethics Committee investigated his alleged affair with the wife of an aide and what that aide was given in return for his silence. At the time, Ensign told reporters, "I have to put my family first."
That may have been the first time Ensign had done so in four years.
The committee's report revealed that not only did Ensign have an affair between 2007 and 2008 with Cynthia Hampton, the wife of Ensign aide Douglas Hampton, but he arranged a lobbying job for Douglas Hampton in Nevada after being confronted about the affair in 2009. It doesn't end there.
Apparently, in the Ensign family, "putting family first" means having your parents (Ensign is 53, by the way) pay your mistress $96,000 to go away and calling it "severance." That didn't fly with the Hamptons, as Douglas Hampton followed up that maneuver by writing a letter to Fox News(NWS_) reporter Megyn Kelly saying Ensign's actions "ruined our lives," only to have Ensign claim he was being extorted for more cash once the letter went public.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., may have been to blame for that idea, with Douglas Hampton saying Coburn tried to get Ensign to stop the affair. When that failed, Coburn allegedly told Douglas Hampton he should let Ensign pay off his home and give him $1 million for his trouble.
That didn't quite work out either, as the Hamptons auctioned off their home last year, Ensign was alienated by his Senate colleagues until he resigned and the whole matter was turned over to the Department of Justice for further review.
Ensign probably didn't see this coming when he uttered the following words about President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998: "He has no credibility left."
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7. Silvio Berlusconi
Position: Prime minister of Italy
Financial responsibility: Aside from managing his media empire, Berlusconi is responsible for crafting and approving laws that govern said media and election laws that have brought him to power three times; and managing foreign affairs, including a cozy relationship with besieged Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Year of scandal: Which one? The 2007 incident in which he allegedly attempted to topple then-Prime Minister Prodi's government through the use of prostitutes? The eventful 2009 when his wife divorced him and accused him of having relations with an 18-year-old girl and, later, a 42-year-old escort claimed she was recruited to spend the night with Berlusconi (which he denies)? Let's just keep it simple and go with the -- current -- "bunga bunga" scandal.
Berlusconi lives in a very different reality than most Italians. He has a huge stake in Italy's media, owns its Serie A-champion soccer club A.C. Milan and becomes the nation's prime minister every few years or so seemingly on whim.
This only slightly explains why he would allow himself to be embroiled in a scandal involving not only an underage prostitute, but 20-person prostitute-heavy orgies. As of January, Berlusconi is accused of paying Moroccan belly dancer Karima El Mahroug -- also known as Ruby Rubacori (or "Ruby Heartstealer" in English) -- more than $10,000 for sex while she was under 18 and abusing his powers in office to get her out of jail.
According to Italian authorities, after El Mahroug was arrested in Milan in May of last year and charged with theft, Berlusconi called the head of the Milan police from Paris, told them she was a relative of now-deposed Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak and had her released into the custody of his dental hygienist. After Berlusconi was put under criminal investigation on those charges in January, word leaked out that charges were being brought against men who ran a "vast pimping network" of underage prostitutes for Berlusconi's so-called "bunga bunga" sex parties, which include a ritual involving Berlusconi and his friends surrounded by 20 naked prostitutes and stripping competitions in which the winner gets to have sex with Berlusconi.
Berlusconi's trial began April 6 but was adjourned until May 31, which is understandable. This is a lot to process.
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6. Bill Clinton
Position: Former U.S. president
Financial responsibility: The economy, stupid. In between various "gates," Clinton signed off on welfare reform, gun control, tax increases, expansion of the earned income tax credit, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the communications reform act that took away limits on media ownership. He and the Republican Congress were also continuing nearly 10 years of uninterrupted economic growth and handing in four balanced budgets that each resulted in surpluses.
Year of scandal: 1998
America's just a bit dumber for having been exposed to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Its collective IQ dropped a few points when the "definition of the word 'is'" was brought into question. Its collective brainpower dwindles to Beavis and Butthead levels whenever a stained dress is mentioned or a cigar is produced.
Meanwhile, the entire political system faced a quandary over just what constituted "sexual relations." Deciding that strip club champagne room rules applied -- they can touch you but you can't touch them -- Congress' impeachment of the president ended with his acquittal of obstruction of justice and perjury charges and the national acceptance that oral sex isn't really sex if you're the one getting it. Thus Clinton didn't allegedly have nine sexual encounters with his intern; she only had them with him.
Somewhere Linda Tripp and Kenneth Starr are still trying to figure out how that works while the rest of America just gave up and flipped on Friends, Survivor or whatever made the icky man go away.
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5. John Edwards
Position: Former vice presidential candidate and U.S. senator, D-N.C.
Financial responsibility: Did not serve on economic committees during his tenure (judiciary and intelligence committees instead), but sought to roll back the Bush tax cuts and provide expanded government assistance for college education. His focus on "two Americas" pretty much drove debate during his last -- and we do mean "final" -- run for the presidency.
Year of scandal: 2008
It's as if he spent his whole post-Senate life devising a plan to be the most hated man alive.
His wife Elizabeth had terminal breast cancer and had the sympathy of roughly the entire Oprah-watching world. He had four children with her, but one died in a car accident. He had ton of amassed good will and husband cred for sticking around the whole time, helping Elizabeth and raising their remaining children. The question was: How could he blow it all up in the most spectacular way possible?
First you start having an affair with a campaign worker named Rielle Hunter in 2006. Then you have a child with said campaign worker. Then you get another campaign worker, Andrew Young, to try to take the rap for it.
For best results, make sure Young has a conscience, renounces his original claims of fatherhood and tells the world that you promised your mistress that you'd marry her during a rooftop ceremony in New York headlined by the Dave Matthews Band as soon as your wife dies. Oh, and make sure Young has access to the sex tape you made with that mistress when he's cleaning out a box of her belongings.
There are frat brothers who spend the month before graduation cheating on the girlfriend they've dated since freshman year who pull it off better than Edwards did. His political career is toast, his 2008 campaign in question after allegations that he funneled funds to both his mistress and Young, and his family is in shambles. Elizabeth Edwards succumbed to cancer in December, before the divorce could go through.
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4. Eliot Spitzer
Position: Former governor, D-N.Y.
Financial responsibility: Increasing the state payroll, passing a state budget that resulted in a $4 billion deficit and proposing a $124 billion budget that would leave a $4.7 billion deficit for the next administration.
Year of scandal: 2008
Public advocate, Wall Street crusader, governor of New York: None of those titles have quite the same ring as "Client 9."
For a guy who supposedly knew the workings of the financial system pretty well, Spitzer looked like just another rube of a john when he tried to transfer more than $10,000 to a front for the Emperor's Club VIP prostitution ring and was red-flagged by North Fork Bank.
It eventually came out that Spitzer paid roughly $80,000 for prostitutes over several years while he was attorney general and governor. It wasn't until IRS and FBI surveillance uncovered an interlude with prostitute Ashley Dupre at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., in February 2008, in which Spitzer paid her $4,300 for her services, that Spitzer's political life came crashing down.
Unlike most of the aforementioned scandals, however, all of the principals in this one somehow managed to land on their feet. Dupre got a Playboy photo spread out of the deal and Spitzer still has his own show (albeit a low-rated one) on CNN.
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3. Larry Craig
Position: Former U.S. senator, R-Idaho
Financial responsibility: Member of the Senate committees on appropriations, public works, energy and veterans affairs.
Year of scandal: 2007
If the name doesn't ring a bell, just call him "wide stance."
This is one of the few sex scandals in which the politician involved didn't even get any sex out of the deal, but Craig would probably still like a do-over on that trip to the men's room back in June 2007. According to police accounts, he went into a men's room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport and, after several attempts at peeking through the cracks in the bathroom stall door, picked a stall next to an occupied area and tapped his foot. He moved his foot into the adjacent stall and eventually just reached underneath the divider with his hand.
Unfortunately for Craig, the guy in the next stall was an undercover cop who arrested Craig for lewd behavior and introduced much of the straight American world to the concept of cottaging -- basically anonymous sex in public bathrooms. Craig initially protested that he had a "wide stance" while on the toilet and reached below the partition to pick up some paper, but eventually he pleaded guilty to a disorderly conduct charge and paid less than $600 in fines.
Though he tried to withdraw his guilty plea and reneged on his resignation, serving until the end of his term and not seeking reelection, the Senate ethics committee made it clear that they thought he was guilty and scolded him for using $213,000 in campaign funds for his defense.
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2. Mark Sanford
Position: Former governor, R-S.C.
Financial responsibility: Vetoing budgets, having those vetoes overridden, refusing stimulus money, accepting stimulus money conditionally.
Year of scandal: 2009
The problem with politicians getting up on a high horse is that it just makes their fall all the more painful.
Take Mark Sanford, for instance. The former South Carolina governor defended the Confederate stars and bars in the state flag, fought for cuts in the budget, spurned stimulus money and believed "the largest proclamation of one's faith ought to be in how one lives his life." He was tea party before tea partying was cool.
Then he went missing. For six days. Without contacting anyone. People tend to notice things like that when you're governor, especially your lieutenant governor, who's supposed to take over in your absence.
Like a teen who's totally going to a show his parents don't know about, Sanford gave his family and coworkers a story about how he was going hiking on the Appalachian Trail and probably wouldn't be reachable. He didn't take more than a dozen calls from his chief of staff, he didn't take his kids' calls on Father's Day. Nope, he couldn't really do any of that in Argentina, where he was continuing an affair with commodities broker Maria Chapur that began when the two first met in 2001.
Sanford's wife Jenny knew about the affair roughly five months before Sanford tried to come back to the U.S. discreetly through Atlanta, where he was met by the press. The incident cost Sanford his marriage and his position as head of the Republican Governors Association, but not his job. He dodged impeachment and was censured by his state's House of Representatives, but finished the remainder of his term in January.
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1. Chris Lee
Position: Former U.S. Representative, R-N.Y.
Financial responsibility: Member of the House's financial services committee who got $29.7 million in earmarks for his district.
Year of scandal: Current
In his first full term in the House, Lee brought a lot of goodies back to Western New York. He got money for high-speed rail, defense contractors and even for a lovely little shooting range at a local Air Force reserve outpost. It was the woman he didn't bring back that led to his downfall.
While cruising around the Interwebs during his second term, Lee came across a personal ad from a woman on Craigslist and decided to give it a go. He gave the woman a story about being a 39-year-old divorced lobbyist (he's 47 and married with a child) and sent shirtless photos to her from his BlackBerry using a Gmail account. Unfortunately, he also gave the woman his real name.
Despite seemingly being connected, what with the hip Research in Motion(RIMM_) device and handy Gmail account, Lee's somewhat of an Internet neophyte. As it turns out, Google also has a feature where you can type in someone's name and "search" for information on them. The industrious object of Lee's affections did just that and ran across Lee's House of Representatives Web page.
Lee also hasn't been downstate enough to know that there's a New York City-based website called Gawker that just loves getting tidbits about shirtless, philandering politicians. Faced with a tough ethical dilemma, the woman took all of her communications with Lee and all his photos and handed them off to Gawker, which published them in a February expose. Lee, this time shirted, resigned later the same day. The special election for his seat is May 24: Candidate photos not required.
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