THE SEX SEASON

Sex is what matters everywhere else you look this campaign season. And not just the Mark Foley scandal, either.

Harold Ford, running for Senate in Tennessee, got zapped by his opponent’s commercial highlighting Mr. Ford’s visit to a Playboy-sponsored party. A House candidate in New York was accused of using a phone-sex line after one of his aides misdialed the state’s Division of Criminal Justice, which reportedly has a similar number. Even the recent gay-marriage ruling in New Jersey – Republicans quickly dared Democrats to defend it – has at its base the thought of same-sex sex.

All Maine has so far produced is a round robin of tax-lien stories that would make an accountant yawn.

The difference between sex and taxes is apparent to anyone who gives the matter a moment’s thought. The unfortunate circumstances of a tax lien have to be considered, the mitigating factors weighed. Were there kids to put through college? Was the lien so small (say, $7.62) that it was clearly an oversight? If so, the story goes pffft, or it pursues the lien leaker.

A story about sex, however, has no qualifiers. Sex under duress or just a little sex can be entirely debilitating to a campaign. Sex doesn’t even have to have occurred: In the Virginia senatorial race, opponents of challenger Jim Webb last week focused on the question of sex scenes Mr. Webb wrote in his novels. Fiction is as good as fact in politics as long as it throbs.

After the longest, dullest and perhaps most-destructive political review about illicit sex and its cover-up -the Lewinsky affair starring Bill Clinton and a cast of really angry members of Congress – the public might have guessed campaigns would no longer be interested in second-hand salaciousness.

Not so; the wandering eye, the drifting hand, the descriptive novel passage and voters seem fully titillated. And neither have the endless gigabytes of graphic Internet steaminess clouded the sensitivities of the electorate.

All this, and Maine, as usual, is talking about taxes.