The Roy Moore Edge

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On Tuesday we’ll learn whether Alabama voters care if their next U.S. senator is an accused pedophile with a long history of dating teens when he was in his 30s.

History would suggest … not so much.

Roy Moore hasn’t pulled out a gun at any rallies lately, but he’s still the person you’d least like your daughter to run into in the Gadsden Mall. Women have charged, with what seems like extreme credibility, that he sexually assaulted them when they were 14 and 16. You’d think that would be enough to do him in.

Yet the chronicles of American politics are absolutely stuffed with stories about politicians who shocked their constituents with bad behavior, generally along the sexual line, without being punished at the polls.

At this very moment, the House of Representatives includes Scott DesJarlais, a physician and a staunch opponent of abortion rights, who was given a new term after voters learned he had dated his patients while still married to his first wife and pressured one of them to get — yes! — an abortion.

And of course Mark Sanford, who famously disappeared while on a tryst with his mistress during his tenure as governor of South Carolina, leading to the “hiking the Appalachian Trail” explanation, which still has to rank as one of the worst cover-up lines in political history. Although possibly now under stiff competition from Moore’s response when asked whether he’d dated teenage girls. (“Not generally.”)

Sanford was censured by the state legislature but finished his term and then won a House seat in 2013, despite a new scandal involving a trespassing complaint by his ex-wife.

There are times when I really miss the Mark Sanford era. Things seemed so simple back then.

To be politically balanced, we should also note that Ted Kennedy was sent back to the Senate after pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident in which a woman drowned when he drove off a bridge. And we could keep going back and forth all day.

But here’s the bottom line, people. Suppose your state was having a very important U.S. Senate election and one of the candidates was an upstanding family man who was going to vote against all the things you most want Congress to do. And the other was an awful slimeball who you could count on to support all the things you believe in. Which way would you go?

No fair answering “to another state.”

Moore now has the strong support of Donald Trump, who currently claims that 19 different women are lying about his sexual harassment. In the future, when the nation looks back on the things it was capable of overlooking at the polls, this is going to be at the top of the charts.

Let’s hope.

Is it fair to compare Trump to Bill Clinton? People never had to listen to tapes of Clinton bragging about all the girls he’d groped. And it really wasn’t until the impeachment that his supporters were confronted with unavoidable evidence that he was the worst kind of sexual harasser. Yet even then, the public did not want him tossed out of office. In areas not involving wanton, repulsive adultery, he was doing a good job. The economy was up. Crime was down.

So it’s hard to expect that voters will reject Roy Moore for his extremely creepy sexual history. However, Moore is a special case since he’s awful in so many different ways. It’s not often you run into a modern Senate candidate — even a modern conservative Republican Senate candidate — who says that homosexuality should be illegal, that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed in Congress and that the last great age in American history was the one when we had slavery. And really, if Alabama is prepared to overlook all that — wow Alabama, shame on you.