I'm just going to hammer these out in one blast and then ask that the thread be locked so as not to be a distraction to the forum. If you have comments, email me.
DemocratsJoe Biden � Married about 38 years to second wife, Jill Biden. Recall that Joe's first wife died tragically in a car accident. Joe had two children with his first wife and one with Jill. He met Jill Biden in 1975 while she was still married to Bill Stevenson. Wikipedia says �she and Stevenson drifted apart� and then �subsequently, she returned to college and met Joe Biden when she was a senior�. They met on a blind date set up by Joe Biden's brother.
Wikipedia: Jacobs enrolled in a�junior college�in Pennsylvania to study�fashion merchandising, but soon found it unsatisfying.�She married Bill Stevenson, a former college football player, in February 1970.�Within a couple of years he opened the Stone Balloon inNewark, Delaware, near the�University of Delaware.]�It became one of the most successful college bars in the nation. She enrolled at the University of Delaware, where she declared English as her major. She then took a year off from college and did some�modeling�work for a local agency in�Wilmington. �She and Stevenson drifted apart. Subsequently, she returned to college and met Senator Joe Biden as a senior at Delaware in March 1975. �They met on a�blind date�set up by Joe's brother, though Biden had seen her photograph in a local advertisement.�She graduated with a�Bachelor of Arts�from the University of Delaware later in 1975. �She began her career teaching high school English.�Meanwhile, she was going through turbulent divorce proceedings with Stevenson; the court case ended in 1976, with her not getting the half-share in the Stone Balloon she had wanted.
She and Joe Biden were married by a Catholic priest on June 17, 1977, at the Chapel at the United Nations�in New York City. �This was four and a half years after his first wife and infant daughter died in a motor vehicle accident;�Joe had proposed several times before she accepted, hesitant to take on the commitment of raising his two young sons who had survived the accident. �She continued to teach and then, while pregnant, received a�Master of Education�with a specialty in Reading from�West Chester University�in 1981. �The Bidens' daughter Ashley Blazer was born on June 8, 1981.
*I also googled �Bill Stevenson� and found apparent confirmation that Jill wasn't "betraying" him (in the behind his back cheating kind of way) but she was certainly dating Joe while still married (and divorcing) Bill. Here's a comment I found:
Rock club owner Bill Stevenson, who helped launch Bruce Springsteen's career, and Jill Biden were married for 7 years. The pair even hosted fundraisers for Biden's first Senate run in 1972 at their famous Stone Balloon Club in Newark, Delaware.
But, five years later, they were locked in a bitter divorce battle--and Jill was dating the man who's now the Democratic vice presidential candidate.
"We had drifted apart during the preceding year," Stevenson writes in his memoir "Stone Balloon; The Early Years.
In an early divorce agreement, Stevenson agreed to make substantial alimony payments to Jill for life. But she hired new lawyers who demanded that she get half of the Stone Balloon--and Stevenson put his foot down.
"I was in a war with the only person on earth I trusted and cared about," he writes.
After a headline--making divorce trial that cost him $50,000 in legal fees, Stevenson kept his beloved bar.
All his payments to Jill ceased when she got married to Biden in June 1977.
� Wikipedia: Webb is married to Hong Le Webb, a�Vietnamese-American�securities and corporate lawyer, twenty-two years his junior. Hong Le was born in�South Vietnam�and escaped to the United States when she was seven, after the�fall of Saigon. She grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. They married in October 2005. �Webb was married twice previously, and has four grown children. Hong Le and Jim Webb have one child together, Georgia LeAnh, born December 2006. Webb is also a stepfather to Hong Le's daughter from a previous marriage. �Jim Webb speaks�Vietnamese.
His first marriage was to Barbara Samorajczyk, a�lawyer�who has worked for various real estate and development companies inWashington, D.C.�and�Northern Virginia. She is a member of the�Anne Arundel County, Maryland, Council. They have one daughter, Amy, who was eight when they divorced in 1979. Webb and Samorajczyk have three grandchildren. His second marriage was to health-care lobbyist�Jo Ann Krukar�in 1981 who also assisted in his 2006 Senate campaign. They have three children: Sarah, Jimmy, and Julia.
*Third marriage to a woman 22 years his junior sounds suspicious. Second marriage too. He left his first wife while his daughter was 8. That doesn't sound much like a family man to me. Then again, this is what happens to military marriages all too often. If I had more time to research there is probably something there indicating adultery but when there are kids involved and [military & political] careers involved they might just all keep their mouths shut. I don't know Webb's politics at all...but my wayward radar is tweaked here.
Hillary Clinton: Wikipedia: Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton bought a house in Fayetteville in the summer of 1975 and Hillary finally agreed to marry.[68]�Their wedding took place on October 11, 1975, in a Methodist ceremony in their living room. �
*As most of us know, Hillary is the most famous betrayed wife in the world, apparently living a pretty separate life from her friendly and seemingly supportive politician and maybe repentant husband (we can't know his heart but his past behavior and his slickness it wouldn't surprise me if he is still cheating somehow/sometimes when he can). They have one adult child, Chelsea. Another poster keeps trying to insist that Hillary Clinton did, in fact, have lesbian affairs, but there is absolutely nothing that I have found out there to substantiate the 1990's and beyond rumors. Personally, I put these in the same bucket I put the rumors that Jeb Bush is or was cheating with a former playboy club cocktail waitress, Cynthia Henderson, now an attorney in Florida that he has associated with professionally and had given favorable political appointments. It just smells a little to partisan to post as fact on a non-political thread.
**Being a betrayed spouse in a reconciled marriage (to whatever extent it's reconciled) shouldn't hurt your electability. I wonder though if a betrayed husband politician's electability would be negatively impacted more than a betrayed wife's? I think so. I read that Rand Paul keeps bringing up Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and framing it as a knock on Hillary Clinton. I wonder if the purpose is to make Hillary look weak and as a sympathetic victim and thus implying she'd likewise be a weak leader. Everything is fair game in politics but a betrayed wife will probably get less flack or blame than a betrayed husband. Sexism implies that a man should have control over his woman but no one will think Hillary should have controlled her husband better...(he was an incorrigible womanizer) but maybe that's the implication. If she was tough (tough enough to be President) he never would have dared to cheat on her. Food for thought.
***Here's an article on the Clinton Marriage found at slate.com (considered a liberal rag) from the 2008 election cycle =
Clinton Marriage win or lose Lincoln Chaffe : Wikipedia: Chafee and his wife, Stephanie Birney (Danforth) Chafee, married in January 1990. They have three children: Louisa, Caleb, and Thea.
*Lincoln was 37 when he married Stephanie even though they met as teenagers. Don't see much reported on previous relationships.
Martin O'Malley Wikipedia: O'Malley met his wife, the former�Catherine "Katie" Curran, in 1986 while they were both in law school. At the time, he was working on�Barbara Mikulski's U.S. Senate campaign, and she was working on her father's,�J. Joseph Curran, Jr., campaign forAttorney General of Maryland. They were married in 1990 and are the parents of four children, Grace, Tara, William, and Jack.
*Around 2005 while Mayor of Baltimore, a rumor was spread that Martin impregnated a local television reporter and somehow (he or his wife) was involved in a hit and run accident where the reporter nearly lost her life (the driver that hit her was never caught). Martin and his wife vehemently denied the rumors and some political rival was blamed. The rival threw a staffer under the bus and fired the staffer. I've read nothing since that which substantiates the rumor, but like most political rumors...the rumor pops up from time to time. I have no idea what the truth is.
Bernie Sanders : Already covered in this thread. Second marriage.
Lawrence Lessig : Also covered in the thread previously.
Republicans Chris Christie Wikipedia: In 1986 (*at age 23 or 24), Christie married Mary Pat Foster, a fellow student at the�University of Delaware. After marriage they shared a studio apartment in�Summit, New Jersey.[13]�Mary Pat Christie pursued a career in�investment banking, eventually working at the Wall Street firm�Cantor Fitzgerald; she left the firm in 2001 following the�September 11 attacks.[2]�She is currently a managing director at the�Wall Street�investment firm�Angelo, Gordon & Co.[14] Christie and his wife have four children; two boys: Andrew (b. 1993) and Patrick (b. 2000) and two girls: Sarah (b. 1996) and Bridget (b. 2003).
* New York Times (a liberal paper) followed up on rumors and implied that Chris was having or had an affair with US Attorney Michele Brown back in 2009. There were instances uncovered where Chris Christie travelled with his wife and staff and he sent his wife home and he and Michele stayed a couple more days. They also travelled together to Vegas (to speak at a convention). There is nothing to substantiate Ms. Brown was anything more than a person on his staff. I don't know how large this �staff� was at the time. If it was just he and Ms. Brown that would be rather suspicious and the implications were magnified in the article when other favors given to Ms. Brown over the years were discovered and discussed. A little more that wild speculation but still not substantiated even years later.
Carly Fiorina In a continuing affairage with her former boss. Discussed earlier in the thread.
Ben Carson : already discussed. Married many years to first wife he met in college.
Jeb Bush Covered earlier in thread. Married a long time to first wife that he met as a teenager.
Scott Walker Married 22 years to Tonette Walker. Wikipedia: She married her first husband when she was 23, but he died of kidney disease by the time she was 30. Five years after her first husband�s death, she was at a karaoke night at Saz's State House restaurant when she first met�Scott Walker, 12 years her junior.[17]�She and Walker wed in 1993 and are parents to two sons, Matt and Alex.
*I see nothing rumored about Scott Walker, his wife and their marriage on the internet.
**Withdrew from the race today
Ted Cruz Wikipedia: Cruz married Heidi Nelson in 2001.[202]�The couple has two daughters:[203]�Caroline (born 2008) and Catherine (born 2011). Cruz met his wife while working on the�George W. Bush�presidential campaign of 2000. She is currently taking leave from her position as head of the Southwest Region in the Investment Management Division of�Goldman, Sachs & Co.�and previously worked in the�White House�forCondoleezza Rice�and in New York as an�investment banker.
*Besides websites jokingly accusing Cruz of having an affair of sorts with Donald Trump, there's nothing to suggest he is other than a happily married monogamous man.
Rand Paul Wikipedia: Paul is married to�Kelley Paul (n�e Ashby).�They live in�Bowling Green, Kentucky, where she is a freelance writer.[195]�They have three sons.
John Kasich Wikipedia: Kasich was married to Mary Lee Griffith from 1975 to 1980; they had no children.[175]�Griffith has campaigned for Kasich post-divorce.[175] Kasich married his second wife, Karen Waldbillig, a former public relations executive, in March 1997.[175]�They have twin daughters, Emma and Reese
*From all I read it was an amicable divorce and there was a lot of time between his two marriages.
Mike Huckabee Wikipedia: Huckabee married his wife,�Janet (McCain).....�She graduated from Hope High School in 1973, and married her high school sweetheart Mike Huckabee in May of the following year. Within two years of their marriage, she was diagnosed with�spinal cancer. Faced with the possibility of paralysis and the inability to have children, she underwent surgery and six weeks of radiation therapy. She eventually recovered and gave birth to three children: two sons, John Mark and�David, and a daughter, Sarah
*Mike Huckabee affair searches reveal nothing. I think he's super clean. In fact, he may have the best marriage of the bunch. Here's a nice slate article (a liberal rag but I didn't read a liberal bias..they seemed fond of the Huckabees) I found about their marriage from the 2008 Election cycle =
Slate on Huckabee Marriage Donald Trump : Wikipedia: In 1977, Trump married model�Ivana Zeln�čkov�, a native of the�Czech Republic, and together they have three children:�Donald, Jr.�(born December 31, 1977),�Ivanka�(born October 30, 1981), and�Eric�(born January 6, 1984). By early 1990 Trump's troubled marriage to Ivana
and long-running affair with actress�Marla Maples�had become tabloid fodder,�and the couple divorced in 1991.
After dating model�Carla Bruni, who reportedly discouraged Trump's relationship with Marla Maples,[Trump married Maples on December 21, 1993, two months after the birth of their child, Tiffany (born October 13, 1993). They divorced on June 8, 1999. In a February 2009 interview on ABC's news program�Nightline, Trump commented on his ex-wives by saying, "I just know it's very hard for them [Ivana and Marla] to compete because I do love what I do. I really love it." Trump dated model�Kara Young�in the mid- to late-1990s,[*notice this intersects the time he was married to Marla Maples]�and reportedly "bombarded"�Princess Diana�with expensive floral arrangements after her 1996 divorce from�Prince Charles.�"I only have one regret in the women department � that I never had the opportunity to court Lady Diana Spencer", Trump wrote in his 1997 book,�The Art of the Comeback. "I met her on a number of occasions ... She was a genuine princess � a dream lady."[*He wrote that in a book while married to Marla Maples]. On April 26, 2004, Trump proposed to model�Melania Knauss, a native of�Slovenia. The couple had met and begun a relationship in September 1998 [still married to Marla Maples]�Trump and Knauss married on January 22, 2005, at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, on the island of�Palm Beach, Florida, followed by a reception at Trump's�Mar-A-Lago�estate. �Melania gave birth to a boy named Barron William Trump, Trump's fifth child, in 2006�and became a naturalized U.S. citizen that same year.�Trump has seven grandchildren.
*Long history of waywardness. My wife pointed out that there is little way for us to know his heart and whether he has repented for his prior adulterous behavior. This youtube video kind of gave me the impression that he's not all that repentant. Your mileage may vary. [he refers to Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking ---- Peale was not a Presbyterian (as Trump implies) and many don't consider him a Christian at all but, rather, an apostate].
Marco Rubio Already covered in this thread. Married to his first wife.
Bobby Jindal Already covered in this thread. Married to his first wife.
SUMMATION As I said way above, I'm going to request that this thread be locked now. Hopefully it's resource or a start of further inquiry for those truly on the fence about one or more of these candidates. As someone pointed out above, the nature of politics is often destructive to marriages so it's no wonder so many of them have bad marriages. At least we can be pretty sure few to none of them have MB marriages. That being said, if a politicians ambition is to win elections and infidelity hurts those chances and makes an otherwise electable politician unelectable (as it was in the past � Ronald Reagan is the only president that has ever been divorced (and he was the OM in his 1st wife, Jane Wyman's previous marriage) so obviously marriage mattered throughout most of history in the US), then, perhaps, these professional politicians might be too fearful to risk their careers for a side piece and seek persons and staff to hold them accountable while criss crossing the country pursing power and influence. One can only hope. 8 years ago, John McCain's affairage story made me nauseous, IMO, he should have never been nominated. Bill Clintons story makes me nauseous. An electorate that expresses marriage is important and cheating isn't acceptable conduct nor something that just happens and you won't get a free pass is a good thing because we more than anyone know waywards be crazy. A consequence of cheating
should be political suicide.
That all being said, I find it impossible to discuss these matters without politics coming into play and bad feelings between us creep in. For example, IMO it is political to say: �Hillary Clinton has had lesbian affairs...here's proof� as though it's an established fact when citing the National Enquirer versus saying �there are decades old unsubstantiated rumors that Hillary Clinton may have had lesbian affairs�. Another example is to comment on Jeb Bush's marriage and then say �Jeb Bush comes from one of the finest families in America�. That is a non-factual politically explosive off-subject statement purposefully thrown in to incite and be disrespectful. �Finest families� is a political opinion when it comes to 2 former president's family. I doubt on Wikipedia is it going to tell you unequivocally that the Bush family is one �fine family� (as if there is some ranking system) but if it did, quote it and demonstrate you are just giving a balanced historical story of JEB's marriage instead of trying to sell him (and his family) as a politician you support. It also begs the response from many that feel they are not a �fine family at all�. There are many that think the Bushs are a pack of criminals, at worst and, at best, complete imbeciles but this isn't a political thread so I won't share what I think about the Bush family.
Thank you for those that participated honestly. I didn't spend nearly the same amount of time researching the candidates on the list as I did on each one I did separately previously so I may have missed a rumor or two out there. When we get down to two candidates, please do your own research and, perhaps, make marriage and any history of cheating a part of the conversation you have with your friends, family, co-workers, etc. Society is tacitly approving of infidelity more and more. It's up to us (people that have seen the empty shallow selfish evil faces of waywardism) to remind people that unrepentant narcissistic waywards are unhealthy, untrustworthy and unelectable individuals and it doesn't matter what side of the aisle they sit on.
Peace,
Mr. W
