[Error: unknown template qotd]Well, the joke is you never want to be caught with a dead woman or a live boy. For the dead woman, Ted Kennedy wins for crashing his car with a campaign aide in it, then disappearing for 48 hours. After he sobered up, his career in national politics never recovered.

For the live boy, a lot of people will say Mark Foley, but I always liked the time that Barney Frank's lover got caught running a brothel out of Frank's house. It's a great arguement for coming out of the closet, actually. I always thought that Barney would have had it twenty times worse if he'd been lying about being gay when that happened. Since he was out, he just said "Hey, I had no idea" and most people thought "Well, he's been honest with us before." It barely counts as a scandal, since there was no permanent damage to Frank's career and hardly anyone remembers it. He had to ditch the boyfriend, though.