Making a fuss about Kevin Rudd going to a New York strip club is the
kind of tactical mistake that can cost a party an election.
If Mr Rudd is right in pointing the finger at Foreign Minister
Alexander Downer for disclosing details of his drunken indiscretion
then it confirms that Mr Downer is a dill. His party will be punished
for it at the ballot box.

The evidence on this kind of muckraking is clear. The Australian
people do not like it. At best it gives people who have no intention
of voting Labor a new reason to justify their decision. At worst it
gives people who were considering a vote for Labor because they are
sick of a tired government a new reason to do so.

On balance I have no doubt that it is an electoral plus for the
Opposition Leader just as it was when early in the year Mr Downer and
others on the government side tried to impugn Mr Rudd's character by
linking him with the disgraced former Premier of Western Australia
Brian Burke and by using decisions of a business owned by his wife to
suggest his views on IR laws were hypocritical.

The polls then moved in Labor's direction as people showed their
distaste for this kind of campaigning. While Mr Rudd says he expects
his drunken night out to cost him votes, the opposite is more likely.

People are much more understanding than journalists like Glenn Milne
thinks they are. A visit to a bar with topless waitresses is a long
way short of Bill Clinton's escapades in the Oval Office and the other
philandering which did not prevent his re-election.

The United States has a more vocal and active Christian community than
Australia and I expect that among Australian Christians there is
considerable agreement with former US President Jimmy Carter who said
in his 1976 interview with Playboy magazine that "I've looked on many
women with l-st. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God
knows I will do this and forgives me."

Closer to home, former Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke knows the depth
of the forgiving feeling of Australian voters. For Bob, it was not
just a matter of adultery in his heart and the evening at the Scores
club in New York would pale into insignificance compared with some of
his nocturnal social encounters. People knew of these character traits
when they elected the Hawke-led Labor Party because they decided they
were irrelevant.

The people who will really be squirming over Milne's story are the
members of parliament from both sides of politics who, like Kevin
Rudd, are normal human beings with the normal frailties of the flesh.

If the new rules of journalism are that all behaviour of politicians
like that of Rudd are to be written about there will be very few who
are not embarrassed when their spouse picks up the newspaper in the
future.

The only people eligible to stand for future Parliaments will need to
be like Seinfeld's Bubble Boy