WASHINGTON — If one question rises as yet another politician falls from the love nest and lands with a splat, it's this: What the heck was he thinking?
Elizabeth Edwards has scarcely finished her book tour of scorn. Eliot Spitzer is energetically engineering his comeback from shame. And there goes South Carolina's governor, Mark Sanford, another of the political high and mighty, hurling himself into a pit of adulterous disgrace. This time it was a South American tryst with a lover reportedly named Maria.
"Do they think they're invisible?" mused Dick Harpootlian, former South Carolina Democratic Party chairman and a longtime Sanford adversary.
Experts have all kinds of theories about why otherwise intelligent men -- and it's almost always men -- behave so recklessly. Sex and power are inextricably intertwined, as Henry Kissinger famously noted, and some politicians have a hard time reining in the urge for either.
"If you're one of these Master of the Universe kind of guys, you get to a place where you feel that the rules don't apply to you," said Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist who specializes in relationships.
Frank Farley, a Temple University psychologist, even coined a term -- the "Type T personality" -- to describe politicians' predilection for philandering. The "T" stands for thrill-seeker, which describes the kind of person drawn to a career that, by its nature, requires a willingness to step out of ordinary life and take risks.
"It's not a 9-to-5 job," said Farley, a former president of the American Psychological Assn. who has extensively studied politicians' behavior. "It has very high levels of uncertainty, variety, novelty, challenge, unpredictability -- and therefore it attracts a certain kind of person."
The positive side of that risk-taking is a willingness to expose oneself to that most public of examinations: an election campaign. The downside, Farley said, is relenting to personal urges, like drugs, alcohol or an extramarital dalliance.
"It's almost built into their personalities," he said of many officeholders. "Put it together with the opportunities they have, and we should not be shocked when we see it happening."
Still, the scrutiny of elected officials is harsher today than it was even when Bill Clinton was president. In an age when lawmakers tweet their State of the Union critiques in real time and post their every thought on Facebook, Sanford shook his security detail, turned off his cellphone for days and disappeared.
