A Tart In The Oval Office–Joe Biden’s Sexual Epiphany

Joe Biden had always thought about ‘sexual congress’, a term he had first seen in a brief argued before the Warren court.  Something about illicit carnal knowledge, the freedom of choice, and national standards.  “Pornography?” Chief Justice Scalia had later commented. “You’ll know it when you see it”, and this judgment which referred to the sanctity of community values and the illegal federal arrogation of moral authority became the law of the land until the MeToo movement brought legal actions to protect women from men.

In any case ‘sexual congress’ had always been the President’s dream, giving sexual activity a judicial cover, and allowing him – at least in his imagination – a great deal of sexual license.  He could never actually act on his impulses like Bill Clinton, a cheap fraud, trickster, and cad.  

Biden never had liked Hillary.  Few Americans did, so the President, for all his moral rectitude, didn’t blame his predecessor for fishing in another stream.  God only knows what sex with that woman would have been like.

Sex in the Oval Office was nothing new.  Even Richard Nixon, the most sexually repulsive man ever to have taken residence in 1700 was reported to have had a lover.  Where could they have met? wondered Biden? In a Holiday Inn? In Bakersfield? Or in a suite at the Watergate? Nixon in his dark suit and tie, disrobing discretely in an anteroom, coming in with just his suspenders, garters, and Florsheims while his girlfriend was already perfumed, naked, and waiting. Even that was exciting for Biden to imagine, a man whose political ambitions, let alone his lack of sexual imagination, had restricted his sexual range. 

Not that he hadn’t thought about it.  In fact he couldn’t keep his hands of young interns and Congressional aides, hugging and embracing them as an older, respectable man could do, not much more than kissing babies he had reasoned, but without admitting the desire percolating and brewing in him.  

Once he got rapped on the knuckles for it, he kept his hands to himself, but his dreams became more fervid and impatient.  Oh, to be Martin Luther King, his hero, a Lothario of immense sexual appetites and satisfaction, an American hero and black Casanova bar none.

Here was the problem as the President saw it.  He, like most older men, wanted a young lover – that surprise gift, that early Christmas present under the tree, that soft, warm, wet and inviting sweet thing that reaffirmed everything, denied nothing and made sunsets more beautiful – but having staked his entire reputation on moral integrity, respect for women, and sexual probity, he felt he could not enjoy such delights; and so the fevered dreams.  

But why not, he thought.  I am the President, after all; and if Johnson, Kennedy, and King had hidden their affairs so neatly, why couldn’t he?  And even if he was caught, he could be as nonchalant as Sarkozy and Mitterrand, denying nothing, proud of it all, and all the more popular for it.  Even that old, ugly, dewlapped, misshapen Kissinger had has paramours – a lot of them, according to his biographers, acting as he did on his own adage, ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac’. 

There was Jill, of course, who had kept her husband on a short leash all through his political career.  “Now, Joe”, she would say, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” and he knew that the love of this incredible woman was worth all the dalliances in Delaware; but as he grew older and began to resent her reins and halters, and grew restive as he saw his sexual opportunities fade, he thought it was about time to throw it all off, become his own man and plow new furrows.

The most sexually ambitious politician of all time, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, candidate for President of France and an unashamed philanderer refused to be put in the cage of conventional morality.  Neither proud of nor guilty about his infidelities or sexual appetites, he announced that immorality was other people’s problem, not his. When he flippantly rejected charges of procuring, he said that he had no idea that the women at a party he attended were prostitutes.  “All women look the same without their clothes”, he said.  

His wife stayed with her husband for twenty years less out of love than her desire to be First Lady of France.  Her fabulous wealth was not enough,  and only the position of La Présidente would satisfy her ambition.  She knew her husband well, and tolerated if not accepted his sexual profligacy because it was inconsequential and irrelevant given the intellectual brilliance and political savvy of the man.  Strauss-Kahn knew that his wife would never leave him.  

He, then, had it all.  He was wealthy and powerful on his own merits, was awarded even more wealth and status because of his wife’s family, and free to be as licentious and sexually active as he wished.  The French knew him, accepted and admired his voracious sexual appetites.  Why, thought Joe Biden, can’t I be like him?

There was the coming election, of course, and he would be a dead duck if caught in flagrante delicto given the punishing censoriousness of the country; but then again, what did that matter?  He, like most men over eighty, regardless of position, fame, or importance, turn more to what comes after death, not how to fill the few years remaining before it.  

Eternity, except to fools, is what matters.  And couldn’t eternity be squared with a nice meal or a tart in the Oval Office?  There, he said it.  And his resolve was fixed.  Sex was a perk of the office, always had been and always would be.  Men will be men, and that too has been predestined; and in the final accounting, notably expressed in Francois Villon’s famous Ballade des Pendus, we all end up in the same place, in a pile pêle-mêle, indistinguishable and undistinguished; so why the debate?

Easier said than done. Where would he start?  Of course he was the President, and if access to everything Top Secret meant anything at all, he could find out how to begin his sexual escapades.  Jeffrey Epstein and his pimp Ghislaine came to mind.  Yes, they ended up badly, but there is always room for improvement. 

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer hired high-class, top-of-the-line K Street hookers because, as he said, “I’m too busy to go looking”.  He too fell on hard times, but those fancy-dancy call girl rings still existed.  For any man well past his sexual pull-by date, pay-as-you-go sex was the only opportunity left for the President – an easy way to personal satisfaction, beyond the watchful perimeter of his wife and MeToo aides, and given Donald Trump’s legal troubles, his dalliances would certainly be overlooked.

But the laws of inertia apply not only to falling bricks.  They govern human behavior.  It is very hard indeed to teach an old dog new tricks or for a leopard to change his spots.  Intent is one thing, action is another, and the President was caught between a rock and a hard place.  He wanted, more than anything in the world, to have a final sexual fling; but found himself unable to take the first step.  The more he imagined the wildest, most unthinkable things, the less he could get off the mark, make a move, take a decision.  

He wrapped himself in briefing papers, policy initiatives, and ribbon cuttings; but fluttered and stumbled about because his mind was on only one thing – indescribable sex with a tart.  Why had it been so easy for MLK, JFK, and LBJ? Why had they not been timorous, recondite, and counselled?  

He had picked up the secure line to the Secret Service time and time again – just as Johnson had done when he wanted them to arrange an assignation – but put it back down.  He was doomed to be the first old maid president.

As time went on and his mental wobbliness increased, his sexual obsession withered and died.  He could no longer remember where he was let alone what had propelled him to such sexual madness. There were those niggling, upsetting dreams of hot young women, but he could only recall fragments and sadly the most inconsequential of them all.  And so it was despite the President’s sexual epiphany that he ended up far around the bend before he could do anything about it.  The country perhaps was better off, for a scandal with the likes of this poor, overmatched, diminished president would be ugly.