Wives Per GOP Pres. Candidates 1988-2012
Salon has created a wonderful graph of the increasing number of wives Republican presidential candidates have.
As he has inched toward a full-fledged presidential bid, Newt Gingrich has been scrambling to explain away his two divorces and three marriages. The story he offered up this week — that some combination of patriotism and a strong work ethic led him to stray from his second wife in the mid-1990s (just as he was leading a drive to impeach President Clinton over an affair) — surely didn’t help matters.
Gingrich, of course, is just one of many likely Republican candidates seeking to curry favor with a Republican Party base that is filled with religious conservatives — often by voicing loud support for “traditional marriage.” He’s also one of four GOP prospects who has enjoyed three “traditional marriages” in his life. Indeed, an unusually high wives-to-candidate ratio may be the most remarkable feature of the emerging Republican field:
