n 1995, Oregon Senator Bob Packwood's long career of making unwanted sexual advances caught up with him, and, under pressure, he resigned. His friend Alan Simpson, then a senator from Wyoming, was among those who counseled Packwood to step down. Nevertheless, Simpson was incensed by a glaring double standard.
''I looked around that room,'' he said, ''and saw people who had done things much worse.'' In a column soon after, I quoted Simpson and asked: Now, which senior senator from Massachusetts do you suppose he was referring to?
Five years later, that senior senator - Edward Kennedy - is up for reelection. Preparing to challenge him, the papers reported on March 16, was a young Republican businessman, Jack E. Robinson III. Though a novice, Robinson was not, it seemed, without political assets. For one thing, he was reportedly able to finance much of his own campaign. And as the son of a longtime former president of the Boston chapter of the NAACP, he could expect a warmer reception among minority voters than Republicans usually enjoy.
Then the dimes started dropping. In the mid-1980s, it turned out, he had once been stopped for driving under the influence. A former girlfriend took out a restraining order against him, claiming he had forced sex on her one night. Another woman alleged that during a date four years ago, he aggressively tried to kiss her. Robinson himself identified some other episodes: The speeding ticket he forgot to pay; the ''dangerous weapon'' - a star-shaped Kung Fu gizmo - found in his pocket in 1985; the four attempts it took him to pass the bar exam; the court finding that an unpublished book he wrote violated the copyright of another author.
Within a week, bad press had pounded Robinson's fledgling campaign into rubble. He was mocked as ''Jack the Tongue.'' Columnists were pitiless. Governor Paul Cellucci, citing ''the sheer volume of the allegations,'' said the state GOP would have nothing to do with him.
To crown it all, Robinson's car was hit by an out-of-control driver. He was spared from a head-on crash, but not from another snide headline: ''Candidate Robinson steers into more trouble.'' The article's lead sentence was a taste of what he can expect every day from now until he drops out of the race: ''Jack E. Robinson III, the US Senate candidate accused of sexual misconduct, plagiarism, and carrying a dangerous weapon, found himself in a new controversy yesterday: defending his behavior following a car accident.'' (The ''behavior'' was not pulling over immediately.)
Now, the case against Robinson is not exactly airtight. That restraining order was vacated within a month. The woman he supposedly forced kisses on is lobbing her accusation anonymously. The drunk-driving arrest came to naught, since he passed a Breathalyzer test.
Details, details. No one cares. Robinson's real offense is not sexual misconduct or speeding. It's that he is a Republican named Robinson instead of a Democrat named Kennedy.
Sexual misconduct? Robinson has far to go before he can rival the senior senator in that department.
''A former midlevel Kennedy staffer, bitterly disillusioned'' - this is from Michael Kelly's long report in 1990 on Ted Kennedy's loutish ways - ''recalls with disgust one (now ex-) high-ranking aide as `a pimp ... whose real position was to procure women for Kennedy.' The fellow did have a legitimate job, she says, but also openly bragged of his prowess at getting attractive and beddable dates for his boss.''
Mishaps while driving? In the most infamous car accident in US political history, Ted Kennedy left his passenger to die while he went back to a party and never called the police. In a later car wreck, Joseph Kennedy II - a Bay State congressman from 1987 to 1999 - left his passenger crippled for life.
Abuse of women? Ted Kennedy's behavior smacks of ''misogyny,'' journalist Suzannah Lessard wrote in a famous article in 1979. ''It suggests an old-fashioned, male chauvinist, exploitative view of women as primarily objects of pleasure.'' Sheila Rauch Kennedy wrote in 1997 that her ex-husband - Joe Kennedy, the congressman - ''was powerful and popular'' while ''I was, as he so often reminded me, a nobody.'' During her marriage, she said, she ''rarely stood up to Joe'' and for good reason: ''I had simply become afraid of him.''
The point isn't that Kennedys have skeletons in their closet too, or that Robinson deserves a free pass. It is that there is a clanging double standard. Democrats named Kennedy can be guilty of shocking transgressions and Massachusetts voters will keep electing them to term after term in the US Congress. A Kennedy's past is never deemed a bar to holding public office. Indeed, it is considered infra dig even to suggest such a thing. The media themselves generally discuss the Kennedys' old scandals only when a family member is caught committing new ones.
But when it transpires that Republicans named Robinson - or anything else - have a past, they are savaged in the press, their reputations are pummeled, and they are laughed off the stage. Their imperfections, we are given to understand, are massive failings, rendering them unfit for political office.
Jack E. Robinson is only the latest victim of this hypocrisy. He won't be the last.
Jeff Jacoby is a Globe columnist.
