Political Love Stories

Barney Frank is getting married and Al Gore is going steady as Mitt Romney exchanges air kisses with George W. Bush behind closed doors. With the coming of Spring, not-so-young men’s fancies turn lightly to what passes for love in the body politic.

Frank, the retiring Congressman whose name is on Dodd-Frank, the President’s financial regulation law, nonetheless won’t be inviting Barack and Michelle Obama to his gay nuptials in July:

“We’re having this in the city I live in, in Newton, Massachusetts, on a Saturday afternoon. I don’t want to be accused of having shut down the entire region for a five-mile radius on a holiday weekend...it would ruin the party to have the Secret Service.”

On the left coast, the former Veep is surfacing with a new girlfriend, the first since his divorce from Tipper. Not surprisingly, she is “a well-heeled Democratic donor from Southern California in her 50s with a background in science and a devotion to environmental causes.” Birds of a feather?

GOP news is less romantic as George W. Bush admits to a closing elevator door “I’m for Romney,” followed by a furtive phone call from the candidate, but the next day on the stump, Romney doesn’t mention the former president’s name, even as he refers repeatedly to President Obama’s “predecessor.”

Republicans are so buttoned-up. They just refuse to wear their hearts on a sleeve.