Billy, I won't lose your number

This past week was truly one of the most bizarre on record. Nevada's Republican senator admits to an affair and gets bumped from the news by the South Carolina governor's admitting to an affair. Of course, Sen. John Ensign's affair would have gone down the news' memory hole regardless of Republican Gov. Mark Sanford's story, what with the rash of celebrity deaths. I don't think I need to tell you what the biggest of these was.

This past week, we lost one of the most-recognizable voices of all time at the far-too-young age of 50. I'm talking, of course, about pitchman Billy Mays, whose death Sunday eclipsed those of a talk-show sidekick, a pinup girl and a mutant pederast. The death of Billy Mays leaves us all without one of the most-important voices in our lives. When we come home at 4 a.m. after a long night of debauchery, whose enthusiastic voice will now lull us to sleep after we set the timers on our TVs? The ShamWow guy's? Not likely. His run-in with the law in Miami a couple of months ago all but doomed his pitchman career. (For those not up on the scandals of the TV pitchman scene, he is alleged to have beaten a hooker in his hotel room at the Setai after she bit his lip and refused to let go.) I almost went online and ordered a supply of OxiClean out of respect for the deceased. It seemed the least I could do.

What sort of a world do we live in when top pitchmen such as Mays are snuffed out at midlife, and yet shameless hacks who can't even sell the idea that they were hiking the Appalachian Trail, not slamming their mistresses in Buenos Aires, are allowed to keep their offices? Of course, by the time you read this, that may not even be true. Sen. Ensign, brushed from the headlines, will hold onto his job at least until the next election cycle. After all, Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, another family-values Republican, survived an even-more-scandalous dust-up when his name came up on the DC Madam's list, and rumors among the demimonde suggested that the senator enjoyed a diaper fetish.

But the governor? Well, Sanford's admission was just a little too weird, a bit too outré for the sensibilities of the South Carolina voter. It's one thing to have an affair with a staffer. It's quite another to sneak off to a foreign country to have sex with some foreign lady, occasionally on the taxpayer's dime. One could suggest that Vitter's peccadilloes, by that reasoning, should have shuffled him from office, but such a suggestion ignores the understanding of the Louisiana voter, who is quite a different animal than the South Carolina voter and is used to his/her political representatives shagging hookers, keeping cash in their freezers, getting assassinated in the state capitol building and so on. To paraphrase former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, politicians in Louisiana just need to avoid being caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl. Some things are too much even for Louisiana.

Or Florida, for that matter, where the campaigns for 2010 have already shaped up, with current governor Charlie Crist taking on Rep. Kendrick Meek for retiring Sen. Mel Martinez's seat — always assuming Crist beats former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio in the Republican primary, which looks like a sure thing despite Rubio's gaining the endorsements of the most-conservative of Republican politicians in recent days. These include swirly eyed fundamentalist and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee; South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, often ranked the most-conservative member of the Senate; and Florida Rep. Jeff Miller, who makes DeMint look like Karl Marx.

But while Crist's gaining Martinez's Senate seat seems like a safe bet, how we fill the gaps in Florida leadership that his run has uncovered makes for far murkier waters. The governorship itself comes down to current state attorney-general Bill McCollum and current state CFO Alex Sink. That then opens up those positions, and filling the attorney-general slot is shaping up to be as close a thing as the gubernatorial election, with current Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp the likely Republican to run against either state Sen. Dave Aronberg or state Sen. Dan Gelber, the more likely Democratic contender if one judges these things by endorsements and buzz. Both McCollum and Kottkamp are odd candidates, having more in common politically with people such as Rubio and Huckabee than the more-electable Crist. My odds right now are on the Democrats picking up both the governor and attorney-general slots while the GOP keeps Martinez's Senate seat.

And, Jesus, how is it that I'm even thinking about this now, much less already engaging in oddsmaking? The election is still a year and a half away! The fact that we even know who's running for these seats, and that those people are out there raising cash and their profiles seems shabby, never mind the fact that I'm already dwelling on it in the pages of City Link Metromix.com. For now, there are more important things to consider, which brings me back to the point I made earlier — whose infomercials will send me to sleep now that Billy Mays, the voice of a generation, is gone? I suppose within a few months, we'll have political commercials to fill the gap, and I'll have to seriously contemplate puncturing my own eardrums with an ice pick.

Send ice picks to Dan Sweeney at dfsweeney@citylinkmagazine.com For more of Sweeney's stuff, visit Huffingtonpost.com.