Daniels: Honest

Washington, May 8: It is a US Senate race to savour, pitting a porn star named Stormy — the proud winner of the 2007 Golden G-string award — against a Christian family-values Republican shamed after being caught cavorting with prostitutes.

In these gloomy days of global recession and soaring unemployment, the Louisiana Senate race is brightening the lives of many, courtesy of Stormy Daniels, who set off on a “listening tour” of her home state yesterday, taking on David Vitter, the Republican senator, with the slogan: “Stormy Daniels: Screwing People Honestly”.

Daniels says that she is running in response to an Internet campaign called Draft Stormy that she claims has got people even more excited than viewers of her hit films Space Nuts and Taken. Whatever the outcome, her decision to thrust her 36-inch chest into Louisiana politics is dragging Vitter’s 2007 prostitution scandal back into the limelight.

“He ran for the Senate on a family values, anti-sex education platform,” Daniels told The Times. “And he’s caught with prostitutes. That’s hypocritical. Call me what you will, but you can’t call me a hypocrite.” Daniels says she loves the business she works in, but if she did enter the US Senate: “I think I would have to give it up.”

Vitter, an outspoken conservative who co-sponsored an anti-gay Marriage Protection Amendment last year, was humiliated in 2007 when it emerged that his name and number was on the list of phone call records kept by the so-called DC Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who turned the documents over to a news organisation.

Vitter, with his wife by his side during the inevitable post-revelation news conference, admitted to a “serious sin” after it emerged that his phone number had been called five times by Palfrey’s agency. Yet he added that he had “asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife”.