Barack Obama and Vera Baker Affair May Be a Scandal with Legs, or Not

Is Barack Obama having a scandalous extramarital affair with an aide of his named Vera Baker?

Two publications, one a Swiss newspaper and another the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer, are breaking a story about an extramarital affair between President Barack Obama and the former campaign staffer and current aide Vera Baker, who is thirty five years old.

For the most part, the mainstream media in the United States is leaving the story alone on Saturday, the drumbeats of rumors and innuendo are growing louder that there is compelling circumstantial proof that President Obama has had an affair; even while in office.

The Enquirer has interviewed a limo driver who claims that he drove Baker to a hotel that Obama was staying at and then drove the two around Washington DC together to various fund raising events before taking the two back to the hotel together.

While for years the National Enquirer was considered to be sensational to the point of being unreliable and lacking credibility, in recent years, the Enquirer has gained a reputation for providing stories only after it has obtained proof and done its due diligence. It was the first publication to report on last year's Tiger Woods affairs, and published the story that led to the eventual avalanche of stories about the disgraced golfing great.

Parallel to the Enquirer's report The Swiss newspaper Le Matin says that a hotel surveillance videotape exists that shows the President in an incriminating series of actions at the hotel. In addition, Le Matin claims in its report that emails have been found between Obama and Baker that will provide further evidence of an affair between the two.

These explosive reports may prove to be very interesting on a couple of levels. If in fact President Obama is having an affair and salacious and irrefutable details emerge, it will almost certainly prove damaging to his presidency as he would need to address them, appease religious groups, and win back the trust of a certain segment of the American people and voters.

But even if this alleged affair between Obama and Baker are proven true, the fallout would seem to pale in comparasion to the problems that Bill Clinton had when it was found that he was cheating with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Lewinsky scandal involved more than just sex; the basis for Clinton's eventual impeachment was not that he had cheated on his wife, but that he was accused of perjuring himself while lying under oath about it. It also involved a very young woman in Lewinsky.

Neither of these situations exist with the Obama and Baker story. The President has not, and in all likelihood will not, be placed under oath and asked to discuss his sexual behavior. And at thirty five years old, Vera is a grown woman. While younger than Obama, she is hardly a young intern the way Lewinsky was.

Further helping Obama potentially is the fact that the country seems to have a different attitude when it comes to personal scandal now than it did in the days of the Clinton and Lewinsky scandal. With two wars being fought, a still struggling economy, a collapsed housing market and deep concerns over the environment, the public likely will want to focus more on fixing these problems and returning, if at least partially, to the days of the late 1990's when the stock market and overall economy were both booming.

If the Barack Obama and Vera Baker affair rumors are true, the President will undoubtedly have some explaining to do. But the nation will likely want to move on quickly to another topic, even if the most salacious of details emerge from the Obama and Baker alleged affair.

Source: National Enquirer Staff, "Obama Cheating Scandal", nationalenquirer.com