During the impeachment-driven midterm elections in 1998, then-Speaker Newt Gingrich commissioned a series of ads designed to try to reverse growing public support for his nemesis, Pres. Bill Clinton, whom Gingrich and congressional Republicans were trying to hound out of office because he had been caught lying during a lawsuit deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

One of the ads, titled “What Did you Tell Your Kids,” specifically targeted suburban women who might be wavering in their support for the GOP by referencing the ickier parts of the scandal — the “not sex” sex, stained blue dress, etc. — without mentioning them outright. The ads don’t appear to be available online today — 1998 was well before the YouTube era — but writing for Slate.com in October 1998, William Saletan, supplied this review:

It features one young suburban mother talking to another. “What did you tell your kids?” asks the first woman. “I didn’t know what to say,” answers the second. The first woman replies: “It’s wrong. For seven months he lied to us.” Like the finger-wagging scene in One Person, this ad reminds viewers not of what Clinton did to [Paula] Jones or [Ken] Starr but of what he did to us. It doesn’t say his lies were criminal; it merely says they were wrong. This isn’t an abstract matter of law, the ad suggests. It’s about your kids.

This ad, and the theme of explaining a politician’s sexual misdeeds to children, has renewed salience now, in light of Gingrich’s surprise victory in the South Carolina primary over the weekend. As a caller into C-SPAN’s phone-in show, “Washington Journal”, put it in a rhetorical question to women Republican voters last week: Have you considered the fact that if you elect Newt Gingrich president, his first lady will be this homewrecker who broke up his marriage?

What will you tell your kids, indeed.

The C-SPAN caller was reacting to an interview with Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, on ABC News that also ran last week:

Marianne described her “shock” at Gingrich’s behavior, including how she says she learned he conducted his affair with Callista “in my bedroom in our apartment in Washington.”

“He always called me at night,” she recalled, “and always ended with ‘I love you.’ Well, she was listening.”

Remember that this state of affairs went on for six years. Newt and Callista apparently began their affair in 1994, around the time he became speaker. It continued into 1994 while he rammed the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act through the House and through the investigation that led to impeachment in 1997. Newt was divorced in 2000 and married Callista soon afterward.

But is it fair to treat Callista, or any candidate’s wife, as political fodder?

It is when the wives are Democrats. Republicans put Hillary Clinton through the investigative wringer during her two terms as first lady. They not only accused her of unspecified skullduggery in the Whitewater, Travelgate and Filegate non-scandals, they also suggested she was complicit in the death of her colleague and aide, Vince Foster, despite the unanimous agreement among local and federal law-enforcement investigators that Foster had committed suicide.

In the 2008 campaign, Republicans spread rumors falsely attributing derogatory statements about white people to Michelle Obama in an attempt to portray her as a racist stereotype, the “angry black woman.” Just last month, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a rotund Republican from Wisconsin who was a House manager during the Clinton impeachment, criticized the first lady’s “big butt” at a Christmas event at a church in his district. (His office claimed he later sent a note apologizing to the first lady.)

Conversely, in the 1980 and 1984 campaigns, Democrats did not make an issue of the fact that when Ronald Reagan married Nancy Davis, in 1952, she was four months pregnant with their daughter Patti. This was magnanimous of them considering the fact that Ronald Reagan could not have been elected without the votes of the moralizing evangelical base.

In the 2000 and 2004 cycles, neither the Al Gore or John Kerry campaigns, respectively, chose to make an issue out of the fact that George W. Bush’s wife Laura had accidentally killed a young friend in a car crash when she was 17.

In the current cycle, Gingrich himself opened the door to political attacks on his third wife when he chose to pander to the evangelical base by campaigning on the sanctity of marriage. For example, he eagerly signed an anti-gay hate group’s pledge, promising that, if elected, he would advocate for a constitutional amendment that would prohibit gays from marrying.

Writing in the Boston Globe, Joan Vennochi notes that Callista “isn’t an innocent bystander… [She] is caught up in her husband’s political immorality play.”

Vennochi also points out that, in this current cycle, Herman Cain’s wife Gloria has had to deal with accusations that he is a philanderer, and Karen Santorum has been targeted by a Republican-driven whispering campaign about a relationship she had with a much older abortion provider before she married Rick and adopted his big-government advocacy of outlawing abortion.

In fact, Callista has already become an issue in this election. Her status as a fallen woman was asked, “Has Callista Gingrich had plastic surgery?”

Liberals are a little kinder. A profile of Callista in the current New Yorker is balanced and generous, but even so, she comes across as a tightly wound fembot.

Yes, the New Yorker is known for its liberal editorial slant, but last January, in a profile of Speaker John Boehner, right winger Peter Boyer rewrote the history of Speaker Gingrich’s ouster in 1998 by omitting the inconvenient fact that he lost the confidence of his minions after some of them learned about his affair with Callista. They had a right to be angry. If the news about the affair had become public while their impeachment gambit was playing out, it would have ruined them all.

The Republicans’ official story then was that Newt was booted because of the disastrous results of the 1998 midterms. Despite the ad campaign Gingrich ordered that included the “What Did you Tell You Your Kids” spot, the GOP barely held onto its majority in the House. As Michael Crowley recalled in Time magazine last month, it was “the worst midterm showing in 64 years for an opposition party, Democrats claimed five seats and left Gingrich’s Republicans with a razor-thin majority and a press narrative that voters were rejecting impeachment.”

When Gingrich resigned two days after the election, on Nov. 5, 1998, his story was a variation of the “I need to spend more time with my family” excuse.

“Marianne and I are tired,” he said. “We need time off to get to know each other again.”