'I Put My Foot Knee-Deep in his Ass'

Good thing for Jesse Jackson Jr. he's a Democrat. Typically sleazy politicians who have affairs outside their marriage are hounded for years by the media. Yet outside of Chicago this barely is a blip on the radar.

It's a story as old as time: adultery, anguish and atonement. Last Tuesday, when news broke of U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.'s extramarital relationship with a blond nightclub hostess -- kryptonite in the world of the African-American woman -- his wife, Ald. Sandi Jackson, inserted a little laughter into the public disclosure.

The venue she chose to publicly thwack her errant husband was her 47th birthday party/fund-raiser tossed by her 7th Ward staff at the Park 52 restaurant in Hyde Park.

"I told them: 'I put my foot knee-deep in his ass and he has been having a very difficult time sleeping peacefully since then.' "

Surprisingly, she did it with her husband in attendance.

"Jesse laughed because he knew it was true," Ald. Jackson told me. "But I also wanted everyone to know I was not taking it lightly."

What Ald. Jackson wasn't taking lightly was how much the public disclosure had hurt.

In an exclusive interview punctuated with tears and laughter at a West Side restaurant Thursday, a vivacious, but intense Sandi Jackson talked about her private anguish; her sea legs as a new alderman in the process of transforming her ward's old Steel Works lakefront, and her commuter marriage to the son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose life of service has also been pockmarked by sexual scandal.

"You know, when the Clintons ran into marital trouble, I thought Hillary should leave Bill," she said. "I couldn't stand what Tiger Woods did and how his wife had to suffer publicly.

"But when the 'beast' lands at your door, it can be a very, very different experience. No one really knows what they are going to do until they are in that situation. When it happens to you it's amazing how what you once thought was black and white becomes variations of a color called gray."

Although Congressman Jackson's name had surfaced in the Rod Blagojevich trial involving the alleged sale of President Obama's former U.S. Senate seat, word of Jackson's affair, interspersed somewhere in that time frame, did not hit the news until last week.

And we've hardly heard a word about it.