Making a fuss about Kevin Rudd going to a New York strip club is the kind of tactical mistake that can cost a party an election.

If Mr Rudd is right in pointing the finger at Foreign Minister Alexander Downer for disclosing details of his drunken indiscretion then it confirms that Mr Downer is a dill. His party will be punished for it at the ballot box.

The evidence on this kind of muckraking is clear. The Australian people do not like it. At best it gives people who have no intention of voting Labor a new reason to justify their decision. At worst it gives people who were considering a vote for Labor because they are sick of a tired government a new reason to do so.

On balance I have no doubt that it is an electoral plus for the Opposition Leader just as it was when early in the year Mr Downer and others on the government side tried to impugn Mr Rudd’s character by linking him with the disgraced former Premier of Western Australia Brian Burke and by using decisions of a business owned by his wife to suggest his views on IR laws were hypocritical.

The polls then moved in Labor’s direction as people showed their distaste for this kind of campaigning. While Mr Rudd says he expects his drunken night out to cost him votes, the opposite is more likely.

People are much more understanding than journalists like Glenn Milne thinks they are. A visit to a bar with topless waitresses is a long way short of Bill Clinton’s escapades in the Oval Office and the other philandering which did not prevent his re-election.

The United States has a more vocal and active Christian community than Australia and I expect that among Australian Christians there is considerable agreement with former US President Jimmy Carter who said in his 1976 interview with Playboy magazine that “I’ve looked on many women with l-st. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me.”

Closer to home, former Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke knows the depth of the forgiving feeling of Australian voters. For Bob, it was not just a matter of adultery in his heart and the evening at the Scores club in New York would pale into insignificance compared with some of his nocturnal social encounters. People knew of these character traits when they elected the Hawke-led Labor Party because they decided they were irrelevant.

The people who will really be squirming over Milne’s story are the members of parliament from both sides of politics who, like Kevin Rudd, are normal human beings with the normal frailties of the flesh.

If the new rules of journalism are that all behaviour of politicians like that of Rudd are to be written about there will be very few who are not embarrassed when their spouse picks up the newspaper in the future.

The only people eligible to stand for future Parliaments will need to be like Seinfeld’s Bubble Boy.