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”.

Ms 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 Mr Vitter’s 2007 prostitution scandal back into the limelight.

“He ran for the Senate on a family values, anti-sex education platform,” Ms 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.”

Ms 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.” Mr 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 D. C. Madam, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who turned the documents over to a news organisation.

Mr Vitter, with his wife by his side during the inevitable post-revelation press conference, admitted to a “serious sin” after it emerged that his phone number had been called five times by Ms Palfrey’s agency.

Yet he added that he had “asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife”. In May last year Ms Palfrey was found dead, having apparently committed suicide after being convicted of running a prostitution ring.

Ms Daniels, one of the most successful porn actresses in the US, has already challenged Mr Vitter to a debate — “but I don’t think he has the balls to confront me” — and said she would be willing to wrestle him, something that Mr Vitter, with his track record, might secretly relish.

Few think Ms Daniels can actually beat Mr Vitter next year but her candidacy is an uncomfortable reminder for a Republican party as to why it has been so resoundingly rejected by US voters. After losing power on Capitol Hill in 2006, the party lost the White House and further ground in Congress in 2008. Democrats now reign supreme in Washington.

Part of the reason was the sleaze factor and as Ms Daniels says: “Politics can’t be any dirtier a job than the one I am already in.”

Unlikely winners

The Queen of England Actress Glenda Jackson, best known for playing Queen Elizabeth I in the TV serial, hung up her crown to become MP for Hampstead and Highgate in 1992. She ran an unsuccessful campaign to become the Labour candidate for London Mayor in 2000

The trailblazer Ilona Staller, better known as Cicciolina, was the first porn star to enter politics. She was elected an MP for Italy’s Radical Party but became most famous around the world for flashing her breasts in public

The recovering alcoholic It was said that George W. Bush won the 2000 US elections because voters would rather have a beer with him than Al Gore. Bush, however, had stopped drinking 14 years earlier after decades of alcohol abuse

The Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived in the US from Austria aged 21, unable to speak English. He became a champion bodybuilder, a millionaire tycoon, married a Kennedy and starred in more than 40 movies before he was made Governor of California in 2003

The Beauty Queen Former Miss Great Britain Gemma Garrett attempted to fill David Davis’s shoes after his protest over the 42-day detention law prompted a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden. She won 521 votes — not enough to trump Davis, who regained his seat

The washed-up actor Ronald Reagan starred in B-list movies with such titles as Swing Your Lady and Bedtime for Bonzo before being elected to the White House in 1981. He was named the most popular president since Eisenhower

Sources: Times archive; Boston Globe

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