Sept. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Among those of us who watched the president do his whirl of Sunday morning talk shows on a beautiful Indian summer day, the question was less what he said than the potential for overexposure on television. Yet an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll this week shows that 54 percent of those asked thought they were seeing “about the right amount” of Barack Obama.

What’s troubling about the president on TV is something different than whether the third hot fudge sundae is as good as the first. It’s that to be on TV today is to keep such bad company.

Now TV is the preferred medium for disgraced politicians clawing their way back into polite -- or not so polite -- society. They aren’t going to make it back to elected office, but in that interlude between resignation and indictment, sentencing or writing a book, they can wriggle back into our living rooms.

This week we were treated to the spectacle of former House majority leader Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, the Texas pest-control operator who ran for Congress because government was over- regulating him, shaking his booty on “Dancing with the Stars.” The tragi-comedy is a small price to pay for returning to the klieg lights where a bored reporter at rehearsal asked him for his opinion on health-care reform (unconstitutional) and Obama (strangling small business).

Hard to Watch

A cross between an Elvis impersonator and denture model, Delay’s cha-cha to “Wild Thing” could hardly have made anyone’s heart sing as he landed in sixth place scoring 20 out of a possible 32 points.

TV offers a form of instant redemption. Would former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich be yukking it up as part of the regular panel on “Morning Joe” or making nice with the ladies on “The View” if the tapes on which he’s heard trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat were all that bad? It seems so long ago that we were horrified by the Blagojevich Enterprises, as prosecutors called the multiple counts of corruption in Blago’s indictment, citing his attempts to extort payoffs, punish a children’s hospital for balking at pay-to- play, and collect extra cash through his wife’s real estate business.

At least one person was repelled by giving Blago a stage. A judge barred his signing on for a season of the jungle reality show “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.” His wife did instead.

Acts of Betrayal

You know there is no shame when former presidential candidate John Edwards goes on “Nightline” and invites Oprah to his mansion in North Carolina to promote his wife’s book. Consult your listings for another Edwardses appearance on a one- time special, “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.”

Edwards shouldn’t see the light of day much less the light of a camera. Edwards betrayed his wife with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter and then the Edwards jointly betrayed the country by appearing as a loving couple knowing their secret could compromise the election for the highest office in the land.

Imagine if Edwards had won the nomination. If his secret came out before the general election, a Republican would have undoubtedly won. If he’d won and then it came out, it would be a catastrophe for the country to have a new president weighed down by such a squalid and ghoulish tale. Would we have had a shadow first lady?

Violating Our Trust

Reports are circulating that Edwards paid a former aide, Andrew Young, to say the child was his (a grand jury is investigating whether Edwards used campaign funds as hush money) but now Young is circulating a book proposal. In it he admits to his own tawdry role and adds details like Edwards’ placating Hunter with the promise of a rooftop wedding once his cancer- stricken wife died.

All these media culpas debase the medium. It’s one thing to live off disgraced celebrities like Britney Spears but quite another to offer a platform to those who’ve violated the public trust. If they ever leave office, we can expect the airwaves to be invaded by the triumvirate of wife cheaters made up of Senators John Ensign and David Vitter, and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

TV does have some standards. Former Congressman Mark Foley’s comeback has been relegated to local radio. The disgraced Republican who sent sexually explicit e-mails to underage congressional pages debuted on a West Palm Beach, Florida, station on Tuesday with a show entitled “Inside the Mind of Mark Foley.” No ratings released yet to tell us how many people wanted to go there.

(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 23, 2009 21:00 EDT