Oct. 13, 2006
Will GOP Pay The Price For Foley?
American Prospect: Scandal Could Bury Republicans In Midterm Elections
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Play CBS Video Video 'Capitol Bob' On The News Election Day is four weeks away and the latest headlines about Mark Foley and Iraq are nothing but trouble for Republicans. "Capitol Bob" Schieffer goes behind the headlines with Harry Smith.
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(CBS/AP)
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Interactive Campaign 2006 Complete coverage and analysis of Senate and key House races, plus gubernatorial elections.
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Interactive Foley Fallout Background on the former Florida representative and the probe into the House page scandal.
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Who's Who Iraq Insurgency More on the militant groups behind the insurgency in Iraq and their motivations.
Republicans are in trouble — and it is not the kind of trouble that dissipates with time or the kind that can be overridden by the usual political subterfuge or great 30-second ads in the waning weeks of the campaign.
This is the kind of trouble that takes root. It is found not just in the garden variety public cynicism most politicians are used to enduring, but in the personal, visceral disdain occasioned by people being able to see clear through to politicians' motives and character — and being repelled by them.
As a result, I am now in the big-wage tent betting that the GOP will lose control of both houses of Congress — and, in the House, likely not by a small margin,. And it is Mark Foley who will play a larger-than-anticipated role in his party's demise. Of course, many factors have coalesced to help usher Republicans out the door: midterm elections in two-term presidencies are never good for the president's party; the war in Iraq is, to say the very least, more protracted than we had prepared for; and despite the hopeful economic trends, there is a nervousness coursing through the economy that has kept Americans' enthusiasm for it consistently dim.
Still, it is the Foley episode that will end up burying the whole party this election. I emphasize "election" in the singular because, despite the fact that there are of course hundreds of individual local contests this year involving hundreds of individual, local issues, November 7 will be a national election day. It'll be about the war in Iraq, who controls the Congress, and how changing the latter would affect the former. People understand they are voting for congressional control — there is no longer any way of obscuring the fact that this election is now about who's in charge and what that means for the country.
For the many already dismayed by the war — and that is now a majority — the Foley scandal, not in its particulars but in what it revealed about the House leadership, will be a nail in the GOP coffin. I'm saying 30 House seats change hands.
Why? The Foley follies reveal a truth in a manner that the war in Iraq does not. The motives in the Foley scandal are much easier to grasp. You don't have to sift through the facts, the spin, and the good-faith differences of opinion to come to some shaky understanding of what has happened and is happening. You can argue until you're blue in the face — and who hasn't? — about the war, its relation to the war on terror, the justifications for launching it, and what should be done now, but there is only so much evidence to prove your point one way or the other. Further, there is not much in the way of personal experience by which people can measure the validity of the arguments. (Who among us has ever bought yellowcake in Niger?)
Phone sex, on the other hand, is all too accessible. People get sex and they get why it's scandalous. They understand the impulse that would compel a person to send tamer messages by e-mail and raunchier ones by IM. They grasp intuitively that the safeness of the Foley seat, as long as Foley was in it, could have been a consideration in the GOP leadership's muted response when they learned what he was up to with the pages. The dynamics of this scandal are no mystery.
A lot of questionable comparisons have been drawn between the midterms of 2006 and those of 1994, but I think the Foley scandal parallels the House banking scandal in a very damaging way for Republicans. Back then, amid abstract discussions by the GOP about smaller government and lower taxes, there sprang from the political heavens this ridiculous story about people who bounced checks without any consequences. Americans did not have to compare notes or go sifting through their own political baggage to understand that a bunch of powerful Democrats were using their position of privilege to act irresponsibly and without fear of any consequences.
Americans didn't like that then, and they are not going to like it now.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
By Terence Samuel
Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect, 5 Broad Street, Boston, MA 02109. All rights reserved.
| The American Prospect is America's leading liberal magazine of politics, a blend of essay, criticism, investigation,commentary, and in-depth analysis. |
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- janem4:
Gerry Studds' relationship was with a seventeen-year-old page. The page was of the age of consent, therefore there were no laws broken.
Studds was censured by the House of Representatives, twenty years AFTER that 1973 relationship became known. He did not, as many claim, get off "scot-free".
If you're going to make comparisons, please find examples that really do compare. - Reply to this comment
- janem4:
Gerry Studds' relationship was with a seventeen-year-old page. The page was of the age of consent, therefore there were no laws broken.
Studds was censured by the House of Representatives, twenty years AFTER that 1973 relationship became known. He did not, as many claim, get off "scot-free".
If you're going to make comparisons, please find examples that really do compare. - Reply to this comment
- Foley was a hippocrate and PEDOFILE. He is also a traitor to all children because he claimed to be protecting children whie he was actually molesting them.
Republicans are more vulnerable to weird "secret" *** crimes because they have to repress their sexual lives in order to fit the GOP's "Family Values" mold. - Reply to this comment
- I think the Republicans will lose both the House and the Senate. Its one things to have corruption as in Delay, Ney, Cunningham, Foley. But not to protect our children and try to cover it up,parents will not forgive that ever. Its time for a change and on Nov 7 Americans have a chance to change direction.
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