Curt Weldon, the embattled suburban Philadelphia Republican congressman, is already well into the predictable cycle of responses employed by politicians who labor under the cloud of scandal: I haven’t been informed of any investigation; if there is an investigation, I didn’t do anything wrong; the timing of this investigation is suspicious, given the impending election, but I will look forward to cooperating fully with those who are unfairly coming after me; this is just a conspiracy concocted by my political enemies; even if it’s just a conspiracy, I am moving on.
It’s worth revisiting Weldon’s claim that he is the victim of a conspiracy. At last check, he is attributing the FBI’s raid on his lobbyist-daughter’s house to, among other people: public interest activist Melanie Sloan (who used to work for a Democrat, and who filed a complaint against Weldon with the FBI two years ago), former President Bill Clinton, a former senior Justice Department official and 9-11 Commission member named Jamie Gorelick, former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
But here’s the part that I don’t get:
1. Do all those people, acting separately or in concert, have the clout to tell the FBI what to do?
2. Isn’t the FBI a part of the Justice Department, which, last I checked, is run by a Bush Republican loyalist named Alberto Gonzalez?
3. In fact, last I checked, isn’t the government (White House, executive agencies, Congress) basically run by Weldon’s fellow Republicans?
4. Are these put-of-power Democrats somehow responsible for impaneling the federal grand jury that, since last May, has sifted wiretap evidence which suggests – although no charges have been filed - that Weldon may have illegally traded on his congressional clout to help his daughter land juicy lobbying contracts with Russian companies and a Serbian foundation?
The likely answers to those questions, of course, are: no, yes, yes, and no. But because Weldon is trying to save his political skin on the eve of his first competitive race in decades, in a district that has been slowly trending Democratic, at a time when the national GOP dearly needs him to hang on, we can hardly expect him to craft a defense grounded in empirical fact. Rather, his defense can best be understood in raw political terms. He is trying to rally his base, by arguing to potentially waffling supporters that he is a victim of his enemies and the bureaucrats and government overreach. (After all, this strategy worked for Democratic Philadelphia mayor John Street, when an FBI bug was found in his office during his re-election drive.)
Nevertheless, it’s never helpful for a politician in a tight race to be back on his heels as voting day draws near. It’s tough to stay on offense and when you’re being asked to explain yourself. And while Weldon might have easily shrugged this off during a normal election year, he now has to contend with the broader, inhospitable, atmospherics.
As the non-partisan Congressional Quarterly put it late yesterday, “the suggestion of a possible scandal comes at a time when most of the voting public already has a dim view of the Republican-controlled Congress, and when public corruption has emerged as an issue in the national campaign for control of the House.” The CQ website, which has been tracking all House races this year, now believes – for the first time - that Weldon’s challenger, retired Navy vice admiral Joe Sestak, should be given the edge.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that if a well-ensconced incumbent like Weldon is ousted, it’s a sign that Republican control of the House is imperiled. But not everyone in the GOP camp is worried about losing control. Karl Rove, for instance, sat down with the friendly Washington Times yesterday and said, “I’m confident we’re going to keep the House.” And typically paranoid Democrats are no doubt wondering, “Does he know something that we don’t?”
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There is no mention, in that Rove story, about Christian conservative voters, and whether they are sufficiently energized to help save the GOP congressional majority. Clues to their mood are abundant elsewhere. It’s clear that, in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, they remain furious with what they perceive as “homosexual infiltration” of the Republican party. And now they’re upset that Condoleezza Rice was recently photographed swearing in a State Department AIDS official who (a) is gay and (b) has a gay partner. And, worse yet, Rice was outwardly friendly to both.
Here’s the text of an email that I received the other day from the Family Research Council, a prominent religious right group. It’s self-explanatory:
“The U.S. State Department is in the business of diplomacy and avoiding faux pas, so the turns of phrase recently used by Secretary of State Condi Rice can be assumed to be intentional. Flanked by First Lady Laura Bush, Secretary Rice recently administered the oath of office for new Global AIDS Coordinator Dr. Mark S. Dybul. Dr. Dybul placed his hand on a Bible held by his homosexual partner Jason Claire. First the State Department's Deputy Chief of Protocol, Raymond Martinez, and then Secretary Rice herself referred to Mr. Claire's mother as Dr. Dybul's ‘mother in law.’ Both Martinez and Rice referred to Dr. Dybul's "family," which, under the circumstances (Dr. Dybul's parents were also present), contained enough truth to be generically proper."
The email continues: "A photograph of the swearing-in, on October 10, appears on the State Department's web site. In the world of protocol, verbal miscues are anathema. The question arises, what guidelines do the State Department and White House follow? Neither federal law (the Defense of Marriage Act) nor District of Columbia law recognizes a marriage between Dr. Dybul and his partner, and "mother in law" is therefore both linguistically (and possibly legally) improper and morally provocative. Why did Secretary Rice deploy the term in the presence of the First Lady? We've written to ask her, and we'll let you know.”
Don’t be fooled by that civil, polite language. The Christian conservatives are ticked off. As another religious right leader, Louis Sheldon, put it yesterday, the Dybul incident "was totally a damper to the base that we need to turn out” on election day.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Is Santorum speaking his mind to deaf ears?
The final senatorial debate between Sammy Glick and Perry Como – excuse me, Rick Santorum and Bob Casey Jr. – was conducted early last evening, which means that TV viewers in Pennsylvania can now return to their regular programming, no doubt needing no further reminders that they will be compelled to choose on Nov. 8 between the hyper and the soporific.
I’ll spare you a reenactment of the various charges and countercharges; nor will I dwell on the dueling attack lines (Casey says that Santorum is a stay-the-course, rubber-stamping toady for President Bush; Santorum says that Casey is an empty suit with an empty mind, cruising on his father’s name). Most people are probably tuning out that stuff already. All that will really matter, on election day, is whether the Republican incumbent will be judged by most voters to be out of sync with the prevailing statewide mood.
And I suspect that this will happen.
It’s true that the Democratic challenger, whenever given the choice between sounding decisive and vaporous, continues to opt for the latter; last night, for instance, when Casey was twice asked to spell out the conditions under which he would endorse military action against a recalcitrant North Korea, he said there’s “no line I can identify” and “we can’t sit here tonight and draw a line on this.”
But this Senate race - which the national Democrats must win, if they have any chance of taking back the Senate chamber - is not about Casey, notwithstanding Santorum’s increasingly frenetic efforts to make it so. At this point, Santorum looks like he’s trying to drive a nail into a vat of Jell-o. His exertions are almost palpable, and probably in vain, because this race is ultimately about the number three Senate Republican, in an election year that has shaped up to be a referendum on the governing Republican party. The man knows how to hustle, in Glick fashion, but it’s debatable whether he can hustle successfully in such an inhospitable climate.
Santorum’s ongoing problem, evidenced again last night, is that he can’t help saying exactly what he really thinks – despite the fact that his commendably unvarnished candor is probably turning off the suburban Republican moderates whose votes he desperately needs in order to survive. Assuming they haven’t tuned him out already.
Take Iraq, for example. Most Pennsylvanians, echoing most fellow citizens elsewhere, by this point have judged the war to be a failure, either in terms of its underlying mission or for its incompetent execution, or both; nor do they believe that the Iraq war has made Americans safer at home. But Santorum is still insisting that the voters have got it all wrong; as he put it last night:
“The fact that we have been out there, aggressively going after (the Iraq terrorists), has kept this country safe for five years. It’s one of the things seemingly overlooked every now and then, with respect to our success. We have not been attacked in five years. That’s because we’ve been taking it to them.”
Moreover, he contended that if the war on terror is ultimately lost, he is prepared to blame it on Americans at home, for failing to lose their nerve. (We will lose, he said, “if Americans don’t understand what we’re facing.”) This argument might well strike many Pennsylvania voters as a bit of an insult. In other words, why blame the folks at home, without saying nary a word during the debate about the increasingly well-documented mistakes committed in Iraq by the administration that he has long supported – such as (among other things) sending too few troops to this so-called central front in the war on terror, and failing to provide sufficient body armor, and failing to anticipate the possibility of an anti-American insurgency?
Many war analysts, as well as many voters, have long believed that Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld deserves some of the blame for those mistakes. John McCain has said that he has “no confidence” in Rumsfeld, and some moderate Republicans, as well as Senate Democratic hawk Joe Lieberman, have called for his resignation. Bob Casey, the cautious centrist, has echoed that call. But last night, Santorum – again risking the perception that he refuses to hold the administration accountable for errors – staunchly defended Rumsfeld, with this puzzling line:
“Don Rumsfeld doesn’t make policy, he follows policy.”
In other words, Santorum was saying that Rumsfeld should not be held accountable for anything, because he’s not really in charge of anything. No doubt this would be news to Rumsfeld, because the fact is that Santorum’s argument was not accurate.
It has long been established, in reports and books and congressional studies, that Rumsfeld essentially controlled the war planning; he reportedly micromanaged the invasion plans “down to the last tank.” As a self-described military reformer, he’s the person who contended that a smaller, quicker strike force could get the job done. And when Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff in 2003, argued that winter that we would need at least several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, he was shown the door on an accelerate schedule – and everybody in the Pentagon knew where that decision was made.
Nor is it clear that, on Iraq, Santorum can win over swing voters and moderate Republicans by portraying himself as an independent politician who occasionally disagrees with Bush. Especially when his disagreements are grounded in the argument that Bush isn't hawkish enough.
Last night, for instance, Santorum again insisted that we define the enemy as “Islamo-fascists.” When it was pointed out to him that even Bush has stopped using that terminology – because his aides persuaded him that it turns off moderate Muslims and therefore does more harm than good – Santorum implied that Bush has made the wrong call: “I’m sure that we offended a lot of Germans and Japanese and Italians when we called a spade a spade in World War II.”
For the most part, however, Santorum is stuck with the fact (which Casey recites almost as a mantra) that he has long been one of the Bush team's most faithful soldiers. This is a troublesome label, especially when a top gun on the Bush team says something that might not sit well with most Pennsylvania voters. Witness Dick Cheney, for example. Today, while talking with Rush Limbaugh, Cheney said this about the current government in Iraq (where October is shaping up to be the third worst month of the war for U.S. military deaths): "If you look at the general overall situation, they're doing remarkably well."
But since moderates and independents might not be persuadable on Iraq, one can sense that Santorum is stacking his sandbags around the immigration issue, as catnip for his conservative base. That, in the end, might be where he makes his final stand – seeking to maximize conservative turnout by putting heavy stress on his call for strong border security. The problem here, however, is that anti-immigration sentiment is not nearly as strong in Pennsylvania as it is elsewhere (in part because the state reportedly ranks 31st in the percentage of foreign-born residents). One statewide poll shows that only around eight percent of Pennsylvania voters rank immigration as their top issue concern, and most of them are probably with Santorum already.
So it would not appear that the debates shifted the dynamic in Santorum’s favor. He risks being swept into early retirement ( at least from elective office) by the prevailing national mood, and that’s noteworthy, given the fact that he rode a pro-Republican mood into the Senate 12 years ago. If he loses on Nov. 7, it could be written that, sometimes in politics, you live by the wave, you die by the wave.
I’ll spare you a reenactment of the various charges and countercharges; nor will I dwell on the dueling attack lines (Casey says that Santorum is a stay-the-course, rubber-stamping toady for President Bush; Santorum says that Casey is an empty suit with an empty mind, cruising on his father’s name). Most people are probably tuning out that stuff already. All that will really matter, on election day, is whether the Republican incumbent will be judged by most voters to be out of sync with the prevailing statewide mood.
And I suspect that this will happen.
It’s true that the Democratic challenger, whenever given the choice between sounding decisive and vaporous, continues to opt for the latter; last night, for instance, when Casey was twice asked to spell out the conditions under which he would endorse military action against a recalcitrant North Korea, he said there’s “no line I can identify” and “we can’t sit here tonight and draw a line on this.”
But this Senate race - which the national Democrats must win, if they have any chance of taking back the Senate chamber - is not about Casey, notwithstanding Santorum’s increasingly frenetic efforts to make it so. At this point, Santorum looks like he’s trying to drive a nail into a vat of Jell-o. His exertions are almost palpable, and probably in vain, because this race is ultimately about the number three Senate Republican, in an election year that has shaped up to be a referendum on the governing Republican party. The man knows how to hustle, in Glick fashion, but it’s debatable whether he can hustle successfully in such an inhospitable climate.
Santorum’s ongoing problem, evidenced again last night, is that he can’t help saying exactly what he really thinks – despite the fact that his commendably unvarnished candor is probably turning off the suburban Republican moderates whose votes he desperately needs in order to survive. Assuming they haven’t tuned him out already.
Take Iraq, for example. Most Pennsylvanians, echoing most fellow citizens elsewhere, by this point have judged the war to be a failure, either in terms of its underlying mission or for its incompetent execution, or both; nor do they believe that the Iraq war has made Americans safer at home. But Santorum is still insisting that the voters have got it all wrong; as he put it last night:
“The fact that we have been out there, aggressively going after (the Iraq terrorists), has kept this country safe for five years. It’s one of the things seemingly overlooked every now and then, with respect to our success. We have not been attacked in five years. That’s because we’ve been taking it to them.”
Moreover, he contended that if the war on terror is ultimately lost, he is prepared to blame it on Americans at home, for failing to lose their nerve. (We will lose, he said, “if Americans don’t understand what we’re facing.”) This argument might well strike many Pennsylvania voters as a bit of an insult. In other words, why blame the folks at home, without saying nary a word during the debate about the increasingly well-documented mistakes committed in Iraq by the administration that he has long supported – such as (among other things) sending too few troops to this so-called central front in the war on terror, and failing to provide sufficient body armor, and failing to anticipate the possibility of an anti-American insurgency?
Many war analysts, as well as many voters, have long believed that Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld deserves some of the blame for those mistakes. John McCain has said that he has “no confidence” in Rumsfeld, and some moderate Republicans, as well as Senate Democratic hawk Joe Lieberman, have called for his resignation. Bob Casey, the cautious centrist, has echoed that call. But last night, Santorum – again risking the perception that he refuses to hold the administration accountable for errors – staunchly defended Rumsfeld, with this puzzling line:
“Don Rumsfeld doesn’t make policy, he follows policy.”
In other words, Santorum was saying that Rumsfeld should not be held accountable for anything, because he’s not really in charge of anything. No doubt this would be news to Rumsfeld, because the fact is that Santorum’s argument was not accurate.
It has long been established, in reports and books and congressional studies, that Rumsfeld essentially controlled the war planning; he reportedly micromanaged the invasion plans “down to the last tank.” As a self-described military reformer, he’s the person who contended that a smaller, quicker strike force could get the job done. And when Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff in 2003, argued that winter that we would need at least several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, he was shown the door on an accelerate schedule – and everybody in the Pentagon knew where that decision was made.
Nor is it clear that, on Iraq, Santorum can win over swing voters and moderate Republicans by portraying himself as an independent politician who occasionally disagrees with Bush. Especially when his disagreements are grounded in the argument that Bush isn't hawkish enough.
Last night, for instance, Santorum again insisted that we define the enemy as “Islamo-fascists.” When it was pointed out to him that even Bush has stopped using that terminology – because his aides persuaded him that it turns off moderate Muslims and therefore does more harm than good – Santorum implied that Bush has made the wrong call: “I’m sure that we offended a lot of Germans and Japanese and Italians when we called a spade a spade in World War II.”
For the most part, however, Santorum is stuck with the fact (which Casey recites almost as a mantra) that he has long been one of the Bush team's most faithful soldiers. This is a troublesome label, especially when a top gun on the Bush team says something that might not sit well with most Pennsylvania voters. Witness Dick Cheney, for example. Today, while talking with Rush Limbaugh, Cheney said this about the current government in Iraq (where October is shaping up to be the third worst month of the war for U.S. military deaths): "If you look at the general overall situation, they're doing remarkably well."
But since moderates and independents might not be persuadable on Iraq, one can sense that Santorum is stacking his sandbags around the immigration issue, as catnip for his conservative base. That, in the end, might be where he makes his final stand – seeking to maximize conservative turnout by putting heavy stress on his call for strong border security. The problem here, however, is that anti-immigration sentiment is not nearly as strong in Pennsylvania as it is elsewhere (in part because the state reportedly ranks 31st in the percentage of foreign-born residents). One statewide poll shows that only around eight percent of Pennsylvania voters rank immigration as their top issue concern, and most of them are probably with Santorum already.
So it would not appear that the debates shifted the dynamic in Santorum’s favor. He risks being swept into early retirement ( at least from elective office) by the prevailing national mood, and that’s noteworthy, given the fact that he rode a pro-Republican mood into the Senate 12 years ago. If he loses on Nov. 7, it could be written that, sometimes in politics, you live by the wave, you die by the wave.
Monday, October 16, 2006
Bush family dynamics and other tidbits
Let’s welcome the new week with some short hits:
Is it any wonder that so many Americans seem to be suffering from “Bush fatigue,” given all the intramural sniping within the Bush family dynasty? The keepers of the father’s legacy think that the son is messing up, especially with his war in Iraq, thereby tarring the dad with his misdeeds.
So the courtiers of Bush 41 are dumping on Bush 43, leaking their disdain to the media in the time-honored Washington tradition. They've been ticked off for years, ever since Bush 41 national security adviser Brent Scowcroft wrote a 2002 column warning that a war in Iraq would devolve into a disaster, and the 43 courtiers blew him off.
The sentiments of the 41 camp permeate Bob Woodward’s new book; in fact, Scowcroft is virtually speaking through Woodward in this pungent passage: "In his younger years, Scowcroft thought, George W. couldn't decide whether he was going to rebel against his father or try to beat him at his own game. Now, he had tried at the game, and it was a disaster."
In other words, the 41ers basically think that the kid is way over his head. And this weekend they unloaded on him with a vengeance in the New York Daily News.
I generally hesitate to recommend reports based in part on anonymous reports, but Tom DeFrank is a seasoned political writer with extensive sources, and the comments generally underscore what we already know about 41 camp sentiment. So this tidbit, from a “Bush 41” loyalist, is worth noting:
"Everyone knew how Rumsfeld acts. Everyone knew 43 didn't have an attention span. Everyone knew Condi (Rice) wouldn't be able to stand up to Cheney and Rumsfeld. We told them all of this, and we were told we don't know what we're doing.”
And another 41er seethes: "Forty-three has now repudiated everything 41 stands for, and still he won't say a word," a key member of the elder Bush alumni said. "Personally, I think he's dying inside."
They feel somewhat emboldened by the fact that 41 alumnus Jim Baker (as I mentioned last Friday) is co-helming an Iraq commission that is mandated by Congress to help the son find some light at the end of the tunnel. But all this intra-family tension will probably underscore most Americans’ traditional suspicion of family political dynasties. And as a measure of the public’s Bush fatigue, look no further than the recent Fox News poll which posited a hypothetical 2008 match-up between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. The president’s brother came up short, by 15 percentage points.
That’s how you know things are bad for the Bush family, when Hillary winds up looking good.
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Speaking of disparaging remarks, David Kuo, a Christian conservative activist who once worked in the Bush White House, was on CBS’ Sixty Minutes last night, seeking to amplify the theme of his new book Tempting Faith (mentioned here the other day), which argues that Bush and the Republicans have long been playing Christian conservative voters for suckers by selling out their agenda and privately disparaging their leaders as (among other things) “the nuts.”
That’s not exactly the kind of message that the GOP would like to see on national TV at this time, especially since Republicans are facing a very tough election night unless Christian conservatives are sufficiently enthused to vote Republican in massive numbers.
In fact, Kuo, who resigned in 2003 as the deputy director of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, told CBS last night that Christian conservative voters would be wise to stay home: “The name of God is just being destroyed in the name of politics…Evangelical Christians need to take a step back and take a fast from politics…(The Bush administration) is taking the sacred and making it profane. You’re taking Jesus and making him into a precinct captain.”
The Bush team offered its initial defense last Friday, pointing out that Kuo’s resignation letter had praised Bush for his “unwavering support,” and insisting that Karl Rove (who was cited by Kuo as one of the disparagers) had never called the religious right leaders bad names behind their backs.
Bush spokesman Tony Snow said: “I know Karl Rove, we've asked Karl, ‘did you say the things attributed to you?’ He said, no.” (Perhaps. But Rove is also the guy who told Snow’s predecessor, Scott McClellan, that he, Rove, had played no role in the Valerie Plame leak case. That claim turned out to be, shall we say, at variance with the facts.)
Meanwhile, Jim Towey, who was Kuo’s boss in the faith-based initiatives office, last night told CBN, the Christian news network run by Pat Robertson, that Kuo was wrong to criticize the president: “Good Lord, he was (our) main advocate, it’s in his heart…Evangelicals have a friend in George W. Bush.”
CBN plans to air more about Kuo this week, which is exactly why it’s troublesome for the Republicans. Whatever time and energy the White House and the GOP have to spend knocking down the Kuo story is time and energy not spent on conveying a positive, consistent message about why Christian conservatives should vote heavily in 2006.
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Speaking of the ’06 election, it’s fair to say that when Fred Barnes, of all people, is waxing pessimistic about the GOP, you know that the Republicans must be in major trouble.
Barnes, the conservative commentator who has enjoyed great access to Rove and Bush, generally puts the most upbeat GOP spin on the political zeitgeist. But a sunny forecast is difficult when black clouds are looming on the horizon, even in the red states. For instance, a Republican incumbent congressman in Indiana - repeat, Indiana - is now reportedly trailing his Democratic challenger by 23 points; and national Republican operatives are playing defense, by reportedly spending a disproportionate chunk of their campaign money on GOP incumbents who need appear to need extra help keeping their jobs.
Which is why Barnes' latest piece in the conservative Weekly Standard is a useful barometer of GOP angst:
“Republicans and conservatives, brace yourselves! Strategists and consultants of both parties now believe the House is lost and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi will become speaker… (T)he Democratic crossover vote on which Republican candidates often rely has dried up. Democrats have gone home in droves…Rove is clever, but not that clever. Which is why Republicans and conservatives need to prepare themselves for bad news on Election Night.”
He thinks this situation is very unfair, of course, since he considers the Democrats to be “obstructionist, anti-tax-cut, soft on terrorism, and generally obnoxious.” Not to mention “wimpy.” Nevertheless, he doesn’t foresee any scenario that would help the GOP keep the House…although he does say this: “There's little time left for a major event to occur. The North Korean bomb test wasn't big enough to change the course of the campaign.”
He's hoping for a "major event?" What’s he rooting for, anyway - a bigger nuke? a horrific terrorist attack? Whether he intended to imply that or not, at the very least he was signaling the current state of conservative desperation.
Is it any wonder that so many Americans seem to be suffering from “Bush fatigue,” given all the intramural sniping within the Bush family dynasty? The keepers of the father’s legacy think that the son is messing up, especially with his war in Iraq, thereby tarring the dad with his misdeeds.
So the courtiers of Bush 41 are dumping on Bush 43, leaking their disdain to the media in the time-honored Washington tradition. They've been ticked off for years, ever since Bush 41 national security adviser Brent Scowcroft wrote a 2002 column warning that a war in Iraq would devolve into a disaster, and the 43 courtiers blew him off.
The sentiments of the 41 camp permeate Bob Woodward’s new book; in fact, Scowcroft is virtually speaking through Woodward in this pungent passage: "In his younger years, Scowcroft thought, George W. couldn't decide whether he was going to rebel against his father or try to beat him at his own game. Now, he had tried at the game, and it was a disaster."
In other words, the 41ers basically think that the kid is way over his head. And this weekend they unloaded on him with a vengeance in the New York Daily News.
I generally hesitate to recommend reports based in part on anonymous reports, but Tom DeFrank is a seasoned political writer with extensive sources, and the comments generally underscore what we already know about 41 camp sentiment. So this tidbit, from a “Bush 41” loyalist, is worth noting:
"Everyone knew how Rumsfeld acts. Everyone knew 43 didn't have an attention span. Everyone knew Condi (Rice) wouldn't be able to stand up to Cheney and Rumsfeld. We told them all of this, and we were told we don't know what we're doing.”
And another 41er seethes: "Forty-three has now repudiated everything 41 stands for, and still he won't say a word," a key member of the elder Bush alumni said. "Personally, I think he's dying inside."
They feel somewhat emboldened by the fact that 41 alumnus Jim Baker (as I mentioned last Friday) is co-helming an Iraq commission that is mandated by Congress to help the son find some light at the end of the tunnel. But all this intra-family tension will probably underscore most Americans’ traditional suspicion of family political dynasties. And as a measure of the public’s Bush fatigue, look no further than the recent Fox News poll which posited a hypothetical 2008 match-up between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. The president’s brother came up short, by 15 percentage points.
That’s how you know things are bad for the Bush family, when Hillary winds up looking good.
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Speaking of disparaging remarks, David Kuo, a Christian conservative activist who once worked in the Bush White House, was on CBS’ Sixty Minutes last night, seeking to amplify the theme of his new book Tempting Faith (mentioned here the other day), which argues that Bush and the Republicans have long been playing Christian conservative voters for suckers by selling out their agenda and privately disparaging their leaders as (among other things) “the nuts.”
That’s not exactly the kind of message that the GOP would like to see on national TV at this time, especially since Republicans are facing a very tough election night unless Christian conservatives are sufficiently enthused to vote Republican in massive numbers.
In fact, Kuo, who resigned in 2003 as the deputy director of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, told CBS last night that Christian conservative voters would be wise to stay home: “The name of God is just being destroyed in the name of politics…Evangelical Christians need to take a step back and take a fast from politics…(The Bush administration) is taking the sacred and making it profane. You’re taking Jesus and making him into a precinct captain.”
The Bush team offered its initial defense last Friday, pointing out that Kuo’s resignation letter had praised Bush for his “unwavering support,” and insisting that Karl Rove (who was cited by Kuo as one of the disparagers) had never called the religious right leaders bad names behind their backs.
Bush spokesman Tony Snow said: “I know Karl Rove, we've asked Karl, ‘did you say the things attributed to you?’ He said, no.” (Perhaps. But Rove is also the guy who told Snow’s predecessor, Scott McClellan, that he, Rove, had played no role in the Valerie Plame leak case. That claim turned out to be, shall we say, at variance with the facts.)
Meanwhile, Jim Towey, who was Kuo’s boss in the faith-based initiatives office, last night told CBN, the Christian news network run by Pat Robertson, that Kuo was wrong to criticize the president: “Good Lord, he was (our) main advocate, it’s in his heart…Evangelicals have a friend in George W. Bush.”
CBN plans to air more about Kuo this week, which is exactly why it’s troublesome for the Republicans. Whatever time and energy the White House and the GOP have to spend knocking down the Kuo story is time and energy not spent on conveying a positive, consistent message about why Christian conservatives should vote heavily in 2006.
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Speaking of the ’06 election, it’s fair to say that when Fred Barnes, of all people, is waxing pessimistic about the GOP, you know that the Republicans must be in major trouble.
Barnes, the conservative commentator who has enjoyed great access to Rove and Bush, generally puts the most upbeat GOP spin on the political zeitgeist. But a sunny forecast is difficult when black clouds are looming on the horizon, even in the red states. For instance, a Republican incumbent congressman in Indiana - repeat, Indiana - is now reportedly trailing his Democratic challenger by 23 points; and national Republican operatives are playing defense, by reportedly spending a disproportionate chunk of their campaign money on GOP incumbents who need appear to need extra help keeping their jobs.
Which is why Barnes' latest piece in the conservative Weekly Standard is a useful barometer of GOP angst:
“Republicans and conservatives, brace yourselves! Strategists and consultants of both parties now believe the House is lost and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi will become speaker… (T)he Democratic crossover vote on which Republican candidates often rely has dried up. Democrats have gone home in droves…Rove is clever, but not that clever. Which is why Republicans and conservatives need to prepare themselves for bad news on Election Night.”
He thinks this situation is very unfair, of course, since he considers the Democrats to be “obstructionist, anti-tax-cut, soft on terrorism, and generally obnoxious.” Not to mention “wimpy.” Nevertheless, he doesn’t foresee any scenario that would help the GOP keep the House…although he does say this: “There's little time left for a major event to occur. The North Korean bomb test wasn't big enough to change the course of the campaign.”
He's hoping for a "major event?" What’s he rooting for, anyway - a bigger nuke? a horrific terrorist attack? Whether he intended to imply that or not, at the very least he was signaling the current state of conservative desperation.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Vote first, get answers later
Since Iraq is deemed to be the most important issue in the ’06 congressional elections, one might reasonably argue that prospective voters deserve to know as much as possible about what’s really going on – not just in the bloody precincts of Baghdad, but in the minds of esteemed Washingtonians who are trying to assess that war with fresh eyes.
Well, that won’t happen. Americans who are still trying to sort out their feelings about President Bush’s Iraq adventure would probably be curious to know, for instance, whether longtime Bush family fixer James Baker believes that Bush has essentially screwed up the war big time. But Baker, who served the senior George Bush as secretary of state and who now co-chairs the congressionally mandated Iraq Study Group, has decreed (along with his Democratic co-chair Lee Hamilton) that this bipartisan panel of Washington players will not talk straight about what needs to be done in Iraq until after the voters have spoken.
As Baker insisted last night on PBS’ The News Hour, “we really have to take it out of politics. It cannot be seen to be politically inspired or politically motivated or politically directed, and we couldn’t do that if we reported before the election.” The counter-argument, of course, is that an election is supposed to be (in Bush’s phrase) “an accountability moment,” and that voters make their best accountability decisions when armed with maximum information. Especially when some notables vow that, in Baker's words,) they will be "telling it like it is."
That would seem to be particularly urgent at the moment, with a civil war seemingly on the horizon, and with the Iraqi government (“the young democracy,” in Bush’s phrase) seemingly unwilling to confront the murderous sectarian militias that operate on the inside. Indeed, Hamilton even told PBS that “I still have real questions in my mind as to the capacity, the will of the Iraqi government to move.”
The Baker-Hamilton panel was formed last March, as mandated by the Republican Congress, in one of its own rare attempts to give Bush an accountability moment. (Congress said at the time that it wanted “to help the president chart a new course.”) Baker and Hamilton have since visited Iraq, but the violence in the young democracy has been so intense that they have heeded their minders’ advice and stayed within the Green Zone, wearing their heavy helmets and their 35 pounds of armor. They talked about that experience on PBS – which, by itself, is a signal that their mood is grim and that their post-election findings might not necessarily please the White House.
Other signals have surfaced. A conservative newspaper, the New York Sun, reported yesterday that the panel is toying the idea of telling Bush a lot of things that he might not want to hear. An early draft was leaked to the paper. The draft suggests that it might be wise to pull out some U.S. troops (as part of a “redeployment,” the same word used these days by congressional Democrats); that the Iraqi government should be “representative” of its people, and “not necessarily democracy”; that Bush should stop promising a victory (“The United States should aim for stability…rather than victory”); and that any move to “stabilize” Iraq will require opening a dialogue with Syria and Iran – both of which Bush has refused to talk to.
Baker hit this latter point hard on PBS, rebuking Bush: “I personally believe in talking to your enemies. When I was secretary of state, I made 15 trips to Syria when they were on the state sponsors of terrorism list. And on the 16th trip, they changed their 25 years of policy and came to the table and sat across the table from Israel and negotiated peace with Israel.”
Would Bush accept this kind of advice? Here’s where the intricate Bush family dynamics come into play. Baker was one of the loyalists who saved Bush’s candidacy in December 2000, by helping to pull him across the finish line in Florida. But Baker’s advice about talking to the enemy, and about potentially dumping the democratization dream in favor of “stability,” sounds suspiciously like the kind of adverse advice that Bush would expect to get from his father’s retinue – and, as evidenced by the reporting in Bob Woodward’s new book, as well as many others – the Bush 41 team is not exactly popular within the Bush 43 coterie. And vice versa.
Anyway, on PBS, Baker was asked, “What gives you confidence that (members of the coterie) are ready to embrace recommendations to chart some kind of new course?” And Baker replied: “We have no assurance whatsoever.”
Stay tuned, but cast your ballots first. The answer to that key question won’t be available until after the election.
-------
By the way, if Baker winds up endorsing some form of troop "redeployment," he will be merely reflecting American mainstream of public opinion. According to the latest survey by the pollsters at Fox News, 41 percent of Americans want to "get out" of Iraq, and 39 percent want to "stay in." The margin for getting out is notably wider among independent swing voters, 43 to 29 percent.
And if you still don't think that's the mainstream opinion, consider the latest remarks on Iraq offered by Hillary Clinton, who, during her early manuevers for 2008, has spent much of her time positioning herself in the middle of the electorate. Here's what she told the New York Daily News editorial board the other day:
"The administration has this mantra: 'We'll stand down when they stand up.' Well, 350,000 of them have stood up — but standing up does not mean they will fight and defend anything.
The appropriate formula is, 'We will stand down anyway, and you will fight to defend Iraq.' Because (right now) they are basically able to just allow us to take the brunt of the impact. There are certain groups of the Iraqis that will fight, but the vast majority of the 350,000 are not prepared to stand up and fight for Iraq. They might stand up and fight for their tribe or for their family or for their religious affiliation. And that's not going to change unless they have to face the reality that, guess what, we are going to start, what we call, in the Democratic alternative, a phased redeployment.
"Now, that doesn't mean initially, out of Iraq. It could be just moving to the North, because I do think we have an extra obligation to the Kurds not to desert them once again. It could certainly mean just over the horizon in Kuwait. But what we've been doing is not working."
Well, that won’t happen. Americans who are still trying to sort out their feelings about President Bush’s Iraq adventure would probably be curious to know, for instance, whether longtime Bush family fixer James Baker believes that Bush has essentially screwed up the war big time. But Baker, who served the senior George Bush as secretary of state and who now co-chairs the congressionally mandated Iraq Study Group, has decreed (along with his Democratic co-chair Lee Hamilton) that this bipartisan panel of Washington players will not talk straight about what needs to be done in Iraq until after the voters have spoken.
As Baker insisted last night on PBS’ The News Hour, “we really have to take it out of politics. It cannot be seen to be politically inspired or politically motivated or politically directed, and we couldn’t do that if we reported before the election.” The counter-argument, of course, is that an election is supposed to be (in Bush’s phrase) “an accountability moment,” and that voters make their best accountability decisions when armed with maximum information. Especially when some notables vow that, in Baker's words,) they will be "telling it like it is."
That would seem to be particularly urgent at the moment, with a civil war seemingly on the horizon, and with the Iraqi government (“the young democracy,” in Bush’s phrase) seemingly unwilling to confront the murderous sectarian militias that operate on the inside. Indeed, Hamilton even told PBS that “I still have real questions in my mind as to the capacity, the will of the Iraqi government to move.”
The Baker-Hamilton panel was formed last March, as mandated by the Republican Congress, in one of its own rare attempts to give Bush an accountability moment. (Congress said at the time that it wanted “to help the president chart a new course.”) Baker and Hamilton have since visited Iraq, but the violence in the young democracy has been so intense that they have heeded their minders’ advice and stayed within the Green Zone, wearing their heavy helmets and their 35 pounds of armor. They talked about that experience on PBS – which, by itself, is a signal that their mood is grim and that their post-election findings might not necessarily please the White House.
Other signals have surfaced. A conservative newspaper, the New York Sun, reported yesterday that the panel is toying the idea of telling Bush a lot of things that he might not want to hear. An early draft was leaked to the paper. The draft suggests that it might be wise to pull out some U.S. troops (as part of a “redeployment,” the same word used these days by congressional Democrats); that the Iraqi government should be “representative” of its people, and “not necessarily democracy”; that Bush should stop promising a victory (“The United States should aim for stability…rather than victory”); and that any move to “stabilize” Iraq will require opening a dialogue with Syria and Iran – both of which Bush has refused to talk to.
Baker hit this latter point hard on PBS, rebuking Bush: “I personally believe in talking to your enemies. When I was secretary of state, I made 15 trips to Syria when they were on the state sponsors of terrorism list. And on the 16th trip, they changed their 25 years of policy and came to the table and sat across the table from Israel and negotiated peace with Israel.”
Would Bush accept this kind of advice? Here’s where the intricate Bush family dynamics come into play. Baker was one of the loyalists who saved Bush’s candidacy in December 2000, by helping to pull him across the finish line in Florida. But Baker’s advice about talking to the enemy, and about potentially dumping the democratization dream in favor of “stability,” sounds suspiciously like the kind of adverse advice that Bush would expect to get from his father’s retinue – and, as evidenced by the reporting in Bob Woodward’s new book, as well as many others – the Bush 41 team is not exactly popular within the Bush 43 coterie. And vice versa.
Anyway, on PBS, Baker was asked, “What gives you confidence that (members of the coterie) are ready to embrace recommendations to chart some kind of new course?” And Baker replied: “We have no assurance whatsoever.”
Stay tuned, but cast your ballots first. The answer to that key question won’t be available until after the election.
-------
By the way, if Baker winds up endorsing some form of troop "redeployment," he will be merely reflecting American mainstream of public opinion. According to the latest survey by the pollsters at Fox News, 41 percent of Americans want to "get out" of Iraq, and 39 percent want to "stay in." The margin for getting out is notably wider among independent swing voters, 43 to 29 percent.
And if you still don't think that's the mainstream opinion, consider the latest remarks on Iraq offered by Hillary Clinton, who, during her early manuevers for 2008, has spent much of her time positioning herself in the middle of the electorate. Here's what she told the New York Daily News editorial board the other day:
"The administration has this mantra: 'We'll stand down when they stand up.' Well, 350,000 of them have stood up — but standing up does not mean they will fight and defend anything.
The appropriate formula is, 'We will stand down anyway, and you will fight to defend Iraq.' Because (right now) they are basically able to just allow us to take the brunt of the impact. There are certain groups of the Iraqis that will fight, but the vast majority of the 350,000 are not prepared to stand up and fight for Iraq. They might stand up and fight for their tribe or for their family or for their religious affiliation. And that's not going to change unless they have to face the reality that, guess what, we are going to start, what we call, in the Democratic alternative, a phased redeployment.
"Now, that doesn't mean initially, out of Iraq. It could be just moving to the North, because I do think we have an extra obligation to the Kurds not to desert them once again. It could certainly mean just over the horizon in Kuwait. But what we've been doing is not working."
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Dissing the "nuts," dumping a race, turning a profit
Christian conservatives are quite sensitive about being disrespected. Over the years, whenever they have hosted me, in their kitchens and their churches, in states like Iowa and Texas and South Carolina, they have always made it quite clear (in their earnestly friendly way) that they don’t like being summarily dismissed by less devout Americans as wild-eyed loons.
So I would not imagine that they will take kindly to the news today that certain prominent people view them as “nuts” and “ridiculous” and “goofy” and “out of control.”
Especially when those prominent people work for…the Bush administration. The same administration that for years has been assiduously courting their votes.
Just as the White House and the GOP has embarked on its latest strategy to retain control of the House and Senate in the ’06 elections – by trying to pin the blame for the North Korean nuke test on Bill Clinton – here comes another development that might further sour the GOP’s religious conservative base. A new book, slated for release next Monday, says that the Bush team has been basically playing Christian conservatives for suckers, caring only about pumping them up at election time with slogans and flattery – then shelving the religious right’s issues once the elections were won.
As the author of Tempting Faith contends, the Bush White House has been “mocking the millions of faithful Christians who put their trust and hope in the president and his administration.” He writes: “National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person, and then were dismissed behind their backs as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and ‘just plain goofy.” He says that, in Karl Rove’s office, evangelical leaders were known as “the nuts.” All told, the author writes that, aside from its interest in mining the religious right’s votes, the Bush team “simply didn’t care.”
And who is this author - a “liberal” from the “reality-based community?” Quite the contrary. David Kuo served as deputy director of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. He used to work for “values” maven Bill Bennett, and for ex-attorney general John Ashcroft. And he’s a Christian conservative.
He’s also pretty ticked off (“Making politically active Christians personally happy meant having to worry far less about the Christian political agenda”). He says that, for example, the Bush team was never really interested in giving the faith-based office enough money to fulfill its mission; instead, he charges that, in 2004, GOP chairman Ken Mehlman used the office - a government entity financed by the taxpayers - for political purposes, by staging ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were actually designed to mobilize religious conservative voters in 20 key races. Kuo says: “Ken loved the idea and gave us our marching orders.” (Mehlman’s office has not yet responded to this charge.)
Thanks to the Mark Foley scandal, and longstanding grievances about a lack of GOP attention to their issues, Christian conservatives already seemed insufficiently enthused about the ’06 elections. Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center reported that only 57 percent of white evangelicals were inclined to vote GOP on Nov. 8 – a drop of 21 points from the final election tally in 2004.
And this morning, Gallup is reporting even more startling numbers, in its survey of “white frequent churchgoers” (a group that is probably broader than evangelicals, but nevertheless has been strongly pro-GOP in recent elections). Gallup says that, over the past month, Democrats have registered a 22-point gain among these voters. The result: 47 percent of white frequent churchgoers now favor a Democratic candidate, and 47 percent favor a Republican. Until now, a tie would have been unthinkable.
Which is why David Kuo’s book is probably the last thing that Republicans need right now.
-------
On another front, there was a major development today in the ’08 Democratic presidential race. Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor, who appeared to be carving out a niche as a centrist red-state candidate with business-oriented managerial credentials, announced he won’t take the plunge. He said he wants to spend more time with his family. No doubt there were other reasons - such as probable doubts about his political viability, doubts about whether he could win key primaries in states dominated by liberal voters, and doubts whether he could raise the kind of money required to face down Hillary Clinton – but let’s take him at his word for now, and move to the big question:
Who gains the most from his departure?
I nominate two prime beneficiaries. First, John Edwards – the other potentially first-tier candidate who hails from the red-state South. He and Warner were seen as major contestants for the “somebody besides Hillary” slot that will be up for grabs in Iowa New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina (the first four battlegrounds).
And the other is Evan Bayh, the centrist senator from red-state Indiana. He would have been vying with Warner for the “let’s lower our voices, roll up our sleeves, and work with the opposition” message. Bayh issued the first press release about Warner today: “Governor Warner is an exceptional public servant, a great leader, and an influential voice in the Democratic Party. I know how tough a decision that this must have been. Mark Warner has much to contribute to the national debate and I look forward to working with him to make our future everything it can be.”
Here’s my translation: “I am thrilled and relieved that Governor Warner is quitting. He was in my way, as I was in his. We have too much in common, including our serious charisma deficits. I look forward to getting on the phone today and raiding all his donors and workers, in order to make my future everything it can be.”
-------
Speaking of the Democrats, it's lucky for them that the Foley scandal has pumped some life into their "culture of corruption" campaign message...especially since Harry Reid seems so determined to deflate it.
An exhaustive report today fingers the Senate Democratic leader for turning a juicy profit on some land he doesn't own - while apparently flouting Senate ethics rules in the bargain. Reid racked up a $1.1-million windfall on a Las Vegas parcel that he had personally sold off three years earlier to a pal with a shady past. None of the complex machinations were reported to the Senate, which requires its lawmakers to list all such transactions.
The initial statement from Reid's office suggested that this was some kind of partisan attack on the eve of an election (the same kind of defense that Democrats typically ridicule when invoked by the White House), but the facts say otherwise: The report was authored by the Associated Press, and the key arbiter in the story is Kent Cooper, a former Federal Election Commission official who spent two decades monitoring candidate disclosure reports - and he says that Reid broke Senate rules:
"This is very, very clear. Whether you make a profit or a loss you've got to put that transaction down so the public, voters, can see exactly what kind of money is moving to or from a member of Congress. It is especially disconcerting when you have a member of the leadership, of either party, not putting in the effort to make sure this is a complete and accurate report. That says something to other members. It says something to the Ethics Committee." "
It also suggests that Democrats aren't immune from the charge of Washington arrogance. Especially since Reid's response, while under questioning, was to hang up on the AP reporter.
So I would not imagine that they will take kindly to the news today that certain prominent people view them as “nuts” and “ridiculous” and “goofy” and “out of control.”
Especially when those prominent people work for…the Bush administration. The same administration that for years has been assiduously courting their votes.
Just as the White House and the GOP has embarked on its latest strategy to retain control of the House and Senate in the ’06 elections – by trying to pin the blame for the North Korean nuke test on Bill Clinton – here comes another development that might further sour the GOP’s religious conservative base. A new book, slated for release next Monday, says that the Bush team has been basically playing Christian conservatives for suckers, caring only about pumping them up at election time with slogans and flattery – then shelving the religious right’s issues once the elections were won.
As the author of Tempting Faith contends, the Bush White House has been “mocking the millions of faithful Christians who put their trust and hope in the president and his administration.” He writes: “National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person, and then were dismissed behind their backs as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and ‘just plain goofy.” He says that, in Karl Rove’s office, evangelical leaders were known as “the nuts.” All told, the author writes that, aside from its interest in mining the religious right’s votes, the Bush team “simply didn’t care.”
And who is this author - a “liberal” from the “reality-based community?” Quite the contrary. David Kuo served as deputy director of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. He used to work for “values” maven Bill Bennett, and for ex-attorney general John Ashcroft. And he’s a Christian conservative.
He’s also pretty ticked off (“Making politically active Christians personally happy meant having to worry far less about the Christian political agenda”). He says that, for example, the Bush team was never really interested in giving the faith-based office enough money to fulfill its mission; instead, he charges that, in 2004, GOP chairman Ken Mehlman used the office - a government entity financed by the taxpayers - for political purposes, by staging ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were actually designed to mobilize religious conservative voters in 20 key races. Kuo says: “Ken loved the idea and gave us our marching orders.” (Mehlman’s office has not yet responded to this charge.)
Thanks to the Mark Foley scandal, and longstanding grievances about a lack of GOP attention to their issues, Christian conservatives already seemed insufficiently enthused about the ’06 elections. Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Pew Research Center reported that only 57 percent of white evangelicals were inclined to vote GOP on Nov. 8 – a drop of 21 points from the final election tally in 2004.
And this morning, Gallup is reporting even more startling numbers, in its survey of “white frequent churchgoers” (a group that is probably broader than evangelicals, but nevertheless has been strongly pro-GOP in recent elections). Gallup says that, over the past month, Democrats have registered a 22-point gain among these voters. The result: 47 percent of white frequent churchgoers now favor a Democratic candidate, and 47 percent favor a Republican. Until now, a tie would have been unthinkable.
Which is why David Kuo’s book is probably the last thing that Republicans need right now.
-------
On another front, there was a major development today in the ’08 Democratic presidential race. Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor, who appeared to be carving out a niche as a centrist red-state candidate with business-oriented managerial credentials, announced he won’t take the plunge. He said he wants to spend more time with his family. No doubt there were other reasons - such as probable doubts about his political viability, doubts about whether he could win key primaries in states dominated by liberal voters, and doubts whether he could raise the kind of money required to face down Hillary Clinton – but let’s take him at his word for now, and move to the big question:
Who gains the most from his departure?
I nominate two prime beneficiaries. First, John Edwards – the other potentially first-tier candidate who hails from the red-state South. He and Warner were seen as major contestants for the “somebody besides Hillary” slot that will be up for grabs in Iowa New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina (the first four battlegrounds).
And the other is Evan Bayh, the centrist senator from red-state Indiana. He would have been vying with Warner for the “let’s lower our voices, roll up our sleeves, and work with the opposition” message. Bayh issued the first press release about Warner today: “Governor Warner is an exceptional public servant, a great leader, and an influential voice in the Democratic Party. I know how tough a decision that this must have been. Mark Warner has much to contribute to the national debate and I look forward to working with him to make our future everything it can be.”
Here’s my translation: “I am thrilled and relieved that Governor Warner is quitting. He was in my way, as I was in his. We have too much in common, including our serious charisma deficits. I look forward to getting on the phone today and raiding all his donors and workers, in order to make my future everything it can be.”
-------
Speaking of the Democrats, it's lucky for them that the Foley scandal has pumped some life into their "culture of corruption" campaign message...especially since Harry Reid seems so determined to deflate it.
An exhaustive report today fingers the Senate Democratic leader for turning a juicy profit on some land he doesn't own - while apparently flouting Senate ethics rules in the bargain. Reid racked up a $1.1-million windfall on a Las Vegas parcel that he had personally sold off three years earlier to a pal with a shady past. None of the complex machinations were reported to the Senate, which requires its lawmakers to list all such transactions.
The initial statement from Reid's office suggested that this was some kind of partisan attack on the eve of an election (the same kind of defense that Democrats typically ridicule when invoked by the White House), but the facts say otherwise: The report was authored by the Associated Press, and the key arbiter in the story is Kent Cooper, a former Federal Election Commission official who spent two decades monitoring candidate disclosure reports - and he says that Reid broke Senate rules:
"This is very, very clear. Whether you make a profit or a loss you've got to put that transaction down so the public, voters, can see exactly what kind of money is moving to or from a member of Congress. It is especially disconcerting when you have a member of the leadership, of either party, not putting in the effort to make sure this is a complete and accurate report. That says something to other members. It says something to the Ethics Committee." "
It also suggests that Democrats aren't immune from the charge of Washington arrogance. Especially since Reid's response, while under questioning, was to hang up on the AP reporter.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
The national security steward treads carefully
During his Rose Garden press briefing today, President Bush sought to define the issues that would work best to the Republicans’ advantage in the ’06 congressional elections: “Security and the economy.”
No wonder the Republicans are in trouble this autumn.
On the economy, as I noted the other day, the GOP is being hammered in the polls. Despite the upbeat macroeconomic indicators, touted today by the president, most Americans seem to be unwilling to credit the GOP. In all likelihood, this grudging response (most significantly, among independent swing voters) can be traced to the sour national mood, and the current credibility problems that plague the party’s leader in the White House.
And on the security front…this where Bush had to tread very carefully, as he labored to deliver his key campaign message. We have heard the basic message many times before, of course: The Democrats allegedly want to raise the white flag in Iraq, because they don’t understand the stakes in Iraq, whereas Republicans do. And he wants to make sure that Americans recognize the stakes, which is why, today, at random moments over a span of 65 minutes, he kept saying it: “The stakes are high, as a matter of fact, they couldn’t be higher….I’m going to spend a lot of time explaining the stakes….I understand the stakes….The stakes are high….The stakes are really high.”
But the complications of factual reality don’t seem to lend themselves to repetitive talking points. For instance, how is Bush to deal with the fact that Republican senator like John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee and somebody who surely agrees that the stakes are really high, just returned from Iraq and said publicly that the war is “drifting sideways?” - and warned that the White House may need to rethink its mission within the next 60 or 90 days?
Asked about this today, Bush said he had no problem with Warner, because “we’re constantly changing tactics to achieve a strategic goal…to help this young democracy succeed. If the plan isn’t working, we have to adjust, I completely agree.” But he didn’t address the full import of Warner's remarks. Last Friday, the senator warned that, unless the raging violence is curbed, “I wouldn’t take off the table any option"- which means that even an establishment hawk with close Pentagon ties is willing to consider the supposedly “Defeatocrat” option of pulling back some troops. That doesn’t sound like a sterling vote of confidence in Bush’s security stewardship.
Bush had to navigate some other tricky moments. There’s a report today that a new study by Iraqi and American health researchers has pegged the Iraqi civilian death toll in the war at roughly 600,000. Even considering the broad margin of error, that finding stands in stark contrast to the civilian estimate that Bush offered last winter: 30,000. Asked about this discrepancy, Bush replied, “I don’t consider it a credible report.” But when asked whether he still stood by his 30,000 figure, he moved the goalposts: “I stand by the figure that a lot of innocent people have lost their lives.”
He also had this to say: "I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate." But polls show that most Iraqis, far from "tolerating" the violence in their midst, actually want to be free...of the American military. A majority believes that if U.S. forces departed, the level of violence would drop. Two weeks ago, the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which conducts surveys in Iraq, found that 71 percent of Iraqis questioned want the Iraqi government to ask foreign forces to leave within a year.
The North Korean situation has further complicated his campaign message. On May 23, 2003, he stated that "we will not tolerate” a nuclear North Korea, and now apparently we have a nuclear North Korea. Asked about this, he said “that statement still stands.” And he suggested that Bill Clinton (without mentioning Clinton’s name) messed up by trying to negotiate directly with North Korea starting in 1994; the Republican party followed that up today by circulating a photo of Clinton’s press secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, clinking glasses with Kim Jung Il. Indeed, some top conservative bloggers contend that the North Koreans have nuked the Democrats' prospects for taking over the House and Senate; as radio host Hugh Hewitt argues today, "It took 48 hours of loose nukes in the control of bad hair kooks to get the electorate refocused on the stakes in November's elections."
Clearly, the GOP has the potential to reassign part of the blame to the Clinton camp, because there’s no doubt that North Korea was not in full compliance with the pact (the Agreed Framework) that it negotiated with the Clinton regime, a pact that largely froze plutonium production. But it’s also true that the Bush White House tore up the Agreed Framework in 2002, and has done little ever since to confront this charter member of the “axis of evil,” except for sending a representative to six-party talks organized by the Chinese. One independent study, sponsored by the Institute for Science and International Security, has concluded that North Korea has produced enough plutonium to make between four and 13 nuclear bombs – all of it since the Clinton pact was scuttled in 2002.
Regarding those six-party talks, Bush said today that he still trusts in diplomacy: “I believe the commander in chief must (use) diplomatic measures before using the military” – which is a switch from what happened prior to the Iraq war, when the White House used the military to invade Iraq and root out weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist, rather than trying to rally full support within the United Nations. (But he did say today that the decision to invade and oust Saddam Hussein was “the right decision,” an argument that is no longer accepted by a majority of Americans, as evidenced by the polls.)
At one point, referring to all the tomes about the Bush team that now crowd the bookstores, the president said, “Someone should add up all the pages.” No doubt there will be many more, if chaos in Iraq persists while Bush continues to insist (as he did today) that "we're on the move, we're taking action."
No wonder the Republicans are in trouble this autumn.
On the economy, as I noted the other day, the GOP is being hammered in the polls. Despite the upbeat macroeconomic indicators, touted today by the president, most Americans seem to be unwilling to credit the GOP. In all likelihood, this grudging response (most significantly, among independent swing voters) can be traced to the sour national mood, and the current credibility problems that plague the party’s leader in the White House.
And on the security front…this where Bush had to tread very carefully, as he labored to deliver his key campaign message. We have heard the basic message many times before, of course: The Democrats allegedly want to raise the white flag in Iraq, because they don’t understand the stakes in Iraq, whereas Republicans do. And he wants to make sure that Americans recognize the stakes, which is why, today, at random moments over a span of 65 minutes, he kept saying it: “The stakes are high, as a matter of fact, they couldn’t be higher….I’m going to spend a lot of time explaining the stakes….I understand the stakes….The stakes are high….The stakes are really high.”
But the complications of factual reality don’t seem to lend themselves to repetitive talking points. For instance, how is Bush to deal with the fact that Republican senator like John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee and somebody who surely agrees that the stakes are really high, just returned from Iraq and said publicly that the war is “drifting sideways?” - and warned that the White House may need to rethink its mission within the next 60 or 90 days?
Asked about this today, Bush said he had no problem with Warner, because “we’re constantly changing tactics to achieve a strategic goal…to help this young democracy succeed. If the plan isn’t working, we have to adjust, I completely agree.” But he didn’t address the full import of Warner's remarks. Last Friday, the senator warned that, unless the raging violence is curbed, “I wouldn’t take off the table any option"- which means that even an establishment hawk with close Pentagon ties is willing to consider the supposedly “Defeatocrat” option of pulling back some troops. That doesn’t sound like a sterling vote of confidence in Bush’s security stewardship.
Bush had to navigate some other tricky moments. There’s a report today that a new study by Iraqi and American health researchers has pegged the Iraqi civilian death toll in the war at roughly 600,000. Even considering the broad margin of error, that finding stands in stark contrast to the civilian estimate that Bush offered last winter: 30,000. Asked about this discrepancy, Bush replied, “I don’t consider it a credible report.” But when asked whether he still stood by his 30,000 figure, he moved the goalposts: “I stand by the figure that a lot of innocent people have lost their lives.”
He also had this to say: "I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate." But polls show that most Iraqis, far from "tolerating" the violence in their midst, actually want to be free...of the American military. A majority believes that if U.S. forces departed, the level of violence would drop. Two weeks ago, the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which conducts surveys in Iraq, found that 71 percent of Iraqis questioned want the Iraqi government to ask foreign forces to leave within a year.
The North Korean situation has further complicated his campaign message. On May 23, 2003, he stated that "we will not tolerate” a nuclear North Korea, and now apparently we have a nuclear North Korea. Asked about this, he said “that statement still stands.” And he suggested that Bill Clinton (without mentioning Clinton’s name) messed up by trying to negotiate directly with North Korea starting in 1994; the Republican party followed that up today by circulating a photo of Clinton’s press secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, clinking glasses with Kim Jung Il. Indeed, some top conservative bloggers contend that the North Koreans have nuked the Democrats' prospects for taking over the House and Senate; as radio host Hugh Hewitt argues today, "It took 48 hours of loose nukes in the control of bad hair kooks to get the electorate refocused on the stakes in November's elections."
Clearly, the GOP has the potential to reassign part of the blame to the Clinton camp, because there’s no doubt that North Korea was not in full compliance with the pact (the Agreed Framework) that it negotiated with the Clinton regime, a pact that largely froze plutonium production. But it’s also true that the Bush White House tore up the Agreed Framework in 2002, and has done little ever since to confront this charter member of the “axis of evil,” except for sending a representative to six-party talks organized by the Chinese. One independent study, sponsored by the Institute for Science and International Security, has concluded that North Korea has produced enough plutonium to make between four and 13 nuclear bombs – all of it since the Clinton pact was scuttled in 2002.
Regarding those six-party talks, Bush said today that he still trusts in diplomacy: “I believe the commander in chief must (use) diplomatic measures before using the military” – which is a switch from what happened prior to the Iraq war, when the White House used the military to invade Iraq and root out weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist, rather than trying to rally full support within the United Nations. (But he did say today that the decision to invade and oust Saddam Hussein was “the right decision,” an argument that is no longer accepted by a majority of Americans, as evidenced by the polls.)
At one point, referring to all the tomes about the Bush team that now crowd the bookstores, the president said, “Someone should add up all the pages.” No doubt there will be many more, if chaos in Iraq persists while Bush continues to insist (as he did today) that "we're on the move, we're taking action."
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Can the North Korean evil-doer save the GOP?
During the past two weeks, Republicans have been feeling a tad panicked, as if they were being propelled down a white-water river, careening straight for the waterfall without a raft or a paddle. Which is why they’re now clinging to the North Korea nuclear blast story as if it was the overhanging tree branch that could save them from the final plummet on election day.
Iraq is a mess, the Mark “Maf54” Foley scandal is an embarrassment (the latest CBS-New York Times poll says that the Democrats have become the preferred party of moral values), and the economy isn’t paying the GOP any political dividends…so here, courtesy of dictator Kim Jong Il, is perhaps the October development that will finally cause voting Americans to spurn those purportedly weak Democrats and instead take refuge beneath the Republicans’ dependable national security umbrella.
That’s the talk today in conservative circles. A poster on the redstate.com website asks hopefully, “Has North Korea just blown up the Democrats' best chance to capture the House?” Republicans, sensing that the nuclear story might boost their imperiled image as the tough national security party, are now combing through the voting records of Democratic candidates, to see who might be painted as soft on the Korean threat; sure enough, they’re already assailing Maryland senatorial candidate Ben Cardin for having voted, as a member of the House, to cut spending for a missile defense system. And they might find it useful that Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker in waiting, voted against the establishment of such a system; so did congressman Sherrod Brown, the Democratic senatorial candidate in winnable Ohio.
Meanwhile, the commentator Rich Lowry thinks the North Korean test is vivid proof that voters shouldn’t trust the Democrats with their lives: “Ned Lamont, the liberal hero who vanquished Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman in a Democratic primary in August, declared a few months ago that our nation is stronger when we ‘negotiate with our enemies.’ He thus neatly summarized post-9/11 Democratic foreign-policy thought in four words. The criminal regime of North Korea…has now issued a rejoinder to this foreign-policy axiom that measured 4.2 on the Richter scale.”
And conservative blogger and political analyst Tom Bevan puts it bluntly: “By almost any standard, the testing of a nuclear bomb by a rogue regime is a pretty significant event. It is also, one would hope, worthy of a great deal of attention and a far more serious debate than the one we've been having for the last ten days over a few pervy IMs from a gay Congressman. Obviously, with only 30 days or so left to the election, this represents a pretty big, and perhaps final opportunity for Republicans to put the focus back on national security….Republicans will be more than happy to sling mud back and forth and refight the issue of whose to blame over North Korea because it keeps the focus off Mark Foley and off Iraq. It may not be exactly the fight the GOP wanted to have for the final four weeks of the midterm election, but it will certainly do. Beggars, after all, can't be choosers.”
So the question is whether the North Korea story really has the potential to send the Republicans soaring northward in the polls. Will voters, perhaps sensing a threat to their safety, quickly forget their frustrations with the governing party and seek shelter within the Republicans’ protective embrace? Or will the boom above a faraway mountain turn out to be a bust for the GOP?
One political development is already evident: the Democrats have not gone into their traditional defense crouch. Quite the contrary, this time. They are confident that they can paint this event as a byproduct of the Bush misadventure in Iraq.
Rather than cede the dialogue to the GOP, they clearly feel that they can fight back on solid ground. It was noteworthy, in today’s New York Times, that the key Democratic talking point was most prominently articulated by Sam Nunn, the former Georgia senator who in his day was respected by both parties as a credibly hawkish policymaker. In just a few sentences, he argued that the North Korean test is proof of President Bush’s failure to make America safer: “What it tells you is that we started at the wrong end of the ‘axis of evil.’ We started with the least dangerous of the countries, Iraq, and we knew it at the time. And now we have to deal with that.”
Other Democrats are speaking in similar terms; Democratic senatorial candidate Bob Menendez, who is trying to shrug off scandal allegations and hang on to his New Jersey seat, put out a statement late yesterday, contending that the North Korean test “illustrates just how much the Bush administration’s incompetence has endangered our nation. We invaded Iraq, the country that didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and ignored Iran and North Korea, the two that did.”
The GOP is already working to place much of the blame on Bill Clinton, by contending that his administration allowed the North Korean despot to run wild. They do have some raw material to work with: Clinton talked directly with the renegades, and those talks yielded a pact that the North Koreas soon began to cheat on, by setting up a secret uranium-enrichment program. The political argument here is that, if voters elect Democrats, they would choose to negotiate directly with enemies who will merely take advantage.
The potential downside to that argument, however, is that voters – already in a foul mood about the incumbent party – might not be so willing to re-debate the 1990s, not when they have six Bush years in the foreground. The Bush/GOP foreign policy record is on the ballot this year, not Clinton’s. And even if the issue is about whether it’s a sign of softness to talk directly with enemies, there are plenty of Republicans and intelligence experts who believe that Bush has been wrong not to talk to the North Koreans.
This past Sunday on ABC, Republican James Baker – who served the senior George Bush as secretary of state and is currently reviewing Iraq policy at the current president’s request – articulated his own philosophy: “I believe in talking to your enemies. It’s got to be hard-nosed, it’s got to be determined. You don’t give away anything, but in my view, it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”
And career CIA official Donald Gregg, who served the senior Bush as a national security advisor and as ambassador to South Korea, made these scathing comments yesterday: “Why won't the Bush administration talk bilaterally and substantively with NK, as the Brits (and eventually the U.S.) did with Libya? Because the Bush administration sees diplomacy as something to be engaged in with another country as a reward for that country's good behavior. They seem not to see diplomacy as a tool to be used with antagonistic countries or parties, that might bring about an improvement in the behavior of such entities, and a resolution to the issues that trouble us. Thus we do not talk to Iran, Syria, Hezbollah or North Korea. We only talk to our friends - a huge mistake.”
With people like Baker and Gregg openly rebuking the administration, it's no surprise that the press is asking the White House whether it thinks it could have done more to halt or reverse the North Korean nuclear program, especially since Bush had declared three years ago that such weaponry would not be tolerated. That very question came up today. But Bush spokesman Tony Snow replied, "It's a silly question." When a reporter objected and said that, in fact, it was "a fair question," Snow explained that "you need to give presidents the benefit of the doubt when national security is involved."
You need to give presidents the benefit of the doubt...That was certainly an interesting remark, given the fact that, at 2:21 this afternoon, the Republican National Committee sent out an email with this subhead: "Clinton administration made a deal with North Korea and failed."
Defenders of the current President Bush will, of course, dismiss Baker and Gregg as anachronisms; at the very least, however, these remarks hint at disunity within the GOP camp, and undercut the notion that the North Korean test can be an election-eve boon to ailing Republicans. Iraq is a glaring and easily graspable vulnerability; and the nuances of Far East diplomacy, past and present, are too complex for the casual voter – unlike the nuances of the Foley scandal.
As one disconsolate conservative blogger remarks on redstate.com, “Even after this (North Korean) event, regardless of the coverage it generates, there will still be more people in the United States who can identify Maf54 and locate him on a map than can do the same for Kim Jong-Il.”
Iraq is a mess, the Mark “Maf54” Foley scandal is an embarrassment (the latest CBS-New York Times poll says that the Democrats have become the preferred party of moral values), and the economy isn’t paying the GOP any political dividends…so here, courtesy of dictator Kim Jong Il, is perhaps the October development that will finally cause voting Americans to spurn those purportedly weak Democrats and instead take refuge beneath the Republicans’ dependable national security umbrella.
That’s the talk today in conservative circles. A poster on the redstate.com website asks hopefully, “Has North Korea just blown up the Democrats' best chance to capture the House?” Republicans, sensing that the nuclear story might boost their imperiled image as the tough national security party, are now combing through the voting records of Democratic candidates, to see who might be painted as soft on the Korean threat; sure enough, they’re already assailing Maryland senatorial candidate Ben Cardin for having voted, as a member of the House, to cut spending for a missile defense system. And they might find it useful that Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker in waiting, voted against the establishment of such a system; so did congressman Sherrod Brown, the Democratic senatorial candidate in winnable Ohio.
Meanwhile, the commentator Rich Lowry thinks the North Korean test is vivid proof that voters shouldn’t trust the Democrats with their lives: “Ned Lamont, the liberal hero who vanquished Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman in a Democratic primary in August, declared a few months ago that our nation is stronger when we ‘negotiate with our enemies.’ He thus neatly summarized post-9/11 Democratic foreign-policy thought in four words. The criminal regime of North Korea…has now issued a rejoinder to this foreign-policy axiom that measured 4.2 on the Richter scale.”
And conservative blogger and political analyst Tom Bevan puts it bluntly: “By almost any standard, the testing of a nuclear bomb by a rogue regime is a pretty significant event. It is also, one would hope, worthy of a great deal of attention and a far more serious debate than the one we've been having for the last ten days over a few pervy IMs from a gay Congressman. Obviously, with only 30 days or so left to the election, this represents a pretty big, and perhaps final opportunity for Republicans to put the focus back on national security….Republicans will be more than happy to sling mud back and forth and refight the issue of whose to blame over North Korea because it keeps the focus off Mark Foley and off Iraq. It may not be exactly the fight the GOP wanted to have for the final four weeks of the midterm election, but it will certainly do. Beggars, after all, can't be choosers.”
So the question is whether the North Korea story really has the potential to send the Republicans soaring northward in the polls. Will voters, perhaps sensing a threat to their safety, quickly forget their frustrations with the governing party and seek shelter within the Republicans’ protective embrace? Or will the boom above a faraway mountain turn out to be a bust for the GOP?
One political development is already evident: the Democrats have not gone into their traditional defense crouch. Quite the contrary, this time. They are confident that they can paint this event as a byproduct of the Bush misadventure in Iraq.
Rather than cede the dialogue to the GOP, they clearly feel that they can fight back on solid ground. It was noteworthy, in today’s New York Times, that the key Democratic talking point was most prominently articulated by Sam Nunn, the former Georgia senator who in his day was respected by both parties as a credibly hawkish policymaker. In just a few sentences, he argued that the North Korean test is proof of President Bush’s failure to make America safer: “What it tells you is that we started at the wrong end of the ‘axis of evil.’ We started with the least dangerous of the countries, Iraq, and we knew it at the time. And now we have to deal with that.”
Other Democrats are speaking in similar terms; Democratic senatorial candidate Bob Menendez, who is trying to shrug off scandal allegations and hang on to his New Jersey seat, put out a statement late yesterday, contending that the North Korean test “illustrates just how much the Bush administration’s incompetence has endangered our nation. We invaded Iraq, the country that didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, and ignored Iran and North Korea, the two that did.”
The GOP is already working to place much of the blame on Bill Clinton, by contending that his administration allowed the North Korean despot to run wild. They do have some raw material to work with: Clinton talked directly with the renegades, and those talks yielded a pact that the North Koreas soon began to cheat on, by setting up a secret uranium-enrichment program. The political argument here is that, if voters elect Democrats, they would choose to negotiate directly with enemies who will merely take advantage.
The potential downside to that argument, however, is that voters – already in a foul mood about the incumbent party – might not be so willing to re-debate the 1990s, not when they have six Bush years in the foreground. The Bush/GOP foreign policy record is on the ballot this year, not Clinton’s. And even if the issue is about whether it’s a sign of softness to talk directly with enemies, there are plenty of Republicans and intelligence experts who believe that Bush has been wrong not to talk to the North Koreans.
This past Sunday on ABC, Republican James Baker – who served the senior George Bush as secretary of state and is currently reviewing Iraq policy at the current president’s request – articulated his own philosophy: “I believe in talking to your enemies. It’s got to be hard-nosed, it’s got to be determined. You don’t give away anything, but in my view, it’s not appeasement to talk to your enemies.”
And career CIA official Donald Gregg, who served the senior Bush as a national security advisor and as ambassador to South Korea, made these scathing comments yesterday: “Why won't the Bush administration talk bilaterally and substantively with NK, as the Brits (and eventually the U.S.) did with Libya? Because the Bush administration sees diplomacy as something to be engaged in with another country as a reward for that country's good behavior. They seem not to see diplomacy as a tool to be used with antagonistic countries or parties, that might bring about an improvement in the behavior of such entities, and a resolution to the issues that trouble us. Thus we do not talk to Iran, Syria, Hezbollah or North Korea. We only talk to our friends - a huge mistake.”
With people like Baker and Gregg openly rebuking the administration, it's no surprise that the press is asking the White House whether it thinks it could have done more to halt or reverse the North Korean nuclear program, especially since Bush had declared three years ago that such weaponry would not be tolerated. That very question came up today. But Bush spokesman Tony Snow replied, "It's a silly question." When a reporter objected and said that, in fact, it was "a fair question," Snow explained that "you need to give presidents the benefit of the doubt when national security is involved."
You need to give presidents the benefit of the doubt...That was certainly an interesting remark, given the fact that, at 2:21 this afternoon, the Republican National Committee sent out an email with this subhead: "Clinton administration made a deal with North Korea and failed."
Defenders of the current President Bush will, of course, dismiss Baker and Gregg as anachronisms; at the very least, however, these remarks hint at disunity within the GOP camp, and undercut the notion that the North Korean test can be an election-eve boon to ailing Republicans. Iraq is a glaring and easily graspable vulnerability; and the nuances of Far East diplomacy, past and present, are too complex for the casual voter – unlike the nuances of the Foley scandal.
As one disconsolate conservative blogger remarks on redstate.com, “Even after this (North Korean) event, regardless of the coverage it generates, there will still be more people in the United States who can identify Maf54 and locate him on a map than can do the same for Kim Jong-Il.”
Monday, October 09, 2006
The GOP's "Hey, how about that awesome Dow?" defense
As part of their ongoing attempts to defuse the Mark Foley scandal, the Republicans have now come up with another talking point, another strategy designed to change the subject from their own potential culpability. In essence, it can be called the “Hey, how about that awesome Dow?” defense.
As I mentioned here last Thursday, the Republicans, mindful that their dominance of Congress is imperiled with just four weeks remaining in the ’06 congressional elections, have been trying out all kinds of defenses. On the Sunday shows yesterday, for example, Florida congressman Adam Putnam, the number-five guy in the House GOP hierarchy, brought up the “Yeah, well, what about Bill Clinton?” defense; while under fire on ABC’s This Week, he charged that the other two people seated at the interview table – Democratic congressman Rahm Emanuel and host George Stephanopolous, had once worked for Clinton and had “covered up” for him. (Stephanopolous quickly pointed out that he had left Clinton’s employ two years before the Lewinsky scandal.)
And Putnam tried another tack, which can be called the “When trapped, simply make stuff up” defense. While seeking to defend the embattled House GOP leadership, he said this about the events of Friday, Sept. 29: “Within hours of the explicit email coming to light, (the Speaker’s office) demanded Foley’s resignation.” But this attempt to paint Dennis Hastert as a man in charge, a talking point that was also floated late last week by GOP chairman Ken Mehlman, does not square with factual reality. When ABC News was preparing to break the story that day, it called Foley’s office in the morning with the details. An hour later, Foley called back and said he was quitting Congress. House Speaker Dennis Hastert played no role in the decision – and said so himself last Monday: “When (the instant messages) were released, Congressman Foley resigned. And I’m glad he did. If he had not, I would have demanded his expulsion from the House of Representatives.”
So that brings us to the Dow defense.
On paper, this would appear to be a potent way to change the subject, by arguing in essence that voters should be more focused on the money in their pocket than on the particulars of one sleazy episode. The macroeconomic indicators are healthy these days, and any incumbent party in a tight spot would try to take credit. Putnam reeled off some of the stats yesterday: plummeting gasoline prices, a low jobless rate, and “three record-breaking days for the Dow last week.” Illinois congressman Ray LaHood did the same thing over on CBS yesterday, and a trip of Republicans echoed this theme on the Sunday New York Times’ op-ed page; as former California congressman Tom Campbell contended, “The robust economy stems from actions the Republican president and Congress have taken…”
Yet, if all this is true, then why are the Republicans getting no credit from the voters for the sunny economic stats? In a Newsweek poll released yesterday, Democrats were favored over the Republicans as the party best trusted to handle the economy – by a margin of 53 to 31 percent. Other polls lately have reported similar margins. Privately, a number of Republican strategists are deeply frustrated by these findings, and their party’s apparent inability to reap political benefits. One of them asked me recently, “Can you explain it?”
It’s not so tough to explain. One could always make the argument that most voters are dismissing the sunny numbers as irrelevant to their everyday lives; after all, counter-stats show that the real wages of working Americans have stagnated during the Bush years, and that the gap between the richest and poorest Americans continues to widen. It was Henry Paulson, the Bush administration’s new Treasury secretary, who effectively undercut the Sunday show Republicans, when he said in a speech two months ago that “amid this country’s strong economic expansion, many Americans simply aren’t feeling the benefits. Their increases in wages are being eaten up by high energy prices and rising health care costs, among others.”
But the GOP’s current inability to get credit for the economy can probably be attributed to a more fundamental factor: the Bush administration’s credibility gap.
Iraq is the animating issue in the ’06 elections, and, as yesterday’s Newsweek poll pointed out, a majority of Americans now believe that the president (backed by the GOP Congress) deceived the nation into war. This climate of distrust permeates the national mood at the moment. Disenchanted voters, who feel they have been deceived, are hardly in the mood to accept as truth the GOP’s claims of effective economic stewardship – especially at a time of deep budget deficits, caused in part by a war that is costing the taxpayer $2 billion a week.
Meanwhile, the Foley scandal has managed to underscore the GOP’s credibility woes. Republican congressman Tom Davis - who has headed the House GOP’s campaign efforts in the past, and who is respected for his willingness to dump the talking points and talk straight – put his finger on the problem yesterday, during his appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation. He said simply that the Republicans can’t get any “oxygen” to talk about their preferred issues, because of “the very difficult atmospherics” of the moment.
And to truly gauge how difficult the “atmospherics” have become, consider the plight of Tom Reynolds, the Republican congressman who is helming the current House GOP campaign efforts.
An upstate New York incumbent who was widely assumed to be a cinch re-election winner, he suddenly trails his Democratic challenger by 15 points – because of his role in the Foley chronology. He says he informed Hastert about Foley last spring, but Hastert says he doesn’t remember that. And Reynolds reportedly asked Foley to run for re-election at a time when evidence about Foley’s behavior was already circulating (although he now says he can’t recall when it was that he asked Foley to run again).
Reynolds was supposed to appear on ABC yesterday, but he canceled. No surprise there. More surprising was the release of his new TV ad in his home district. Appearing on camera, he recounts his version of events, starting with last spring: “I reported what I had been told to the Speaker of the House….I trusted that others had investigated.”
Now there’s a political commercial that you normally don’t see: In a bid to save his own skin, an incumbent from the governing party is attacking the leader of his own party as untrustworthy.
With that kind of material out on the airwaves, is it any wonder why the Republicans are having problems changing the subject to the economy?
-------
Will social and religious conservative voters stay home on election day and tip the balance to the Democrats? Some polls say yes; The New York Times today isn't so sure. Either way, and no matter who wins this autumn, tensions will persist within the fragile Republican conservative coalition, at least according to one print column that ran Sunday. That would be mine.
As I mentioned here last Thursday, the Republicans, mindful that their dominance of Congress is imperiled with just four weeks remaining in the ’06 congressional elections, have been trying out all kinds of defenses. On the Sunday shows yesterday, for example, Florida congressman Adam Putnam, the number-five guy in the House GOP hierarchy, brought up the “Yeah, well, what about Bill Clinton?” defense; while under fire on ABC’s This Week, he charged that the other two people seated at the interview table – Democratic congressman Rahm Emanuel and host George Stephanopolous, had once worked for Clinton and had “covered up” for him. (Stephanopolous quickly pointed out that he had left Clinton’s employ two years before the Lewinsky scandal.)
And Putnam tried another tack, which can be called the “When trapped, simply make stuff up” defense. While seeking to defend the embattled House GOP leadership, he said this about the events of Friday, Sept. 29: “Within hours of the explicit email coming to light, (the Speaker’s office) demanded Foley’s resignation.” But this attempt to paint Dennis Hastert as a man in charge, a talking point that was also floated late last week by GOP chairman Ken Mehlman, does not square with factual reality. When ABC News was preparing to break the story that day, it called Foley’s office in the morning with the details. An hour later, Foley called back and said he was quitting Congress. House Speaker Dennis Hastert played no role in the decision – and said so himself last Monday: “When (the instant messages) were released, Congressman Foley resigned. And I’m glad he did. If he had not, I would have demanded his expulsion from the House of Representatives.”
So that brings us to the Dow defense.
On paper, this would appear to be a potent way to change the subject, by arguing in essence that voters should be more focused on the money in their pocket than on the particulars of one sleazy episode. The macroeconomic indicators are healthy these days, and any incumbent party in a tight spot would try to take credit. Putnam reeled off some of the stats yesterday: plummeting gasoline prices, a low jobless rate, and “three record-breaking days for the Dow last week.” Illinois congressman Ray LaHood did the same thing over on CBS yesterday, and a trip of Republicans echoed this theme on the Sunday New York Times’ op-ed page; as former California congressman Tom Campbell contended, “The robust economy stems from actions the Republican president and Congress have taken…”
Yet, if all this is true, then why are the Republicans getting no credit from the voters for the sunny economic stats? In a Newsweek poll released yesterday, Democrats were favored over the Republicans as the party best trusted to handle the economy – by a margin of 53 to 31 percent. Other polls lately have reported similar margins. Privately, a number of Republican strategists are deeply frustrated by these findings, and their party’s apparent inability to reap political benefits. One of them asked me recently, “Can you explain it?”
It’s not so tough to explain. One could always make the argument that most voters are dismissing the sunny numbers as irrelevant to their everyday lives; after all, counter-stats show that the real wages of working Americans have stagnated during the Bush years, and that the gap between the richest and poorest Americans continues to widen. It was Henry Paulson, the Bush administration’s new Treasury secretary, who effectively undercut the Sunday show Republicans, when he said in a speech two months ago that “amid this country’s strong economic expansion, many Americans simply aren’t feeling the benefits. Their increases in wages are being eaten up by high energy prices and rising health care costs, among others.”
But the GOP’s current inability to get credit for the economy can probably be attributed to a more fundamental factor: the Bush administration’s credibility gap.
Iraq is the animating issue in the ’06 elections, and, as yesterday’s Newsweek poll pointed out, a majority of Americans now believe that the president (backed by the GOP Congress) deceived the nation into war. This climate of distrust permeates the national mood at the moment. Disenchanted voters, who feel they have been deceived, are hardly in the mood to accept as truth the GOP’s claims of effective economic stewardship – especially at a time of deep budget deficits, caused in part by a war that is costing the taxpayer $2 billion a week.
Meanwhile, the Foley scandal has managed to underscore the GOP’s credibility woes. Republican congressman Tom Davis - who has headed the House GOP’s campaign efforts in the past, and who is respected for his willingness to dump the talking points and talk straight – put his finger on the problem yesterday, during his appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation. He said simply that the Republicans can’t get any “oxygen” to talk about their preferred issues, because of “the very difficult atmospherics” of the moment.
And to truly gauge how difficult the “atmospherics” have become, consider the plight of Tom Reynolds, the Republican congressman who is helming the current House GOP campaign efforts.
An upstate New York incumbent who was widely assumed to be a cinch re-election winner, he suddenly trails his Democratic challenger by 15 points – because of his role in the Foley chronology. He says he informed Hastert about Foley last spring, but Hastert says he doesn’t remember that. And Reynolds reportedly asked Foley to run for re-election at a time when evidence about Foley’s behavior was already circulating (although he now says he can’t recall when it was that he asked Foley to run again).
Reynolds was supposed to appear on ABC yesterday, but he canceled. No surprise there. More surprising was the release of his new TV ad in his home district. Appearing on camera, he recounts his version of events, starting with last spring: “I reported what I had been told to the Speaker of the House….I trusted that others had investigated.”
Now there’s a political commercial that you normally don’t see: In a bid to save his own skin, an incumbent from the governing party is attacking the leader of his own party as untrustworthy.
With that kind of material out on the airwaves, is it any wonder why the Republicans are having problems changing the subject to the economy?
-------
Will social and religious conservative voters stay home on election day and tip the balance to the Democrats? Some polls say yes; The New York Times today isn't so sure. Either way, and no matter who wins this autumn, tensions will persist within the fragile Republican conservative coalition, at least according to one print column that ran Sunday. That would be mine.
Friday, October 06, 2006
Foley-watchers, remember that thing overseas? Costs us $2 billion a week? Oh, yeah
The Mark Foley firestorm has diverted attention this week away from a fairly important story with major political implications. If memory serves, it’s that ongoing matter in Iraq.
While Americans were busy reading Foley’s exchanges with underage boys (including the kid who interrupted the congressman’s reverie to say that his mom was yelling for him), 13 American soldiers were killed over a span of three days, the worst three-day mark since the war began.
And while we were all riveted on what House Speaker Dennis Hastert knew and when he knew it or should have known it, the Bob Woodward book about the struggling Bush war team picked up a major endorsement from someone with no links to liberals or George Soros or “Defeatocrats.” This would be Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan and Bush speechwriter.
She writes today on the conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page that “it is a good book. It may be a great one. It is serious, densely, even exhaustively, reported, and a real contribution to history in that it gives history what it most requires, first-person testimony.” She endorses the book’s depiction of President Bush as a “vain and intensely limited man,” accepts its reportage that Bush and his people are mired in “a state of unknowingness” about factual reality in Iraq, and then she twists the knife by contending that the administration hawks have screwed things up in part because none of them have actually served in war:
“I have come to give greater credence to the importance, in the age of terror, among our leaders, of having served in the military. For you need personal experience that you absorbed deep down in your bones, or a kind of imaginative wisdom that tells you even though you were never there what war is like, what invasion is, what building a foreign nation entails.”
It should also be noted today that, while we were all watching the Foley affair, Americans were telling the pollsters that the president’s 9/11 anniversary bounce was over. In the latest Associated Press-IPSOS survey, likely voters said (by 44 to 42 percent) that they now trust Democrats over Republicans to fight terrorism effectively, and that (by 45 to 43 percent) they trust the Democrats to more effectively protect the country. And that sentiment was measured before Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia returned from Iraq and warned yesterday that Congress may need to buck Bush and forge a solution of its own – in his words, make “bold decisions” after weighing all options - if the violence is not reversed within the next 60 to 90 days. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Navy secretary under Richard Nixon, is a barometer of the increasingly restive Republican sentiment.
All this demonstrates why the GOP is hamstrung at the moment. It can’t change the subject from Foley to Iraq, for obvious reasons. And it can’t change the subject from Iraq to the domestic realm, because the Foley scandal is dominant there. And if it tries to dismiss the Foley scandal as a liberal/Democratic/gay/Soros conspiracy, there are now plenty of prominent conservative voices who recognize the GOP leaders’ culpability – and perceive the serious political dangers, on the eve of the ’06 elections.
Consider Myrna Blyth, an author who considers herself a scourge of liberalism. She writes today on the National Review website that the “security moms” of 2004, the married women with children who voted for President Bush, have become the outraged moms of 2006:
“What were those guys thinking? That is what every woman I’ve spoken to has said about the Foley mess…Unlike the discussions about the war, this is a very simple story to understand. Most of us don’t know what to do about Iraq or Iran or North Korea. There can be plenty of debate about how to handle these enormous challenges. But we do know how we should act if we were told about someone sending inappropriate messages to a teenager and we were in a position to do something about it. We would ask many more, and tougher, questions than these Congressmen say they did. And we would act to protect the kid and any other youngster whom that overly friendly guy might be tempted to bother. It has nothing to do with politics or policy, but just common sense. And the fact that the Republican leaders didn’t show enough concern, and some basic common sense, is what is most troubling of all.”
The exodus of these women could spell doom at the polls. Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia, one of our most detail-oriented political junkies, today has a new comprehensive rundown of the GOP’s deepening woes, here. No doubt it will be interesting to see what Tom Reynolds, one of the House GOP leaders currently on the hot seat, has to say when he defends himself this Sunday morning on ABC’s This Week; he’s the guy who, as director of the ’06 Republican campaign effort, persuaded Mark Foley to run for re-election even though evidence of Foley’s pursuit of underage House pages had already surfaced. That could be a cringe-worthy interview.
But for the moment, at least, the cringe-worthy award goes to whoever wrote the editorial yesterday in The Hill, a serious newspaper that covers Congress. Charting the various conflicting statements that Hastert and House Majority Leader John Boehner have issued about the Foley scandal, the editorial writer concludes with this gift to Leno and Letterman:
“Hastert and Boehner need to get on the same page or Republican troubles will continue to mount.”
While Americans were busy reading Foley’s exchanges with underage boys (including the kid who interrupted the congressman’s reverie to say that his mom was yelling for him), 13 American soldiers were killed over a span of three days, the worst three-day mark since the war began.
And while we were all riveted on what House Speaker Dennis Hastert knew and when he knew it or should have known it, the Bob Woodward book about the struggling Bush war team picked up a major endorsement from someone with no links to liberals or George Soros or “Defeatocrats.” This would be Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan and Bush speechwriter.
She writes today on the conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page that “it is a good book. It may be a great one. It is serious, densely, even exhaustively, reported, and a real contribution to history in that it gives history what it most requires, first-person testimony.” She endorses the book’s depiction of President Bush as a “vain and intensely limited man,” accepts its reportage that Bush and his people are mired in “a state of unknowingness” about factual reality in Iraq, and then she twists the knife by contending that the administration hawks have screwed things up in part because none of them have actually served in war:
“I have come to give greater credence to the importance, in the age of terror, among our leaders, of having served in the military. For you need personal experience that you absorbed deep down in your bones, or a kind of imaginative wisdom that tells you even though you were never there what war is like, what invasion is, what building a foreign nation entails.”
It should also be noted today that, while we were all watching the Foley affair, Americans were telling the pollsters that the president’s 9/11 anniversary bounce was over. In the latest Associated Press-IPSOS survey, likely voters said (by 44 to 42 percent) that they now trust Democrats over Republicans to fight terrorism effectively, and that (by 45 to 43 percent) they trust the Democrats to more effectively protect the country. And that sentiment was measured before Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia returned from Iraq and warned yesterday that Congress may need to buck Bush and forge a solution of its own – in his words, make “bold decisions” after weighing all options - if the violence is not reversed within the next 60 to 90 days. Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Navy secretary under Richard Nixon, is a barometer of the increasingly restive Republican sentiment.
All this demonstrates why the GOP is hamstrung at the moment. It can’t change the subject from Foley to Iraq, for obvious reasons. And it can’t change the subject from Iraq to the domestic realm, because the Foley scandal is dominant there. And if it tries to dismiss the Foley scandal as a liberal/Democratic/gay/Soros conspiracy, there are now plenty of prominent conservative voices who recognize the GOP leaders’ culpability – and perceive the serious political dangers, on the eve of the ’06 elections.
Consider Myrna Blyth, an author who considers herself a scourge of liberalism. She writes today on the National Review website that the “security moms” of 2004, the married women with children who voted for President Bush, have become the outraged moms of 2006:
“What were those guys thinking? That is what every woman I’ve spoken to has said about the Foley mess…Unlike the discussions about the war, this is a very simple story to understand. Most of us don’t know what to do about Iraq or Iran or North Korea. There can be plenty of debate about how to handle these enormous challenges. But we do know how we should act if we were told about someone sending inappropriate messages to a teenager and we were in a position to do something about it. We would ask many more, and tougher, questions than these Congressmen say they did. And we would act to protect the kid and any other youngster whom that overly friendly guy might be tempted to bother. It has nothing to do with politics or policy, but just common sense. And the fact that the Republican leaders didn’t show enough concern, and some basic common sense, is what is most troubling of all.”
The exodus of these women could spell doom at the polls. Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia, one of our most detail-oriented political junkies, today has a new comprehensive rundown of the GOP’s deepening woes, here. No doubt it will be interesting to see what Tom Reynolds, one of the House GOP leaders currently on the hot seat, has to say when he defends himself this Sunday morning on ABC’s This Week; he’s the guy who, as director of the ’06 Republican campaign effort, persuaded Mark Foley to run for re-election even though evidence of Foley’s pursuit of underage House pages had already surfaced. That could be a cringe-worthy interview.
But for the moment, at least, the cringe-worthy award goes to whoever wrote the editorial yesterday in The Hill, a serious newspaper that covers Congress. Charting the various conflicting statements that Hastert and House Majority Leader John Boehner have issued about the Foley scandal, the editorial writer concludes with this gift to Leno and Letterman:
“Hastert and Boehner need to get on the same page or Republican troubles will continue to mount.”
Thursday, October 05, 2006
The art of political apologia, which Nixon called "the modified limited hangout route"
Politicians generally take responsibility for errors only when trapped in a corner with no way out. And since such a confession has to be wrung out of them, what value does the mea culpa really have?
So it goes with the House Speaker Dennis Hastert - which is ironic, given the fact that his man in the White House has been trying to paint the GOP as the party of personal responsibility; as President Bush said in 2003, “The culture of America is changing from one that has said, ‘if it feels good, do it’ and ‘if you've got a problem, blame somebody else,’ to a new culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life."
Until today, when he realized he was cornered, Hastert apparently didn’t get that memo.
In recent days, while being peppered with evidence that his office took no substantive action against congressman Mark Foley despite repeated warnings, and while being assailed for this inaction by other Republican leaders (who didn’t want to accept responsibility, either), Hastert had been busy trying to blame somebody else.
It’s all a Democratic plot, he said. It‘s all a liberal media plot, he said. It’s a liberal conspiracy, he said. And sometimes it’s all three: “"When the (Republican) base finds out who's feeding this monster, they're not going to be happy. The people who want to see this thing blow up are ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros,” a reference to the rich liberal philanthropist who has been on the GOP’s bogeyman roster since 2004.
Well, the GOP House leader’s bid to perpetuate the blame-somebody-else culture was foiled today in the wake of reports that the key scandal tipster was actually a former House Republican staffer. And it was becoming increasingly difficult, as well as politically embarrassing, for Hastert to fend off responsibility when the people “feeding this monster” were actually his brethren in the GOP hierarchy. I doubt that Majority Whip Roy Blunt first consulted with George Soros before remarking yesterday that Hastert had been slow to act in the Foley matter (“you have to be curious, you have to ask all the questions you can think of”); and I doubt that Senator John McCain first touched base with “Democratic operatives” before essentially saying yesterday that Hastert cannot be trusted to fully probe the Foley affair (“I think it needs to be addressed by people who are credible”).
Blunt, by the way, put out a new statement this afternoon, insisting that he and Hastert are tight. He said, “There is not, and has not been, any daylight between the Speaker and me” – which is curious, since 24 hours earlier, he had demonstrated precisely the opposite. But such contradictions typically abound during political crises, when the urge is to circle the wagons.
Besides, Hastert was dissed today, in awkward fashion, by one of the Republicans who serves on the House Ethics Committee. Congressman Doc Hastings at first told reporters that Hastert, as House leader, has done “an excellent job.” Then he felt the need to amend himself: “Before I, before we quit here, I just simply want to say the remarks that I made regarding Speaker Hastert is not related to the matter at hand here.”
Meanwhile, Hastert was getting cornered by the adverse public reaction. An Associated Press-IPSOS poll, conducted in the wake of the Foley revelations, shows that half of all likely November voters now view corruption and scandal disclosures as very or extremely important voting factors – and, by a 2-1 margin, they see the Democrats as the party more capable of conducting a cleanup. And, according to a new Time poll, two-third of Americans with knowledge of the Foley scandal believe that the GOP leaders covered it up.
Thus trapped with no exit strategy, Hastert shifted into contrition mode this afternoon, at a press event in his native Illinois: “The bottom line is, I am taking responsibility for it, because ultimately the buck stops here. I'm sorry that this happened.” Whether these remarks are enough to save his speaker job, or trigger a pro-GOP public opinion resurgence, is another matter, of course. If you read between the lines, he’s not saying that he did anything wrong. He’s just saying he has to shoulder the hit because his high standing requires it – and he’s only saying this under duress anyway. Indeed, conservative commentator Larry Kudlow at National Review Online is not impressed: “(Hastert) didn’t take responsibility for the timeline that clearly points to either his knowing about the Foley problem, or his staff knowing, which is all the same thing in my view.”
But just to demonstrate that Hastert is merely one example of the coerced contrition phenomenon, consider one of his foot soldiers, Pennsylvania congressman Donald Sherwood. He got some bad publicity a few years ago when word broke that the veteran campaigner for family values had allegedly tried to choke his longtime extramarital mistress – who then sued him and ultimately settled out of court (the details were sealed). He tried toughing it out, which seemed like a good idea, given the fact that he had long been unassailable in his district.
But now that he’s trailing his challenger by nine points in the polls with just a month left in the campaign (and with only 60 percent of Republicans saying they will vote for him), he wants everybody to know how sorry he feels, and he’s ponying up the money to say it. A new TV ad that went on the air yesterday: “I made a mistake that nearly cost me the love of my wife, Carol, and our daughters. As a family, we’ve worked through this because of my deep regret, our love, and the fact that the allegation of abuse was never true. While I’m truly sorry for disappointing you, I never wavered from my commitment to reduce taxes, create jobs and bring home our fair share. Should you forgive me, you can count on me to keep on fighting hard for you and your family.”
To appreciate the grudging nature of erring politicians, here’s some historical perspective: Richard Nixon said he took responsibility for Watergate (after his aides started getting indicted), but he quit his job without taking the blame. Senator Bob Packwood (remember him?) finally said he was sorry about all the women he had sexually harassed, ``if I did the things that they said I did.'' Lest we forget Chappaquiddick, Senator Edward Kennedy went into contrition mode in a TV address, yet seemed to put the blame on his vehicle: ``The car that I was driving went off a narrow bridge.'' And, of course, there was Bill Clinton, who ‘fessed about Monica Lewinsky in an August 1998 TV address (``a personal failure . . . for which I am solely and completely responsible'') only because she had just cut a deal with the special prosecutor and his avenues of escape had closed.
Undoubtedly, the current defenders of the Hastert regime – mindful of the impending congressional elections – will cite such cases (the Democratic cases, anyway) in an effort to diffuse the Foley issue and contend that sleaze is a bipartisan phenomenon. But only the Hastert GOP establishment is on the ballot next month, and this scandal looms (in the words of columnist George Will) as “a maraschino cherry atop the Democrats' delectable sundae of Republican miseries.”
Former Democratic Louisiana congressman Edwin Edwards once framed the terms of political failure thusly: “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” And in our techie era, instant messaging can be as politically risky as an actual boudoir.
So it goes with the House Speaker Dennis Hastert - which is ironic, given the fact that his man in the White House has been trying to paint the GOP as the party of personal responsibility; as President Bush said in 2003, “The culture of America is changing from one that has said, ‘if it feels good, do it’ and ‘if you've got a problem, blame somebody else,’ to a new culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life."
Until today, when he realized he was cornered, Hastert apparently didn’t get that memo.
In recent days, while being peppered with evidence that his office took no substantive action against congressman Mark Foley despite repeated warnings, and while being assailed for this inaction by other Republican leaders (who didn’t want to accept responsibility, either), Hastert had been busy trying to blame somebody else.
It’s all a Democratic plot, he said. It‘s all a liberal media plot, he said. It’s a liberal conspiracy, he said. And sometimes it’s all three: “"When the (Republican) base finds out who's feeding this monster, they're not going to be happy. The people who want to see this thing blow up are ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros,” a reference to the rich liberal philanthropist who has been on the GOP’s bogeyman roster since 2004.
Well, the GOP House leader’s bid to perpetuate the blame-somebody-else culture was foiled today in the wake of reports that the key scandal tipster was actually a former House Republican staffer. And it was becoming increasingly difficult, as well as politically embarrassing, for Hastert to fend off responsibility when the people “feeding this monster” were actually his brethren in the GOP hierarchy. I doubt that Majority Whip Roy Blunt first consulted with George Soros before remarking yesterday that Hastert had been slow to act in the Foley matter (“you have to be curious, you have to ask all the questions you can think of”); and I doubt that Senator John McCain first touched base with “Democratic operatives” before essentially saying yesterday that Hastert cannot be trusted to fully probe the Foley affair (“I think it needs to be addressed by people who are credible”).
Blunt, by the way, put out a new statement this afternoon, insisting that he and Hastert are tight. He said, “There is not, and has not been, any daylight between the Speaker and me” – which is curious, since 24 hours earlier, he had demonstrated precisely the opposite. But such contradictions typically abound during political crises, when the urge is to circle the wagons.
Besides, Hastert was dissed today, in awkward fashion, by one of the Republicans who serves on the House Ethics Committee. Congressman Doc Hastings at first told reporters that Hastert, as House leader, has done “an excellent job.” Then he felt the need to amend himself: “Before I, before we quit here, I just simply want to say the remarks that I made regarding Speaker Hastert is not related to the matter at hand here.”
Meanwhile, Hastert was getting cornered by the adverse public reaction. An Associated Press-IPSOS poll, conducted in the wake of the Foley revelations, shows that half of all likely November voters now view corruption and scandal disclosures as very or extremely important voting factors – and, by a 2-1 margin, they see the Democrats as the party more capable of conducting a cleanup. And, according to a new Time poll, two-third of Americans with knowledge of the Foley scandal believe that the GOP leaders covered it up.
Thus trapped with no exit strategy, Hastert shifted into contrition mode this afternoon, at a press event in his native Illinois: “The bottom line is, I am taking responsibility for it, because ultimately the buck stops here. I'm sorry that this happened.” Whether these remarks are enough to save his speaker job, or trigger a pro-GOP public opinion resurgence, is another matter, of course. If you read between the lines, he’s not saying that he did anything wrong. He’s just saying he has to shoulder the hit because his high standing requires it – and he’s only saying this under duress anyway. Indeed, conservative commentator Larry Kudlow at National Review Online is not impressed: “(Hastert) didn’t take responsibility for the timeline that clearly points to either his knowing about the Foley problem, or his staff knowing, which is all the same thing in my view.”
But just to demonstrate that Hastert is merely one example of the coerced contrition phenomenon, consider one of his foot soldiers, Pennsylvania congressman Donald Sherwood. He got some bad publicity a few years ago when word broke that the veteran campaigner for family values had allegedly tried to choke his longtime extramarital mistress – who then sued him and ultimately settled out of court (the details were sealed). He tried toughing it out, which seemed like a good idea, given the fact that he had long been unassailable in his district.
But now that he’s trailing his challenger by nine points in the polls with just a month left in the campaign (and with only 60 percent of Republicans saying they will vote for him), he wants everybody to know how sorry he feels, and he’s ponying up the money to say it. A new TV ad that went on the air yesterday: “I made a mistake that nearly cost me the love of my wife, Carol, and our daughters. As a family, we’ve worked through this because of my deep regret, our love, and the fact that the allegation of abuse was never true. While I’m truly sorry for disappointing you, I never wavered from my commitment to reduce taxes, create jobs and bring home our fair share. Should you forgive me, you can count on me to keep on fighting hard for you and your family.”
To appreciate the grudging nature of erring politicians, here’s some historical perspective: Richard Nixon said he took responsibility for Watergate (after his aides started getting indicted), but he quit his job without taking the blame. Senator Bob Packwood (remember him?) finally said he was sorry about all the women he had sexually harassed, ``if I did the things that they said I did.'' Lest we forget Chappaquiddick, Senator Edward Kennedy went into contrition mode in a TV address, yet seemed to put the blame on his vehicle: ``The car that I was driving went off a narrow bridge.'' And, of course, there was Bill Clinton, who ‘fessed about Monica Lewinsky in an August 1998 TV address (``a personal failure . . . for which I am solely and completely responsible'') only because she had just cut a deal with the special prosecutor and his avenues of escape had closed.
Undoubtedly, the current defenders of the Hastert regime – mindful of the impending congressional elections – will cite such cases (the Democratic cases, anyway) in an effort to diffuse the Foley issue and contend that sleaze is a bipartisan phenomenon. But only the Hastert GOP establishment is on the ballot next month, and this scandal looms (in the words of columnist George Will) as “a maraschino cherry atop the Democrats' delectable sundae of Republican miseries.”
Former Democratic Louisiana congressman Edwin Edwards once framed the terms of political failure thusly: “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” And in our techie era, instant messaging can be as politically risky as an actual boudoir.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Hastert seeks shelter with Rush, but it's raining too hard
Quote of the day, from House Speaker Dennis Hastert: “We are the insulation to protect this country.”
One could argue, of course, that Hastert and others in the congressional Republican leadership haven’t exactly excelled at sufficiently insulating certain underage Americans. But Hastert was not referring here to the Mark Foley/GOP leadership scandal. Actually, he was referring to 9/11 – the party’s predictable default defense. Here’s how it works: If anyone suggests that the governing party might have screwed something up (such as, for example, by allowing a veteran Republican congressman to prey on kids), then the party is simply to respond by saying, in effect, “Vote for us if you want to live.”
Just as noteworthy was the venue where Hastert uttered that remark. Under fire from all sides, fighting to hang on to his lofty title, and seeking a friendly place where he knew he could be insulated and protected from serious questions about his own conduct in the Foley matter, he sought refuge yesterday with the most obsequious shouter in the conservative echo chamber.
I am referring, of course, to Rush Limbaugh.
One could make the case that, at a time when Hastert needs to defend his party’s family-values credentials, it might be seem odd to seek out Limbaugh, a guy with a history of bad marriages and drug prescription fraud. But what matters is that he’s such an accommodating host. For instance…
Rush: "Well, it's clear to me that what the Democrats are doing here in some sort of cooperation with some in the media is to suppress conservative turnout by making it look like you guys knew this all along but because you're so interested in holding the House rather than protecting children that you covered it up."
Hastert: "Yeah."
Here’s another…
Rush: "This is a strategic political, or politically timed, release of information, particularly based on how long ago it has been known, and there is -- I have to tell you there's -- a hunger and a real craving amongst conservative voters for Republicans in Washington, House and Senate both, to simply refuse to be set back on your heels and accept this defensive position and just go on offense and strike back at these guys. 'Hey, Mark Foley is not what the future of this country is about. It's about protecting the nation, national security, prosperity, ongoing efforts to maintain a good economy, not destroying the health care system,' and this sort of thing. Is there a problem that Republicans in the House and the Senate have about going on offense when these kind of things happen?"
Hastert: "Absolutely not."
And this...
Rush: "Okay. Before I let you go, you know that the Democrats and the media are going to continue to press the Foley issue -- even though you've dealt with it, even though he's gone, even though the mistake has been corrected. What is the battle plan to deal with these continuing allegations and accusations that are going to be designed to depress voter turnout?"
Hastert’s answers don’t even matter, since Limbaugh basically does all the heavy rhetorical lifting. For instance, look again at the latter Limbaugh comment. Especially the part where he says “even though you’ve dealt with it…even though the mistake has been corrected.” There’s something a tad odd about those pronouncements – such as the fact that they’re flat wrong.
It now turns out, according to news reports today, that Hastert’s office had multiple opportunities to deal with the Foley issue starting back in 2003 – and never dealt with it, never corrected the “mistake.” Limbaugh’s initial remark notwithstanding, it’s not “the Democrats” who are blowing the whistle on Hastert; it’s his own side.
Foley’s former chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, said today that he warned senior Hastert staffers more than three years ago that his boss was preying on the House pages. Hastert’s office then put out a statement which contends that Fordham is lying. Fordham then put out a statement saying that Hastert’s office is lying: “"Rather than trying to shift the blame on me, those who are employed by these House leaders should acknowledge what they know about their action or inaction in response to the information they knew about Mr. Foley prior to 2005.”
And sorry, Rush, but if the issue has been “dealt with,” then why are House Republicans weighing the idea of bringing in a high-profile attorney to assess the situation (as the Wall Street Journal reported today), and why has the House Ethics Committee (along with the Justice Department and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement), deemed it appropriate to probe this matter further?
With top officials in the “family values” party now calling each other liars, is it any wonder that clear-headed conservatives are fearing a political debacle? Hastert might not have fared so easily if he had sat down today with Rich Lowry of the National Review:
“The fundamental problem congressional Republicans are experiencing now is that they have almost no moral capital left after the last two years. Again and again, when given the choice to reform their practices or do little or nothing, they always picked the latter. On travel, on Abramoff, on earmarking—you name it. The impression they always gave was that the integrity of the institution and the public interest had to take a back-seat to their own convenience.
“They wanted to squeak by this year on gerrymandering, negative ads, and money, and just might have succeeded—had nothing more gone wrong. Well, now it has and people feel confirmed in what they always suspected: that it is unable to police its own practices and is full of people who don't follow the same rules as the rest of us. This is deadly."
One could argue, of course, that Hastert and others in the congressional Republican leadership haven’t exactly excelled at sufficiently insulating certain underage Americans. But Hastert was not referring here to the Mark Foley/GOP leadership scandal. Actually, he was referring to 9/11 – the party’s predictable default defense. Here’s how it works: If anyone suggests that the governing party might have screwed something up (such as, for example, by allowing a veteran Republican congressman to prey on kids), then the party is simply to respond by saying, in effect, “Vote for us if you want to live.”
Just as noteworthy was the venue where Hastert uttered that remark. Under fire from all sides, fighting to hang on to his lofty title, and seeking a friendly place where he knew he could be insulated and protected from serious questions about his own conduct in the Foley matter, he sought refuge yesterday with the most obsequious shouter in the conservative echo chamber.
I am referring, of course, to Rush Limbaugh.
One could make the case that, at a time when Hastert needs to defend his party’s family-values credentials, it might be seem odd to seek out Limbaugh, a guy with a history of bad marriages and drug prescription fraud. But what matters is that he’s such an accommodating host. For instance…
Rush: "Well, it's clear to me that what the Democrats are doing here in some sort of cooperation with some in the media is to suppress conservative turnout by making it look like you guys knew this all along but because you're so interested in holding the House rather than protecting children that you covered it up."
Hastert: "Yeah."
Here’s another…
Rush: "This is a strategic political, or politically timed, release of information, particularly based on how long ago it has been known, and there is -- I have to tell you there's -- a hunger and a real craving amongst conservative voters for Republicans in Washington, House and Senate both, to simply refuse to be set back on your heels and accept this defensive position and just go on offense and strike back at these guys. 'Hey, Mark Foley is not what the future of this country is about. It's about protecting the nation, national security, prosperity, ongoing efforts to maintain a good economy, not destroying the health care system,' and this sort of thing. Is there a problem that Republicans in the House and the Senate have about going on offense when these kind of things happen?"
Hastert: "Absolutely not."
And this...
Rush: "Okay. Before I let you go, you know that the Democrats and the media are going to continue to press the Foley issue -- even though you've dealt with it, even though he's gone, even though the mistake has been corrected. What is the battle plan to deal with these continuing allegations and accusations that are going to be designed to depress voter turnout?"
Hastert’s answers don’t even matter, since Limbaugh basically does all the heavy rhetorical lifting. For instance, look again at the latter Limbaugh comment. Especially the part where he says “even though you’ve dealt with it…even though the mistake has been corrected.” There’s something a tad odd about those pronouncements – such as the fact that they’re flat wrong.
It now turns out, according to news reports today, that Hastert’s office had multiple opportunities to deal with the Foley issue starting back in 2003 – and never dealt with it, never corrected the “mistake.” Limbaugh’s initial remark notwithstanding, it’s not “the Democrats” who are blowing the whistle on Hastert; it’s his own side.
Foley’s former chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, said today that he warned senior Hastert staffers more than three years ago that his boss was preying on the House pages. Hastert’s office then put out a statement which contends that Fordham is lying. Fordham then put out a statement saying that Hastert’s office is lying: “"Rather than trying to shift the blame on me, those who are employed by these House leaders should acknowledge what they know about their action or inaction in response to the information they knew about Mr. Foley prior to 2005.”
And sorry, Rush, but if the issue has been “dealt with,” then why are House Republicans weighing the idea of bringing in a high-profile attorney to assess the situation (as the Wall Street Journal reported today), and why has the House Ethics Committee (along with the Justice Department and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement), deemed it appropriate to probe this matter further?
With top officials in the “family values” party now calling each other liars, is it any wonder that clear-headed conservatives are fearing a political debacle? Hastert might not have fared so easily if he had sat down today with Rich Lowry of the National Review:
“The fundamental problem congressional Republicans are experiencing now is that they have almost no moral capital left after the last two years. Again and again, when given the choice to reform their practices or do little or nothing, they always picked the latter. On travel, on Abramoff, on earmarking—you name it. The impression they always gave was that the integrity of the institution and the public interest had to take a back-seat to their own convenience.
“They wanted to squeak by this year on gerrymandering, negative ads, and money, and just might have succeeded—had nothing more gone wrong. Well, now it has and people feel confirmed in what they always suspected: that it is unable to police its own practices and is full of people who don't follow the same rules as the rest of us. This is deadly."
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
A crisis for the party of "family values"
The Mark Foley scandal is the Cliff Notes version of the Jack Abramoff scandal.
Even though both share a common theme – Republicans breaching their conservative principles in order to perpetuate their power – the details of the Abramoff scandal can’t be reduced to resonant shorthand. Abramoff, a high-rolling lobbyist who in his youth embodied the conservative revolution, defrauded clients and poured tainted money that was routed through various non-profit front groups into the GOP’s coffers…you see the problem. How many voters can grasp all that in a heartbeat? The Foley case, however, is something else. Here’s the shorthand: “The party of conservative family values knew about a member who was preying on boys, yet did nothing about it.”
Why bother trying to navigate the nuances of federal campaign and lobbying laws, and to figure out how they apply to Abramoff and his GOP golfing buddies, when you can behold the honorable Mr. Foley - as chairman of the congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, he was the GOP's designated guardian of our nation's youth - taking a leisure break in 2003 from the rigors of House business in order to have Internet sex with an underage male?
Here he is (Maf54), as revealed this afternoon in the latest exchange supplied by a former page to ABC News. Foley had ducked out of the chamber, in the midst of a floor discussion over Iraq war appropriations.
Maf54: I miss you
Teen: ya me too
Maf54: we are still voting
Maf54: you miss me too
(The exchange continues in which Foley and the teen apparently describe their orgasms.)
Maf54: ok..i better go vote..did you know you would have this effect on me
Teen: lol I guessed
Teen: ya go vote…I don't want to keep you from doing our job
Maf54: can I have a good kiss goodnight
Teen: :-*
Teen:
No wonder the governing GOP is in full panic mode today. Midterm elections are all about party base turnout; if partisan Republican voters are more motivated than their Democratic counterparts, then the GOP wins (see the Newt Gingrich election of 1994), and vice versa. The Foley scandal, which more accurately might be called the House Republican leadership scandal, has the potential to depress turnout among the social and religious conservatives who, despite all their frustrations with the ruling GOP, have at least been secure in their belief that the leaders were protecting family values.
But now conservative voters know that House Speaker Dennis Hastert was informed months ago about Foley, yet did nothing to investigate further. (Hastert’s story is that he says he doesn’t remember the warning, and he’s sticking to it).
And the conservative voters know that John Shimkus, the Republican congressman who oversees the House Page Board (which runs the teenage page program) was told about Foley in 2005, yet kept the matter under wraps by failing to share the information with the only Democrat who serves with him on the Page Board.
And the conservative voters are wondering why the warning about Foley didn’t immediately spur the GOP hierarchy to action – given the fact that Capitol Hill denizens have known for years about Foley’s interest in underage males. One possible answer is that Foley was a cash cow for the party. He raised a ton of money for the ’06 House re-election campaigns, a credential that was useful to GOP congressman Tom Reynolds, chairman of the ’06 House campaign effort – who also knew this past spring about some of Foley’s emails, yet did nothing to investigate further…beyond telling his boss.
Reynolds, in other words, is the guy who says he passed the tip about Foley to Speaker Hastert. This is the tip that Hastert says he doesn’t remember, even though Hastert conceded yesterday on CNN that he might have heard it “in the context of maybe a half a dozen or a dozen other things.” (I suppose this means that, if a House leader is told that one of his top members is preying on underage kids, it’s just not very memorable.)
Anyway, the weight of this affair is starting to crack the conservative coalition. This morning, the editorial page of the Washington Times, a staunch defender of the faith, demanded that Hastert vacate his job: “Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week's revelations -- or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away. He gave phony answers Friday to the old and ever-relevant questions of what did he know and when did he know it? Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance."
Conservative commentator Brendan Miniter writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that “it's the implication of willful ignorance that will plague the GOP…Republicans were unwilling to take a closer look at something that long ago demanded a much more detailed inspection. If the GOP had uncovered Mr. Foley last year or even this past spring, the party wouldn't now be facing a full blown sex scandal in October. Heading into this election year, Democrats knew they had a chance to retake the House, if everything broke their way. What no one predicted is that they'd be handed so many breaks by Republicans.”
Conservative activist Bay Buchanan, sister of Pat, excoriated the GOP leadership on CNN yesterday: “They had an obligation, that same day (when they were first informed), to investigate him further, to call in the FBI, if that was an appropriate action, and also to call in those pages and make certain that every one of them was interviewed to see if there (are) any problems here that go deeper than what (the leaders) are already knew. They failed the parents of this country, is what they did.”
Failed the parents of this country…There’s the Democrats’ bumper-sticker message, courtesy of the opposition.
It should be noted, of course, that not all conservatives and Republican leaders profess to be upset or worried about the Foley scandal and its potential impact on the ’06 elections. A number of rebuttals have already been floated:
1. The “all in good fun” defense. Tony Snow, the White House press secretary and one-time conservative commentator, tried this one yesterday. He dismissed Foley’s chatter with the kids as “simply naughty.”
2. The “yeah, well, what about Bill Clinton?” defense. This one was to be expected. Commentator Ben Stein wrote yesterday that Foley is just “a poor misguided Republican man who had a romantic thing for young boys,” but that’s nothing compared to “a man named Bill Clinton who did not send suggestive emails as far as we know, but who had a barely legal intern give him oral sex…”
3. The “who’s out to get us?” defense. Mark Levin, an attorney for a conservative legal foundation, blogged Sunday that the real outrage in the Foley case is that somebody was leaking about Foley to the press on the eve of the ’06 elections: “The timing of this revelation has more to do about helping Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats than protecting teenagers.” (But Brian Ross, who broke the saga late last week on the ABC News website, indicated in a New York Times story today that his sources were Republican.)
4. The “homosexual agenda” defense. One top religious conservative group, the Family Research Council, broke its silence on the story late yesterday by arguing that, even though “the slow response” of House leaders is noteworthy, “the real issue” is that Foley is proof of the depravity of gay behavior – because he demonstrates “the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse.” (Actually, many abuse experts have long concluded the overwhelming majority of men who sexually abuse children live their lives as heterosexual men.)
Nevertheless, it’s noteworthy that a number of religious conservative groups haven’t lifted a finger to defend the Republican leaders. Not a word about the scandal has appeared thus far on the websites of the Traditional Values Coalition, the Christian Coalition or Focus on the Family. And it’s noteworthy that conservatives who normally train their fire at liberals and the Democrats are instead invoking the Foley scandal as just the latest example of the GOP’s culture of corruption.
Witness Richard Viguerie, the legendary conservative activist who pioneered direct mail fundraising back in the days when the movement was in the wilderness. Last night on CNN, he rebuked the GOP leadership for the Foley scandal by resurrecting the old Watergate question: “Who knew what, and when did they know it?”
Then he said: “This is not an issue standing alone by itself. We have many years of these Republican leaders engaging in whatever type of activity…simply for the sole, immoral, corrupt purpose of holding onto power….They use conservative voters, conservative issues, conservative donors, in order to get elected, and then they abandon those voters.”
In other words, the same voters who were already fed up with the GOP’s deficit spending, troublesome war, and the failure to outlaw gay marriage now have another potential reason to stay home on election day.
Conservative commentator Tod Lindberg remarked with wry sarcasm this morning that the GOP had actually been gaining ground during September, passing some decent bills, capitalizing on the 9/11 anniversary, and anticipating success in November… “Why, it would take something on the order of a Capitol Hill Republican sex scandal involving minors plus a leadership coverup to undo such fine political handiwork. And what are the chances of that?”
Even though both share a common theme – Republicans breaching their conservative principles in order to perpetuate their power – the details of the Abramoff scandal can’t be reduced to resonant shorthand. Abramoff, a high-rolling lobbyist who in his youth embodied the conservative revolution, defrauded clients and poured tainted money that was routed through various non-profit front groups into the GOP’s coffers…you see the problem. How many voters can grasp all that in a heartbeat? The Foley case, however, is something else. Here’s the shorthand: “The party of conservative family values knew about a member who was preying on boys, yet did nothing about it.”
Why bother trying to navigate the nuances of federal campaign and lobbying laws, and to figure out how they apply to Abramoff and his GOP golfing buddies, when you can behold the honorable Mr. Foley - as chairman of the congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, he was the GOP's designated guardian of our nation's youth - taking a leisure break in 2003 from the rigors of House business in order to have Internet sex with an underage male?
Here he is (Maf54), as revealed this afternoon in the latest exchange supplied by a former page to ABC News. Foley had ducked out of the chamber, in the midst of a floor discussion over Iraq war appropriations.
Maf54: I miss you
Teen: ya me too
Maf54: we are still voting
Maf54: you miss me too
(The exchange continues in which Foley and the teen apparently describe their orgasms.)
Maf54: ok..i better go vote..did you know you would have this effect on me
Teen: lol I guessed
Teen: ya go vote…I don't want to keep you from doing our job
Maf54: can I have a good kiss goodnight
Teen: :-*
Teen:
No wonder the governing GOP is in full panic mode today. Midterm elections are all about party base turnout; if partisan Republican voters are more motivated than their Democratic counterparts, then the GOP wins (see the Newt Gingrich election of 1994), and vice versa. The Foley scandal, which more accurately might be called the House Republican leadership scandal, has the potential to depress turnout among the social and religious conservatives who, despite all their frustrations with the ruling GOP, have at least been secure in their belief that the leaders were protecting family values.
But now conservative voters know that House Speaker Dennis Hastert was informed months ago about Foley, yet did nothing to investigate further. (Hastert’s story is that he says he doesn’t remember the warning, and he’s sticking to it).
And the conservative voters know that John Shimkus, the Republican congressman who oversees the House Page Board (which runs the teenage page program) was told about Foley in 2005, yet kept the matter under wraps by failing to share the information with the only Democrat who serves with him on the Page Board.
And the conservative voters are wondering why the warning about Foley didn’t immediately spur the GOP hierarchy to action – given the fact that Capitol Hill denizens have known for years about Foley’s interest in underage males. One possible answer is that Foley was a cash cow for the party. He raised a ton of money for the ’06 House re-election campaigns, a credential that was useful to GOP congressman Tom Reynolds, chairman of the ’06 House campaign effort – who also knew this past spring about some of Foley’s emails, yet did nothing to investigate further…beyond telling his boss.
Reynolds, in other words, is the guy who says he passed the tip about Foley to Speaker Hastert. This is the tip that Hastert says he doesn’t remember, even though Hastert conceded yesterday on CNN that he might have heard it “in the context of maybe a half a dozen or a dozen other things.” (I suppose this means that, if a House leader is told that one of his top members is preying on underage kids, it’s just not very memorable.)
Anyway, the weight of this affair is starting to crack the conservative coalition. This morning, the editorial page of the Washington Times, a staunch defender of the faith, demanded that Hastert vacate his job: “Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week's revelations -- or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away. He gave phony answers Friday to the old and ever-relevant questions of what did he know and when did he know it? Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance."
Conservative commentator Brendan Miniter writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that “it's the implication of willful ignorance that will plague the GOP…Republicans were unwilling to take a closer look at something that long ago demanded a much more detailed inspection. If the GOP had uncovered Mr. Foley last year or even this past spring, the party wouldn't now be facing a full blown sex scandal in October. Heading into this election year, Democrats knew they had a chance to retake the House, if everything broke their way. What no one predicted is that they'd be handed so many breaks by Republicans.”
Conservative activist Bay Buchanan, sister of Pat, excoriated the GOP leadership on CNN yesterday: “They had an obligation, that same day (when they were first informed), to investigate him further, to call in the FBI, if that was an appropriate action, and also to call in those pages and make certain that every one of them was interviewed to see if there (are) any problems here that go deeper than what (the leaders) are already knew. They failed the parents of this country, is what they did.”
Failed the parents of this country…There’s the Democrats’ bumper-sticker message, courtesy of the opposition.
It should be noted, of course, that not all conservatives and Republican leaders profess to be upset or worried about the Foley scandal and its potential impact on the ’06 elections. A number of rebuttals have already been floated:
1. The “all in good fun” defense. Tony Snow, the White House press secretary and one-time conservative commentator, tried this one yesterday. He dismissed Foley’s chatter with the kids as “simply naughty.”
2. The “yeah, well, what about Bill Clinton?” defense. This one was to be expected. Commentator Ben Stein wrote yesterday that Foley is just “a poor misguided Republican man who had a romantic thing for young boys,” but that’s nothing compared to “a man named Bill Clinton who did not send suggestive emails as far as we know, but who had a barely legal intern give him oral sex…”
3. The “who’s out to get us?” defense. Mark Levin, an attorney for a conservative legal foundation, blogged Sunday that the real outrage in the Foley case is that somebody was leaking about Foley to the press on the eve of the ’06 elections: “The timing of this revelation has more to do about helping Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats than protecting teenagers.” (But Brian Ross, who broke the saga late last week on the ABC News website, indicated in a New York Times story today that his sources were Republican.)
4. The “homosexual agenda” defense. One top religious conservative group, the Family Research Council, broke its silence on the story late yesterday by arguing that, even though “the slow response” of House leaders is noteworthy, “the real issue” is that Foley is proof of the depravity of gay behavior – because he demonstrates “the link between homosexuality and child sexual abuse.” (Actually, many abuse experts have long concluded the overwhelming majority of men who sexually abuse children live their lives as heterosexual men.)
Nevertheless, it’s noteworthy that a number of religious conservative groups haven’t lifted a finger to defend the Republican leaders. Not a word about the scandal has appeared thus far on the websites of the Traditional Values Coalition, the Christian Coalition or Focus on the Family. And it’s noteworthy that conservatives who normally train their fire at liberals and the Democrats are instead invoking the Foley scandal as just the latest example of the GOP’s culture of corruption.
Witness Richard Viguerie, the legendary conservative activist who pioneered direct mail fundraising back in the days when the movement was in the wilderness. Last night on CNN, he rebuked the GOP leadership for the Foley scandal by resurrecting the old Watergate question: “Who knew what, and when did they know it?”
Then he said: “This is not an issue standing alone by itself. We have many years of these Republican leaders engaging in whatever type of activity…simply for the sole, immoral, corrupt purpose of holding onto power….They use conservative voters, conservative issues, conservative donors, in order to get elected, and then they abandon those voters.”
In other words, the same voters who were already fed up with the GOP’s deficit spending, troublesome war, and the failure to outlaw gay marriage now have another potential reason to stay home on election day.
Conservative commentator Tod Lindberg remarked with wry sarcasm this morning that the GOP had actually been gaining ground during September, passing some decent bills, capitalizing on the 9/11 anniversary, and anticipating success in November… “Why, it would take something on the order of a Capitol Hill Republican sex scandal involving minors plus a leadership coverup to undo such fine political handiwork. And what are the chances of that?”
Monday, October 02, 2006
The "Woodward is terrific" talking point is now inoperative
The Bush administration has apparently come up with a set of rules designed to help Americans determine how they should feel about journalist and author Bob Woodward:
1. If Woodward writes a book which paints the president as a wise, steely-eyed, resolute, and well-informed Decider, and if he depicts the top presidential aides as seamless cogs in a wise, steely-eyed, and resolute war team, then he is to be lauded as a credit to his craft, as a paragon of objectivity, and his books are to be praised by the Republican party as must-reads for all good citizens.
Hence the decision by the Republican National Committee in 2002 to promote Woodward’s Bush at War on the official RNC website. Hence the gushing praise from Condoleezza Rice two years later, upon the publication of Woodward’s Plan of Attack, when she told CNN that Woodward “is terrific, he’s a great journalist." Hence the happy talk from White House counselor Dan Bartlett, who in 2004 seemed ready to join the publicity team at Simon & Schuster: “We’re urging people to buy the book.”
2. But if the same Bob Woodward writes a book that depicts Bush as a clueless commander-in-chief who seems incapable of telling the full truth about the Iraq war in part because he seems incapable of processing factual reality; and if the same Bob Woodward shows the supposedly vaunted war team to be increasingly dysfunctional as the occupation of Iraq drags on…well, that means he is not a “great journalist” at all. Quite the contrary, in fact.
The aforementioned Dan Bartlett, who praised Woodward for doing a “good job” in 2004, has now suddenly decided that – brainstorm - the guy is really bad at his job. The new Woodward book, State of Denial, is in the stores today, and it doesn’t exactly burnish the Decider’s image; for instance, while chronicling Iraq administrator Jay Garner’s disenchantment with his bosses, Woodward writes (clearly from Garner’s perspective) that “in these moments where Bush had someone from the field there in the chair beside him, he did not press, he did not try to open the door himself and ask what the visitor had seen and thought. The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good stories and a good time had by all.”
The White House spent most of the past weekend trying to knock the book down, and to depict its author as just another biased scribe with an unfair agenda. Bartlett told ABC yesterday that, even though White House officials had cooperated with Woodward as usual, “from the outset, he had already formulated conclusions before the interviews began.”
It’s easy to see what happened: Woodward, who in recent years has been assailed by Bush critics as the administration’s court stenographer, was returning to his favorite subject – Bush at war – at a time when long years of conflict in Iraq had clearly taken their toll on the president and his team. The violence was getting worse, and the private assessments at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill did not square with the sunnier public assessments about the war. (During the same week that the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret memo warning about the potential for increasing violence in Iraq through 2007, the administration, via Donald Rumsfeld’s office, told the public that the violence was likely to “wane.” Woodward also strongly suggests, in his book, that Rumsfeld remains entrenched at the Pentagon because Bush is reluctant to confront him.)
The track record of failed promises and the growing mountain of documentation (already mined by many other authors) were impossible for Woodward to ignore. So he asked questions about these things, and the White House didn’t like that; as Bartlett sees it, Woodward had already “formulated conclusions.”
On the Sunday shows yesterday, Bartlett also left open the possibility that Woodward may have simply concocted some explosive material – such as his description of a meeting, two months before 9/11, between national security adviser Rice and CIA chief George Tenet. In the book, Tenet hurried to the White House with a top aide in tow, hoping to share his urgent concerns about an imminent terrorist attack on American soil, but Rice reportedly blew him off. Bartlett told CBS yesterday that Rice doesn’t remember such an encounter. When host Bob Schieffer asked Bartlett if he thought Woodward would make up such a scene, Bartlett said, “I just don’t know. It leaves us somewhat puzzled.”
But it’s not puzzling at all. Clearly, Tenet was Woodward’s source, and that’s the point: When government insiders start fighting in print with other insiders, that’s a sign of serious trouble.
When the wheels come off in Washington, when major policies go awry and message discipline breaks down, insiders often flee the wreckage while trying to salvage their own reputations. They typically do this by dishing to reporters. That’s clearly what has happened in State of Denial. But what I also detect, after reading several book excerpts, is that some of the insiders dished to Woodward because they were deeply frustrated by an administration that seems determined not to confront its shortcomings on the war. As Woodward said on CBS last night, “There is a concern that we need to face realism (and not be) the voice that says ‘Oh no, everything’s fine.’ Well, it’s not.”
It was noteworthy yesterday that the administration’s rebuke of Woodward was basically polite. It didn’t brand Woodward with the liberal label, or link him to Michael Moore, or imply via insinuation that he was somehow helping the terrorists. That would have never worked. Three times the White House has welcomed Woodward into the fold, thereby vetting his credentials.
And he is also a brand name in America. Scores of books critical of the Bush administration have been published this year; very few will influence the ’06 political climate, on the eve of important congressional elections. Woodward’s might be the exception. He and his book will be publicized all week on everything from Charlie Rose to Larry King, and the White House will be stuck in response mode.
Woodward in a sense may be late to the game – documents showing the fact gap between Iraq reality and White House rhetoric have been available, and abundantly reported, for much of the past four years – but Woodward potentially confers extra credibility, if only because he was so solicitous of the administration’s viewpoint in his earlier works.
Some Bush defenders insist that the Woodward episode will simply blow over; in the words of conservative radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt, "the public will grow bored quickly, and Woodward will clip another set of royalty coupons and the (2006) campaign will be right back where it has been since the July arrests surrounding the London bombing plot: A choice between serious and surrender on the issues surrounding security and the war."
Perhaps. But Woodward's damning critique can also be viewed in an historical context. Back in 1968, Lyndon Johnson knew he was in political trouble over Vietnam when Walter Cronkite reported critically on the war; LBJ reportedly said that when he lost Cronkite, he knew he had lost the center of the electorate. It would now appear that President Bush has lost Bob Woodward.
1. If Woodward writes a book which paints the president as a wise, steely-eyed, resolute, and well-informed Decider, and if he depicts the top presidential aides as seamless cogs in a wise, steely-eyed, and resolute war team, then he is to be lauded as a credit to his craft, as a paragon of objectivity, and his books are to be praised by the Republican party as must-reads for all good citizens.
Hence the decision by the Republican National Committee in 2002 to promote Woodward’s Bush at War on the official RNC website. Hence the gushing praise from Condoleezza Rice two years later, upon the publication of Woodward’s Plan of Attack, when she told CNN that Woodward “is terrific, he’s a great journalist." Hence the happy talk from White House counselor Dan Bartlett, who in 2004 seemed ready to join the publicity team at Simon & Schuster: “We’re urging people to buy the book.”
2. But if the same Bob Woodward writes a book that depicts Bush as a clueless commander-in-chief who seems incapable of telling the full truth about the Iraq war in part because he seems incapable of processing factual reality; and if the same Bob Woodward shows the supposedly vaunted war team to be increasingly dysfunctional as the occupation of Iraq drags on…well, that means he is not a “great journalist” at all. Quite the contrary, in fact.
The aforementioned Dan Bartlett, who praised Woodward for doing a “good job” in 2004, has now suddenly decided that – brainstorm - the guy is really bad at his job. The new Woodward book, State of Denial, is in the stores today, and it doesn’t exactly burnish the Decider’s image; for instance, while chronicling Iraq administrator Jay Garner’s disenchantment with his bosses, Woodward writes (clearly from Garner’s perspective) that “in these moments where Bush had someone from the field there in the chair beside him, he did not press, he did not try to open the door himself and ask what the visitor had seen and thought. The whole atmosphere too often resembled a royal court with Cheney and Rice in attendance, some upbeat stories, exaggerated good stories and a good time had by all.”
The White House spent most of the past weekend trying to knock the book down, and to depict its author as just another biased scribe with an unfair agenda. Bartlett told ABC yesterday that, even though White House officials had cooperated with Woodward as usual, “from the outset, he had already formulated conclusions before the interviews began.”
It’s easy to see what happened: Woodward, who in recent years has been assailed by Bush critics as the administration’s court stenographer, was returning to his favorite subject – Bush at war – at a time when long years of conflict in Iraq had clearly taken their toll on the president and his team. The violence was getting worse, and the private assessments at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill did not square with the sunnier public assessments about the war. (During the same week that the Joint Chiefs of Staff circulated a secret memo warning about the potential for increasing violence in Iraq through 2007, the administration, via Donald Rumsfeld’s office, told the public that the violence was likely to “wane.” Woodward also strongly suggests, in his book, that Rumsfeld remains entrenched at the Pentagon because Bush is reluctant to confront him.)
The track record of failed promises and the growing mountain of documentation (already mined by many other authors) were impossible for Woodward to ignore. So he asked questions about these things, and the White House didn’t like that; as Bartlett sees it, Woodward had already “formulated conclusions.”
On the Sunday shows yesterday, Bartlett also left open the possibility that Woodward may have simply concocted some explosive material – such as his description of a meeting, two months before 9/11, between national security adviser Rice and CIA chief George Tenet. In the book, Tenet hurried to the White House with a top aide in tow, hoping to share his urgent concerns about an imminent terrorist attack on American soil, but Rice reportedly blew him off. Bartlett told CBS yesterday that Rice doesn’t remember such an encounter. When host Bob Schieffer asked Bartlett if he thought Woodward would make up such a scene, Bartlett said, “I just don’t know. It leaves us somewhat puzzled.”
But it’s not puzzling at all. Clearly, Tenet was Woodward’s source, and that’s the point: When government insiders start fighting in print with other insiders, that’s a sign of serious trouble.
When the wheels come off in Washington, when major policies go awry and message discipline breaks down, insiders often flee the wreckage while trying to salvage their own reputations. They typically do this by dishing to reporters. That’s clearly what has happened in State of Denial. But what I also detect, after reading several book excerpts, is that some of the insiders dished to Woodward because they were deeply frustrated by an administration that seems determined not to confront its shortcomings on the war. As Woodward said on CBS last night, “There is a concern that we need to face realism (and not be) the voice that says ‘Oh no, everything’s fine.’ Well, it’s not.”
It was noteworthy yesterday that the administration’s rebuke of Woodward was basically polite. It didn’t brand Woodward with the liberal label, or link him to Michael Moore, or imply via insinuation that he was somehow helping the terrorists. That would have never worked. Three times the White House has welcomed Woodward into the fold, thereby vetting his credentials.
And he is also a brand name in America. Scores of books critical of the Bush administration have been published this year; very few will influence the ’06 political climate, on the eve of important congressional elections. Woodward’s might be the exception. He and his book will be publicized all week on everything from Charlie Rose to Larry King, and the White House will be stuck in response mode.
Woodward in a sense may be late to the game – documents showing the fact gap between Iraq reality and White House rhetoric have been available, and abundantly reported, for much of the past four years – but Woodward potentially confers extra credibility, if only because he was so solicitous of the administration’s viewpoint in his earlier works.
Some Bush defenders insist that the Woodward episode will simply blow over; in the words of conservative radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt, "the public will grow bored quickly, and Woodward will clip another set of royalty coupons and the (2006) campaign will be right back where it has been since the July arrests surrounding the London bombing plot: A choice between serious and surrender on the issues surrounding security and the war."
Perhaps. But Woodward's damning critique can also be viewed in an historical context. Back in 1968, Lyndon Johnson knew he was in political trouble over Vietnam when Walter Cronkite reported critically on the war; LBJ reportedly said that when he lost Cronkite, he knew he had lost the center of the electorate. It would now appear that President Bush has lost Bob Woodward.
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