Newsweek‘s Howard Fineman tells us to hold onto our hats — and that if they can’t capitalize on this Democrats should hold onto their whigs:
An Iraq war that has cost us nearly half trillion dollars – and the good will of the world – might not have done it. Runaway federal spending that allowed the national debt to reach $8.5 trillion might not have done it. George Bush’s low approval ratings, the lack of comprehensive immigration reform, the historical pattern of an anti-incumbent “six-year itch� in presidencies, the cascade of stories about administration ineptitude and dissembling and congressional financial and lobbying corruption — none of these issues seemed destined to end the Republicans’ 12 year reign in Congress.
Then came the Foley Scandal. If the Democrats can’t take the Hill now, they deserve to go the way of the Whigs.
Fineman’s key point is one that we’ve made here: the Foley scandal, involving a middle-aged Republican Congressman sending inappropriate and sometimes sexually graphic emails to an underaged teen page, is an issue ALL Americans can understand — even if they don’t regularly follow or even care about politics.
What happens, Fineman notes, is that the narrative is what defines the way an event is perceived…and its symbolism:
The sad, sordid vividness of Bill Clinton’s liaisons with an intern named Monica Lewinsky nearly cost him the presidency. The Watergate tapes made Richard Nixon an all-too-dramatic and familiar character: a mix of Al Capone and King Lear.
Rep. Mark Foley and the pages will now become the faces and stories that define a time. Polls showed that “political corruption,� per se, was not cutting much. But that was when it was defined primarily by money. Now sex is involved, and nothing screams “Out of Touch� like the way the House hierarchy handled the Foley matter.
Read the supposedly benign and ambiguous emails that the House leadership has known about for nearly a year. If they were so benign why did they warn Foley to have no further contact with the boy in question? And if they did warn Foley, why didn’t they launch an investigation?
The Foley Scandal is a missile aimed at the heart of the GOP’s most important base constituency: evangelical, Bible-believing Christians, who were already upset with the administration on a host of issues — including spending and immigration.
And, he warns, the worst is yet to come:
It’s going to get uglier from here. The GOP will respond by unearthing old stories of sexual misconduct on Capitol Hill. I know that the search is on for complaints, however old, about unnamed Democrats who might have come on too strong to male or female pages.
And that’s to be expected since the idea will be to (a) paint the Democrats as hypocrites (which would happen if a similar scandal with the same elements is unearthed involving a Democrat), (b) go back to the good, ‘ol, boilerplate “but everybody does it.” This would especially carry some weight if it turned out that a key Democrat was involved in an almost identical case and the Democratic party’s Congressional leadership kept it swept under the rug.
The result would be a black eye for politicians and Congress in general. MORE:
Democrats are focusing for now on Hastert’s fate, and the “who knew what when� angle, but will soon get back to Foley himself — and those excruciatingly explicit instant messages.
Can Democrats blow it even now? Sure. They don’t have the money and the machinery Republicans do.
Fineman also points out that the Democrats need to hammer home what they’re for, versus what they’re against:
The Foley Scandal means that Democrats might be able to succeed with a campaign slogan that says, simply, “Had Enough?� But if they take control of Congress, they’ll still have to do what the Whigs could not, which is explain what they are for, not just what we all are against.
We have one slight disagreement with Fineman. As we’ve noted before, there is a sense now of a kind of political storm facing the current elite that controls the GOP. Democrats were chased away early in Bush’s first term, polls showed independent voters breaking for the Democrats way before the Foley scandal came to light, and traditional Republicans (Goldwater’s political descendents and some folks associated with the first Bush presidency) have been highly critical of the currently-in-control crew.
So the Foley scandal would not be the cause of a GOP defeat, if it does in fact occur — just the final nail in the political coffin.
But Fineman’s key point needs to be restated: if Democrats have skeletons in their closets they should expect that some of them will be rolled out of the closets before Election Day.
Even so, the most damning part of this scandal is the growing sense that the House leadership preferred not to do anything or think about Foley. How times have changed…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.