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Pressure Grows for Republicans Over Foley Scandal    [
Eugene Robinson | No Spinning Past This Scandal    [

    After Foley, New Fears for the GOP
    By Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei
    The Washington Post

    Tuesday 03 October 2006

Some say party could lose House and Senate.

    Republican strategists said yesterday that public revulsion over the sexually graphic online conversations between Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) and former House pages could compound the party's problems enough to tip the House to the Democrats in November - and could jeopardize the party's hold on the Senate as well.

    As House GOP leaders defended their role in handling revelations that forced Foley on Friday to give up his House seat, party strategists said the scandal threatens to depress turnout among Christian conservatives and could hamper efforts to convince undecided and swing voters that Republicans deserve to remain in the majority.

    There was intense anger among social conservative activists in Washington yesterday, and some called for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) to resign.

    Republican operatives closely following the battle for the House and Senate said that they are virtually ready to concede nearly a third of the 15 seats the Democrats need to recapture control of the House, and that they will spend the next five weeks trying to shelter other vulnerable incumbents from the fallout of the Foley scandal in hopes of salvaging a slender majority.

    Districts in which Republicans have effectively walked off the field include Foley's own in South Florida. House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a radio interview with conservative commentator Sean Hannity that the party's replacement candidate is all but doomed. Because of ballot procedures in Florida, "to vote for this candidate, you have to vote for Mark Foley," Boehner said. "How many people are going to hold their nose to do that?"

    Others warned that the impact could be much greater. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and an important social conservative leader, said "there's a real chance" that the episode could dethrone the Republican majority. "I think the next 48 hours are critical in how this is handled," he said, adding that "when a party holds itself out as the guardian of values, this is not helpful."

    Foley's sudden resignation came at the end of a week that had delivered a series of blows to Republican hopes in November. A National Intelligence Estimate asserted that the war in Iraq is fueling new threats from Islamic jihadists faster than the United States and allies can contain them, then a new book by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post said the administration's private assessments of Iraq are far worse than officials are telling the public. Taken together, GOP strategists said, the events of the past 10 days reversed what some Republicans had seen as a modest rebound in September after the worst days of the summer.

    By yesterday, a number of GOP strategists reported widespread gloom about the party's prospects, combined with intense anger at the House leadership.

    Joe Gaylord, who was the top adviser to Newt Gingrich (Ga.) when Republicans seized control of the House in 1994, was pessimistic about the party's midterm prospects. He said the fallout from Foley's resignation comes "very close" to ensuring a Democratic victory in November.

    "The part that causes the greatest fallout is the obvious kind of pall that an incident like this would put on our hardest-core voters, who are evangelical Christians," he said. "The thing I have said almost since this cycle began is the real worry you have is that [Republicans] just won't turn out. This is one more nail in that coffin."

    Depressed turnout would not only hurt vulnerable House incumbents but also make it more difficult for Republicans to hold the most competitive Senate seats - many of those races are now virtually even, according to recent polling.

    Hastert faces a spreading revolt among some conservatives over the way he and other GOP leaders handled the matter when first alerted to the contact between Foley and one former House page. Hastert said again yesterday that no House Republican leader knew about the most graphic communications until they surfaced on Friday, but that did little to satisfy some conservative activists.

    David Bossie, who runs a group called Citizens United, called yesterday for Hastert's resignation and said other conservative leaders are likely to follow suit. Bossie said the initial e-mails alone, which included Foley's request of a minor's picture, should have prompted an immediate inquiry. "That was a cry for an investigation," Bossie said. "Why couldn't the speaker of the House muster the will to stop this?"

    Leaders from about six dozen socially conservative groups held a conference call late yesterday afternoon, and participants were described as livid with House GOP leaders.

    "They are outraged by how Hastert handled this," said Paul M. Weyrich, a conservative activist who participated in the call. "They feel let down, left aside. How can they allow a guy like [Foley] to remain chairman of the committee on missing and exploited children when there is any question about e-mails?"

    Vin Weber, a GOP lobbyist close to the White House and to congressional leaders, said many Republicans outside of Washington are echoing Bossie.

    "From what I hear, it is resonating badly and our candidates are on the defensive about this," Weber said. "The maddening thing about this is if they had done the right thing" by informing Democrats early on and investigating it fully, "there would be no political fallout," he said.

    Top GOP strategists said party leaders will concentrate on trying to keep the focus of the unfolding story on Foley, rather than on how House leaders responded when informed about his contacts with former pages.

    "I don't know of any race ever where the action of one member has impacted the race of another," said Carl Forti, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

    Republicans are bracing for ads that link previous scandals with the Foley case and ask, "Had enough?" Several strategists said this could be devastating in tight races. The most optimistic scenario offered by GOP strategists is that no new information surfaces and the controversy ends in the next five weeks.

    Republicans have designated state Rep. Joe Negron as the substitute candidate in Florida's 16th District, even as Boehner and others denigrate his prospects.

    Republicans say they are in grave danger of losing the seat of former House majority leader Tom DeLay (Tex.), as well as those held by Rep. Robert W. Ney (Ohio) - who agreed to plead guilty to corruption charges in the investigation into the activities of convicted former lobbyist Jack Abramoff - and Rep. Don Sherwood (Pa.), who has been embroiled in a scandal over an affair.

    In addition, Republicans have largely given up on holding the seat of retiring Rep. Jim Kolbe (Ariz.), and strategists are pessimistic about retaining open seats in Colorado and Iowa and the seat now held by Rep. John N. Hostettler (Ind.).

    Some Republicans also said Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (N.Y.), the NRCC's chairman and one of the GOP leaders who knew about a non-graphic communication between Foley and a former page, could face an even tougher challenge for his Buffalo area seat. Reynolds and Hastert sniped at each other over the weekend about who knew what and when.

 

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    Pressure Grows for Republicans Over Foley Scandal
    By Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny
    The New York Times

    Tuesday 03 October 2006

    Washington - Speaker J. Dennis Hastert faced intensifying questions on Monday about why Republicans had not reacted more assertively to Representative Mark Foley's messages to a teenage page, as members of his party, fearing a political debacle, demanded a strong response.

    Straining to hold the party together five weeks from Election Day amid unfolding revelations about the case, Mr. Hastert and his leadership team held a conference call with House Republicans on Monday night and heard blunt advice and criticism from participants who pressed for further action to reassure voters.

    "This is a political problem, and we need to step up and do something dramatic," Representative Ray LaHood of Illinois said afterward, adding that he had proposed abolishing the Congressional page program.

    Mr. Foley, 52, who resigned Friday after being confronted with sexually explicit instant messages he had sent to pages, released a statement saying he had entered a rehabilitation clinic for treatment of "alcoholism and related behavioral problems."

    At a news conference in West Palm Beach, Fla., late Monday, Mr. Foley's lawyer, David Roth, said that Mr. Foley had sent the inappropriate e-mail messages while under the influence of alcohol and that he had kept his drinking problem secret.

    A former aide and other associates said in interviews that they did not believe Mr. Foley had a drinking problem.

    ABC News, which first reported the sexually explicit messages on Friday, said Monday that additional messages suggested that Mr. Foley had met in person with a teenage page outside Capitol Hill and had sought a relationship.

    "I miss you lots since San Diego," Mr. Foley wrote, using his screen name, Maf54, according to a transcript obtained and released by ABC.

    "Ya I cant wait til dc," the page replied.

    Federal law enforcement officials said the F.B.I. in recent months had been given e-mail messages between Mr. Foley and a page but had found insufficient grounds to open a criminal investigation. A group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said Monday that it had forwarded the messages to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on July 21 and requested an investigation. The group would not say where it had obtained the messages; it made them public after the ABC report.

    Federal agents on Monday began contacting men who were in the Congressional page program in recent years, said government officials briefed on the matter, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry. The officials said the agents were trying to find any former or current pages who had had contact with Mr. Foley and to authenticate e-mail and instant messages attributed to the former lawmaker that had circulated on the Internet in recent days.

    The officials said that several pages who had received electronic messages from Mr. Foley had already been located.

    At the White House, Tony Snow, President Bush's press secretary, initially characterized the scandal as "naughty e-mails," drawing a blistering response from Democrats who said his words suggested that Republicans did not understand the gravity of the situation.

    Mr. Hastert, who returned to the Capitol to deal with the escalating scandal, was pressed by reporters to explain why the first communication between Mr. Foley and a page, which was brought to the attention of Republican leaders last year, had not led to more assertive efforts to determine if it was an isolated case.

    Mr. Hastert defended the Republicans' handling of a parent's complaint last year about communication from Mr. Foley to the parent's teenage son. But he acknowledged that the e-mail inquiring about the boy's well being and requesting a photo was potentially troubling.

    "I think that raised a red flag, raised a red flag with the kid, raised a red flag with the parents," said Mr. Hastert, who repeated that he could not recall learning of the messages before news of them broke last week. But the speaker said he and others had been "duped" by Mr. Foley, who when questioned about the e-mail said it was an innocent effort to make sure that the young man, who was from Louisiana, had made it through Hurricane Katrina.

    Representative John Shimkus, Republican of Illinois, and the House clerk, Jeff Trandahl, instructed Mr. Foley to break off any contact with the former page. At the time, Republicans did not purse the matter further, considering the case closed.

    "Would have, could have, should have," Mr. Hastert said, responding to questions about whether Republicans should have done more.

    In Florida, Republicans met on Monday and chose Joe Negron, a conservative state representative, as a replacement candidate for the 16th Congressional District seat held by Mr. Foley. The ballots, however, have already been printed, and Mr. Foley's name will remain. If he wins, the votes will go to Mr. Negron.

    The House majority leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, dismissed that possibility. "To vote for this candidate, you have to vote for Mark Foley," Mr. Boehner said on a conservative radio program hosted by Sean Hannity. "How many people are going to hold their nose to do that?"

    The case has led to varying accounts from two members of the leadership. Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, who runs the House Republican campaign effort and is in a close race, has acknowledged learning generally about Mr. Foley's initial e-mail messages this past spring. Mr. Reynolds has said he raised the matter with Mr. Hastert, who said he did not recall the exchange but did not dispute that it happened.

    "I did what most of us would have done in the workplace," Mr. Reynolds told reporters in Amherst, N.Y., on Monday night. "I heard something, I took it to my supervisor."

    Across the country, in competitive and noncompetitive races, Democrats seized on an issue that they said was resonating with voters. In an effort coordinated in Washington by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party's candidates urged their Republican opponents to call for the resignation of Mr. Hastert and other leaders.

    In Indiana, Baron Hill, a Democratic candidate for a House seat, asked the incumbent, Representative Mike Sodrel, a first-term Republican, to reject any financial contributions from the national party. In North Carolina, where Representative Robin Hayes, a Republican, is engaged in a tough campaign fight, the state Democratic Party issued a statement asking, "Who does Robin Hayes stand up for - Mark Foley and the Republican House leadership or under-age children?"

    As Congressional Republicans campaigned Monday in their districts, they responded to the Democratic criticism and distanced themselves from Mr. Foley's behavior.

    "We need to admit that this was done on our watch," Mr. LaHood said. He added that when he arrived home after Congress adjourned early Saturday, the page program was what constituents asked about.

    "The first three questions I was asked when I arrived in Peoria," he said, "were not about immigration, the war or taxes. It was, 'What are you going to do about the page program?'"

    The Foley case also drew criticism from conservative groups. "It's one of the worst Congressional scandals ever," Cliff Kincaid, editor of the conservative Accuracy in Media Report, wrote Sunday in an editorial circulated by Gopusa.com, a Republican Web site. "A top House Republican who denounced sex predators as 'animals' stands accused of acting like one."

    At the news conference Monday night, Mr. Roth, Mr. Foley's lawyer, denied that Mr. Foley had ever had inappropriate physical contact with minors. "Mark Foley has never, ever had inappropriate sexual contact with a minor in his life," Mr. Roth said. "He is absolutely, positively not a pedophile."

 

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    No Spinning Past This Scandal
    By Eugene Robinson
    The Washington Post

    Tuesday 03 October 2006

    Even when damage control seems a lost cause, I suppose you have to follow the playbook. So Mark Foley resigns his House seat in a nanosecond, then explains those creepy electronic messages to young congressional pages by declaring himself an alcoholic, effectively blaming it all on demon rum. House Speaker Dennis Hastert promptly calls for a really thorough - meaning really slow - investigation. The rest of the Republican leadership declares itself shocked and/or saddened, but agrees that the time has come to move on, folks, nothing to see here.

    These practiced responses have long served politicians, but you don't get the sense that anyone thinks they'll work this time. There's really no effective spin you can put on the Foley scandal, no way that even the Republican Party's image-making geniuses can make people feel good about a 52-year-old man discussing masturbatory techniques with a male teenager via instant message.

    About all the party leadership can do is hope the whole affair is so unsavory that some voters will be too grossed out to pay much attention. Then maybe it wouldn't sink in that House leaders were told in November 2005 - that's almost a year ago, for anyone who's counting - about an inappropriate e-mail that Foley had sent to a House page. The situation was handled with nothing more than a quiet warning.

    The leadership didn't launch an investigation, which probably would have unearthed the much more explicit instant-message exchange between the Florida Republican and another young male page that surfaced last week. House leaders even let Foley continue to serve as co-chair of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, an irony too sad and unforgivable to properly enjoy.

    Hastert doesn't remember ever being told of any problem with Foley, but others remember telling him about the e-mail incident. That's one of the questions - What did I know, and when did I know it? - that Hastert wants investigators to get to the bottom of. Eventually. Certainly after the November elections.

    Former speaker Newt Gingrich suggested over the weekend that House leaders may have worried last year that if they pursued the Foley matter, they'd be "accused of gay-bashing." Clearly, in terms of his spinning skills, Gingrich has lost a step. The issue was whether a congressman was having improper communications with a child, not whether the congressman was gay; it would have been just as troubling if the e-mail had been sent to a female page. And anyway, it's a little late for the Republicans to denounce gay-bashing after raising it to an art form.

    I don't know whether the Republicans will lose control of the House this fall, but I know that they deserve to. That judgment has nothing to do with party politics; there have been times when the Democrats were in control and allowed Congress to sink to a similar level of corruption. But that's surely where we are now, and since the Republicans are the ones in charge, they're the ones who deserve the blame.

    We've had the Jack Abramoff scandal. We've had the Randy "Duke" Cunningham scandal. Congress - especially the House - has made immigrants into scapegoats. House Republicans didn't even clear their throats in objection when the White House demanded, and eventually won, the right to decide what is and isn't torture. For years now the House has legislated primarily to shovel pork, pork and more pork to the folks back home.

    And now, however it happened - either because of a deliberate political decision or because the institution is so degraded that it couldn't stir itself to action, like an overstuffed aristocrat crippled by gout - we learn that the House has countenanced a congressman's sick advances toward teenagers.

    Congressional pages tend to be idealistic, patriotic young people who wholeheartedly believe in America. Many are contemplating a career in politics, and they are thrilled to have the chance to come to the U.S. Capitol and witness the workings of our great democracy.

    Those who came in contact with Mark Foley certainly got a lesson, didn't they?

    Famous quotations are the last refuge of newspaper columnists and other scoundrels, so I try to avoid them, but at the moment I can't help thinking of what Oliver Cromwell said to the so-called Rump Parliament in 1653. Voters would do well to send the same message to the House of Representatives next month:

    "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"