The Foley scandal's effect at the polls

Glenn Greenwald, who has been one of the most sensible blog commentators on the Foley scandal, writes in Does the Foley scandal prove the existence of a God? 10/06/06:

The perfection of this scandal lies in its substance, not its theatrics. The Foley scandal is not - as even some Bush opponents have asserted - an aberrational, isolated, inconsequential melodrama that is unrelated to the substantive and important critiques of the Bush movement and which just coincidentally emerged as a cynical weapon that can be used to defeat the Republicans. The opposite is true. This scandal has resonated so powerfully because it is shining such a powerful light on the towering hubris, utter lack of intellectual and ethical integrity, and deeply engrained corruption that accounts for virtually every other Bush disaster - from Iraq to law-breaking scandals to torture to Abrahmoff-type corruption schemes and everything in between.

There are, as Matt Yglesias pointed out the other day, huge numbers of people in this country - clearly the majority of the electorate - who are not at all stupid but simply do not have the time or inclination to pay close attention to political events. In that regard, people who spend substantial time in the blogosphere are aberrational; it is not the norm to monitor political developments on a daily basis. ...

But for so many reasons - its relative simplicity, its crystal clarity, the involvement of emotionally- charged issues, the salacious sex aspects - this Foley scandal circumvents that whole dynamic. People are paying attention on their own. They don't need pundits or journalists to tell them what to think about it because they are able to form deeply held opinions on their own. None of the standard obfuscation tactics used for so long by Bush followers are working here. To the contrary, their attempted use of those tactics is making things much worse for them, because people can see that Bush followers are attempting - through the use of patently dishonest and corrupt tactics - to excuse the inexcusable. And seeing that, it gives great credence to all of the accusations voiced over the last five years that this is how the Bush movement operates in every area, because people can now see it for themselves.

I'm more than happy to see Republicans lose votes over the Foley scandal in November.  But, despite polling showing that it's affecting voters' preferences even in districts far away from Foley's Florida home base, I'm just not convinced this scandal in itself is going to be so influential in itself.

Steve Gilliard has been making the pitch in various posts for days that this will be a devastating event for the GOP nationwide.  His argument is based heavily on the (not implausible) assumption that Foley was engaging in direct sexual contact with some of the pages or ex-pages.  But based on the publicly available information as of this writing, that is an assumption, not an established fact.

Glenn Greenwald makes the most plausible case for a more general effect of the scandal on the midterm Congressional elections.  If the scandal illustrates or confirms suspicions that voters already have, if the scandal makes it more likely for voters to pay attention to those suspicions or easier for them to conceptualize more clearly, then it could hurt nationwide.  It's worth quoting some more of Greenwald's argument:

In that regard, this scandal is like the CliffsNotes version [i.e., an easy summary] of a more complicated treatise on how the Bush movement operates. Every one of their corrupt attributes is vividly on display here:

The absolute refusal ever to admit error. The desperate clinging to power above all else. The efforts to cloud what are clear matters of wrongdoing with irrelevant sideshows. And the parade of dishonest and just plainly inane demonization efforts to hide and distract from their wrongdoing: hence, the pages are manipulative sex vixens; a shadowy gay cabal is to blame; the real criminals are those who exposed the conduct, not those who engaged in it; liberals created the whole scandal; George Soros funded the whole thing; a Democratic Congressman did something wrong 23 years ago; one of the pages IM'd with Foley as a "hoax", and on and on. There has been a virtual carousel - as there always is - of one pathetic, desperate attempt after the next to deflect blame and demonize those who are pointing out the wrongdoing. This is what they always do, on every issue. The difference here is that everyone can see it, and so nothing is working.

I'm skeptical myself how much real effect this will have.  Mainly because, no matter how disgusting, scary or generally icky people think Foley is, it's still hard for me to picture that voters in Congressional districts in California, Kansas or Ohio will make their choices based onthe personal misconduct of a now-resigned Congressman from Florida.  The fact that the House leadership obviously put protecting Foley over protecting pages could be a bridge in people's minds to make that connection, though.

Besides that, we should keep in mind that when we talk about the effects on the Republicans in the November elections, we're mainly talking about turnout and swing voters.  It's hard to imagine this would make Democrats either more or less willing to turn out.  It could suppress Republican turnout, but I doubt it.  If FOX News and OxyContin radion can persuade the Republican faithful that the whole things is a plot by a Jewish-"Democrat"-Media conspiracy to give their women and property to black people and illegal Mexican immigrants, it could even help Republican turnout, as Sara Robinson notes in The Irony of It All Orcinus blog 10/06/06.

And then there is the effect on swing voters.  And it seems to me that they would have to be convinced that the Republican House leadership behaved unconscionably in dealing with Foley's questionable behavior when they found out about it for it to kick a lot of Republican-leaning swing voters to the Dems.

We'll see what the exit polls show after the November election.