The Foley scandal

I posted about the Foley scandal at The Blue Voice this past weekend, the one about Florida Congressman Mark Foley, who just resigned over revelations that he had been hitting on 16-year-old male pages working for Congress, including exchanging probably-illegal sexually-explicit e-mails with some of them.

I don't have much to add to what I wrote there.  The Republicans House leadership's ham-handed public response, and the revelations that they knew about at least part of the problem with a possible sexual-harassment situation and basically did very little about it, have spread the embarassment.

The one thing I would add is that the broader damage to the Republicans this year may be more significant than I first thought.  I'm still skeptical of how much weight voters in particular Congressional districts will put on a sex scandal that involved a Congressman in another district.

But the public opinion mavens seem to think the damage is broader:  GOP tries to quiet Foley scandal: 'Dismayed' Bush stands up for Hastert amid demands he quit by Edward Epstein San Francisco Chronicle 10/04/06.  Epstein reports:

Experts on congressional elections say the Foley issue has worsened prospects for the Republicans in the Nov. 7 midterm elections. Democrats need a net gain of 15 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate to win control of the bodies.

The chances of a pre-election Hastert resignation are slim, said congressional expert Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, because such a shakeup would make matters worse for Republicans going into the election.

"A resignation before the election would add to the perception of a party under siege and on the verge of collapse," Mann said. And since Majority Leader John Boehner of Ohio also has been linked to last spring's events, he would also have to go if Hastert stepped down, he said.

"Republicans have to hope the story quiets down" in the next few weeks, Mann said at a forum Tuesday at American University. "My view is, this is very bad ... because this resonates with their constituents and their voters."

At the very minimum, it distracts a bit from the Republicans' "The Terrorists will get you if you don't vote Republican" theme.

And, in a report of 10/03/06, Carolyn Lockhead suggests that the Foley scandal has the potential to suppress turnout among heavily-Republican Christian conservatives this year:  Foley e-mail sex scandal hits the GOP hard: Questions persist about who knew what, when - and the case turns off the conservative base San Francisco Chonicle.

It strikes especially hard at "values voters," the conservative Christians who make up the core of the Republican Party.

"This kind of thing just should not happen, and there is no excuse to justify it in any way," said Rev. Bob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, a politically active group of conservative church leaders.

"A big deal should be made of it, and we intend to make a big deal of it," he said. "We plan to address it in pulpits across the country, that this is an egregious moral violation, and we all will be held accountable."

It's hard to know what to make of this, though.  Christian Right activists are famous for using "divine deception", aka, double-talk.  The rightwing position has been that the press and Democrats are somehow to blame for the whole thing.  So Schenck may be saying in a watch-me-sucker-the-reporter kind of way that he's going to make sure his constituency knows that this is another sign of the evil Democrats at work.

We'll see how it plays out.  The folks at Emerging Democratic Majority, who know their polling data, say (Will GOP Meltdown Give Dems Senate Majority? 10/03/06):

As a result of the Foley cover-up, it is not hard to imagine droves of disgusted evangelicals staying home on November 7, and a healthy chunk of those who don't stay at home now deciding to vote Democratic. Indeed, the GOP leadership's internal rot is so redolent that many non-evangelical conservatives may do likewise.