It is hard to imagine what was going on in Larry Craig's head that led him to decide that he should stay in the Senate. There is no way to put his decision into any logical context; it makes no sense personally, politically or otherwise. Financially, the difference between leaving at the end of September, when first indicated he would, and the beginning of January 2009, is about $5,000 a year in annual pension. So it can't be about the money.
For some bizarre reason, Craig thinks staying in the Senate is worth the 15 months of public humiliation that the rest of his tenure will entail. Every vote, every floor speech will present multiple opportunities for derision. He may be counting on the fact that in politics there is always some new storyline with some new antihero, and that at some point his time in the spotlight will pass. Look at Bill Clinton, who did, after all, have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.
Still, it is hard to grasp the desperation driving Craig, who was guilty before he was not; who was resigning, before he was staying. In his un-resignation statement, Craig claims when he came back to the Senate in early September, he found that the scandal had not been as disruptive he thought it would be.
"As I continued to work for Idaho over the past three weeks here in the Senate, I have seen that it is possible for me to work here effectively," he said. Hell, Harry Reid prospecting for votes on a war amendment called Craig to see if he would vote with the Democrats.
The answer was no.
But it seems that even after his long tenure in the Senate, Craig fundamentally misunderstands the place. Effectiveness in the Senate rests on being taken seriously, and that is based on the quality of you word and the potential of your longevity: You have to do what you say you're going to do, and hold the promise be of being around long enough to make the long-term investment of trust worthwhile.
His word is no good, and his plea to keep his job is based on a promise to leave in a few months. This not how one harnesses leverage in the Senate.
The last three weeks were about kindness, not his effectiveness. People thought he was gone and thought there was no point in piling on. He misread sympathy for support. But the sympathy is about to evaporate. With his on-again, off-again resignation, Craig has made himself an easy target of both ridicule and resentment.
For Democrats, he has become shorthand for something laughable; and a mere mention of his name will be funny. They may not even pursue an ethics investigation.
Republicans resent the additional messaging complications he will cause as they head into 2008. One thing that helped Craig after the story broke in August was the sense that he had been too quickly abandoned by his party. His improbable decision to stay vindicates their strategy, and if they threw him under the bus the first time, now they're out looking for an industrial-strength shredder.
What the GOP wants, quite simply, is for Craig to take the advice directed at another unwelcome malingerer in the Dr. Seuss classic, Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now?:
"The time has come.
The time is now.
Just go. Go. GO!
I don't care how."
"It's embarrassing for the Senate, it's embarrassing for his party," Sen. John Ensign, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said after Craig announced his decision to stay.
Craig could not have bungled this situation more if he had paid someone to do it for him. At every juncture, he misread the situation and made the wrong choice -- beginning, of course, with his little tap routine in the bathroom.
He pleaded guilty to a crime that would have been hard to prove, because he wanted to keep it secret, ignoring the first rule of public officials in trouble: Lawyer up.
Then, after it became clear that the silly, if sordid, episode in the bathroom would end his long career, Craig misread the empathy of those who thought he might have been victimized as encouragement to fight on. But he is wrong about that, too. He may have been entrapped, and the case against him may have been too weak to stick, but Larry Craig was victimized more by his own actions than those of either the police officer or his Republican colleagues.
He vastly overvalued the level of sympathy for him out there, and now he finds himself in the oddest of places -- in office, but out of touch, until, of course, he has to change his mind again.
