Republicans are in trouble -- and it is not the kind of trouble that dissipates with time or the kind that can be overridden by the usual political subterfuge or great 30-second ads in the waning weeks of the campaign.
This is the kind of trouble that takes root. It is found not just in the garden variety public cynicism most politicians are used to enduring, but in the personal, visceral disdain occasioned by people being able to see clear through to politicians' motives and character -- and being repelled by them.
As a result, I am now in the big-wage tent betting that the GOP will lose control of both houses of Congress -- and, in the House, likely not by a small margin,. And it is Mark Foley who will play a larger-than-anticipated role in his party's demise. Of course, many factors have coalesced to help usher Republicans out the door: midterm elections in two-term presidencies are never good for the president's party; the war in Iraq is, to say the very least, more protracted than we had prepared for; and despite the hopeful economic trends, there is a nervousness coursing through the economy that has kept Americans' enthusiasm for it consistently dim.
Still, it is the Foley episode that will end up burying the whole party this election. I emphasize "election" in the singular because, despite the fact that there are of course hundreds of individual local contests this year involving hundreds of individual, local issues, November 7 will be a national election day. It'll be about the war in Iraq, who controls the Congress, and how changing the latter would affect the former. People understand they are voting for congressional control -- there is no longer any way of obscuring the fact that this election is now about who's in charge and what that means for the country.
For the many already dismayed by the war -- and that is now a majority -- the Foley scandal, not in its particulars but in what it revealed about the House leadership, will be a nail in the GOP coffin. I'm saying 30 House seats change hands.
Why? The Foley follies reveal a truth in a manner that the war in Iraq does not. The motives in the Foley scandal are much easier to grasp. You don't have to sift through the facts, the spin, and the good-faith differences of opinion to come to some shaky understanding of what has happened and is happening. You can argue until you're blue in the face -- and who hasn't? -- about the war, its relation to the war on terror, the justifications for launching it, and what should be done now, but there is only so much evidence to prove your point one way or the other. Further, there is not much in the way of personal experience by which people can measure the validity of the arguments. (Who among us has ever bought yellowcake in Niger?)
Phone sex, on the other hand, is all too accessible. People get sex and they get why it's scandalous. They understand the impulse that would compel a person to send tamer messages by e-mail and raunchier ones by IM. They grasp intuitively that the safeness of the Foley seat, as long as Foley was in it, could have been a consideration in the GOP leadership's muted response when they learned what he was up to with the pages. The dynamics of this scandal are no mystery.
A lot of questionable comparisons have been drawn between the midterms of 2006 and those of 1994, but I think the Foley scandal parallels the house banking scandal in a very damaging way for Republicans. Back then, amid abstract discussions by the GOP about smaller government and lower taxes, there sprang from the political heavens this ridiculous story about people who bounced checks without any consequences. Americans did not have to compare notes or go sifting through their own political baggage to understand that a bunch of powerful Democrats were using their position of privilege to act irresponsibly and without fear of any consequences.
Americans didn't like that then, and they are not going to like it now.
Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.
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