Sordid Foley Scandal Pales
Compared To 2008 Importance

By William Finucane

And so the Democratic Party’s faithful gurus were sitting around, figuring how to possibly wrest the House of Representatives from Republicans. And then a solution fell – splat – in their collective laps.

That solution was a Republican, a Floridian, a faithful servant of the party, a flaming homosexual, a writer of horrible (if it is a conservative reading them) love letters, a man so bereft of good character as to hit on the House’s pages made up of high school kids whose parents have to know someone in the House in the first place to have a reasonable chance of landing a position for their son or daughter.

Here was a GOP stalwart who suddenly claimed he was abused by a Catholic priest when he was young himself, but whose own misdeeds have been going on for years. He was, unbelievably, chairman of a House caucus on missing and exploited children. He had, after all, won elections by proclaiming himself a crusader for abused and exploited children.

Exploited children? Really?

Who is doing the writing here, this is like the script of a bad TV show – this is too much – could this man be this stupid, or that arrogant?

Well, he could be and he is.

Mark Foley, 52, was served up on a plate to the Democratic stalwarts, ready for anyone to condemn.

Oh, but there is more.

House leadership is deeply caught up in this good, old fashioned scandal. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert has to prove now that he did not know about the Foley imbroglios. Even if Hastert manages that, it means the top House member had no control over his people. But that is how it would have to be because Hastert was really just the replacement for the real House Speaker – Tom DeLay.

DeLay has his own scandals, so he had to step out of the House as well.

So DeLay quit and Hastert had to try to learn how to be Speaker instantly: apparently he’s a slow learner.

Actually, this putrid Foley business is a sort of blessing in disguise.

It removes all the real issues in the House and Senate races. So did that happen by chance? Probably not; someone saw beforehand, or saw it the minute the scandal poked out its ugly reality and recognized it as pure political gold. House Republicans are – some of them anyway – afraid of getting caught up in the whirlwind of homosexual transgressions.

But that is really the Republican trump card in all elections – say as little as possible about the military screw-ups, poverty growing among the working poor and threatening even the middle-classes while the rich grow richer; health care, fuel and hundreds of real, live issues that have to be solved by someone, but the GOP has decided that grabbing immediate profits and power advantages now are more important. Leave the problem solving to someone else in the future, but smoke it over now.

Republicans are much better at punching one thing – religion, single-sex marriages, stem cells and the like – that people can viscerally understand and rally behind than they are at discussing actual problems.

And Republicans are used to walking away with elections, still waving the flag.

Now, however, they will not do well with the Foley foul-up.

But they will try to blame everything on Foley this year.

They won’t need to go into the labyrinth of complicated policy or any of that hard stuff, no, this will be an automatic home run ball. Foley did it.

So it is a facile excuse for losing this election; next election, 2008, the Republicans can rebuild their image. They escape any real political bloodletting.

Now there have been lots of scandals. Just look at President Bill Clinton’s near impeachment over some over active genes. In the past there were some Democrats who had a similar set of sexual interludes with House pages, one a male one a female. These and other scandals are all so seamy and terrible, but totally bereft of any political weight.

They do nothing, other than diverting public attention.

Meanwhile, Democrats have lots of planning to do right now.

Take the Massachusetts congressional group.

Now, if the Democrats take over power in the House, the scene is completely different. It could be that Sen. John Kerry will try again for president. House Rep. Barney Frank – who is openly gay – will look to become chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, this falls in well with Frank’s hottest issues. But if Republicans keep control of the House and if Kerry goes for the presidency, then Frank will run for Senate instead

If the Dems gain control, others will also gain back serious power, like Rep. Edward Markey from Malden, who could become chairman of the House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce Committee. None of this has anything to do with Republican Foley at all, except that Foley’s blundering makes it much more certain that the Democrats just might win some real power.

They can hold hearings, start investigations, force the president to respond to some Democratic pressure. They will be back in the game.

This is crucial. Right now, America is controlled by Republicans in all three branches of power: the executive, legislative and judicial. Now, before all these politicians get all carried away, remember one very important fact. America’s big race is 2008, and Foley will be buried and forgotten by then because it isn’t an executive scandal.

That race could start the process of saving some of America, or it could see a new, negative era in United States history, since an extension of Bush-style national policies could make damage the things that once held the country together irreparably.

2008 is, for every American, the most important year since America was founded.