The End of a
Revolution
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Sex, lies and power games are just the latest
symptoms of a Republican Party that has strayed from its ideals. |
By KAREN TUMULTY,
TIME Magazine Posted October 8, 2006
Every revolution begins with the
power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left.
The epitaph for the movement that started when Newt Gingrich and his forces rose
from the back bench of the House chamber in 1994 may well have been written last
week in the same medium that incubated it: talk radio. On
conservative commentator Laura Ingraham's show, the longest-serving Republican
House Speaker in history explained why he would not resign despite a sex scandal
that has produced a hail of questions about his leadership and the failure to
stop one of his members from cyberstalking teenage congressional pages.
"If I fold up my tent and leave," Dennis Hastert told her, "then where does that
leave us? If the Democrats sweep, then we'd have no ability to fight back
and get our message out."
That quiet admission may have been the most damning one yet in the unfolding
scandal surrounding Florida Congressman Mark Foley: holding on to power
has become not just the means but also the end for the onetime reformers who in
1994 unseated a calcified and corrupted Democratic majority. Washington
scandals, it seems, have been following a Moore's law of their own, coming at a
faster clip every time there is a shift in control. It took 40 years for
the House Democrats to exhaust their goodwill. It may take only 12 years for the
Republicans to get there.
If you think politicians clinging to power isn't big news, then you may have
forgotten the pure zeal of Gingrich's original revolutionaries. They swept
into Washington on the single promise that they would change Capitol Hill.
And for a time, they did. Vowing to finish what Ronald Reagan had started, they
stood firm on the three principles that defined conservatism: fiscal
responsibility, national security and moral values. Reagan, who had a few
scandals in his day, didn't always follow his own rules. But his doctrine
turned out to be a good set of talking points for winning elections in a closely
divided country, and the takeover was completed with the inauguration of George
W. Bush as President.
But after controlling both houses of Congress and the White House for most of
Bush's six years in office, the party has a governing record that has come
unmoored from those Grand Old Party ideals. The exquisite political
machinery that aces the elections has begun to betray the platform. To win
votes back home, lawmakers have been spending taxpayer money like sailors on
leave, producing the biggest budget deficits in U.S. history. And the
party's approach to national security has taken the country into a war that most
Americans now believe was a mistake and that the government's own intelligence
experts say has shaped "a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."
One of the problems is that after the Republicans got into power, the system
began to change them, not just the other way around. Among the first
promises the G.O.P. majority broke was the setting of term limits. Their
longtime frustrations in the minority didn't necessarily make them any better at
reaching across the aisle either. Compromise, that most central of
congressional checks and balances, has been largely replaced by a kind of
calculated cussedness that has left the G.O.P. isolated and exposed in times of
crisis.
The current crisis arrived with a sex scandal that has muddied one of the
G.O.P.'s few remaining patches of moral high ground: its defense of family
values and personal accountability. Although Hastert and other Republican
leaders say they heard last fall about the "overfriendly" approaches of a
not-so-secretly-gay Congressman to a 16-year-old former page -- both majority
leader John Boehner and campaign chairman Tom Reynolds say they brought it up
with Hastert last spring -- they insist they never imagined anything like the
more graphic instant messages that subsequently came to light. Boehner
spokesman Kevin Madden said his boss was told only that there had been "contact"
between Foley and a page, and that his knowledge of even that much came from a
fleeting conversation on the House floor. But shouldn't someone have got
chills at learning that a 52-year-old man had sent a teenager a creepy e-mail
asking for a "pic of you"? Certainly the page understood what the e-mail
meant, which is why he forwarded it in August 2005 to the office of Louisiana
Congressman Rodney Alexander, who had sponsored him for the page program and who
was alarmed enough to take his concern to Boehner. "This freaked me out,"
the teenager wrote. "Sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick
sick sick sick."
The House response was political from the start. Last November, Jeff
Trandahl, then clerk of the House, told John Shimkus, the Republican head of the
board that oversees the page program, about the less incriminating e-mails.
But nobody bothered to inform the board's lone Democrat. Shimkus and
Trandahl appear to have done nothing more than give Foley a private warning.
When Alexander expanded the circle of those aware of the e-mails the following
spring, one of the two people he chose to loop in was Reynolds, head of the
National Republican Congressional Committee, whose job is managing the election.
Foley wasn't even stripped of his co-chairmanship of the House Caucus on Missing
and Exploited Children.
Even after a batch of truly sleazy instant messages was discovered by ABC News,
Reynolds' chief of staff Kirk Fordham, who was also a former aide to Foley,
tried to solve the political problem by attempting to talk the network out of
publishing the worst of the messages. Fordham resigned last week, but he
didn't go quietly, the way House leaders had hoped. On his way out, he
threw fuel on the political fire by announcing that he had warned Hastert's
staff of Foley's "inappropriate behavior" at least three years ago -- a charge
that Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, denied.
All this suggests that the Republican leaders were motivated much more by fear
of electoral fallout than concern for the young pages in their care. And
if they were worried that the revelation would hurt their chances of holding on
to the House, they turned out to be right. Before the scandal broke, they
were beginning to believe that the clouds were finally clearing for them.
Their fabled get-out-the-vote and fund-raising operations were nearing full
stride just as gas prices were dropping and the national debate was refocusing
on their home-court issue of terrorism.
It seems likely that the party will instead need to reckon with sex and scandal
throughout the final weeks of the election. As conservative George F.
Will, writing in the Washington Post last week, put it, the Foley affair is "a
maraschino cherry atop the Democrats' delectable sundae of Republican miseries."
In the latest TIME poll, conducted the week after the news broke, nearly 80% of
respondents said they were aware of the scandal, and two-thirds of them were
convinced that Republican leaders had tried to cover it up. Among the
registered voters who were polled, 54% said they would be more likely to vote
for the Democratic candidate for Congress, compared with 39% who favored the
Republican -- nearly a perfect reversal of the 51%-40% advantage the G.O.P.
enjoyed as recently as August. There was even worse news in a poll by the
nonpartisan Pew Research Center that showed a precipitous drop in Republican
support among frequent churchgoers, one of the most important and loyal elements
of the G.O.P. base. There's no indication that they are clamoring to be
Democrats, but the risk is that they will simply stay home on Election Day.
One of the victims may turn out to be campaign chairman Reynolds, who suddenly
found himself running as many as 8 points behind in his upstate New York
House-seat re-election bid, which had appeared fairly safe a week earlier.
Hastert's job seems secure for the moment, barring any big new revelations, in
part because the House Speaker is not merely a party leader; the role was
established under the Constitution. It would be difficult to replace
Hastert without summoning Congress back into town from the campaign trail.
Nor would an ugly fight over who would succeed him be good for the party's
prospects in November. Still, Republicans are not particularly eager to be
seen with him. His campaign schedule is starting to look a lot lighter, as
House candidates across the country are turning down his offers to do fund
raisers for them. Even the leadership's much vaunted discipline seems to
be in tatters. Majority leader Boehner defended himself last week by
attacking Hastert: "My position is, it's in his corner, it's his
responsibility." And the third in command, whip Roy Blunt, suggested that
things would have been different if he had been informed. Not
incidentally, both men are expected to consider making a bid for the top job if
Hastert ultimately steps down -- and maybe if he doesn't. But by then the
job description may be House minority leader.
G.O.P. leaders are so desperate to find someone else to blame that they have
been reduced -- with no indication that they see the irony -- to blaming a vast
left-wing conspiracy. "The people who want to see this thing blow up,"
Hastert told the Chicago Tribune, "are ABC News and a lot of Democratic
operatives, people funded by George Soros," the liberal financier who has become
a bogeyman of the right. Hastert went on to say, without producing any
proof, that the revelation was the work of Bill Clinton's operatives. But
that line of argument, of course, suggests that Republicans would have preferred
to keep Foley's secrets locked away, presumably at the pages' peril. And
the Democrats for once are showing the good sense to stay out of the way when
the other side is self-destructing. Sighed one of the younger House
Republican aides who sits in on key meetings: "Foul play on the Democrats'
side? If that is the only card left to play, then we are in serious
trouble."
THE "DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL" PROBLEM
As Hastert and his forces have been trumpeting their charges against the
Democrats, a whisper campaign has been launched in Washington to blame an
internal culprit: a "velvet mafia" at the upper levels of G.O.P.
leadership on Capitol Hill. Foley, that line of argument went, had been
protected by gay staff members like Fordham, Trandahl and others whose names
were being widely circulated. Says a top aide: "It looks like they
may have tried to handle this among themselves because they were similarly
situated."
In many ways, that story line is the product of the strains within the party
over homosexuality. It's a tension nearly as deep and tortured as those
the Democrats grappled with over race a half-century ago, when they tried --
unsuccessfully -- to keep an uneasy coalition of Southern segregationists and
Northern civil rights advocates from tearing their party apart. Even
though many of the G.O.P.'s policies have been hostile to gay rights, its
leaders have long followed a "Don't ask, don't tell" policy with what pretty
much everyone in Washington knows is a sizable number of closeted Republicans
among members of Congress, upper-level staff and top party operatives.
Says Patrick Sammon, executive vice president of the gay group Log Cabin
Republicans: "There are a lot of gay Republicans who are working behind
the scenes to advance the priorities of this party."
Until now, Republicans were able to manage the conflict. And they managed
it by ignoring it. That even became part of an electoral strategy dating
back to the 2000 election that suggested there was nothing to be gained by
moderation. In a memo he wrote to Karl Rove, Bush pollster Matthew Dowd
estimated that truly independent voters had fallen to a mere sliver of the
electorate. There were, Dowd concluded, not enough percentage points in
being "a uniter, not a divider." The key to winning in a polarized country
was mobilizing the conservative base. That year, Bush refused to meet with
the Log Cabin Republicans, choosing instead to see a handpicked group of gay
Republicans, but only after the party's nomination was secured. In 2004,
even as Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter Mary was a potential symbol of the
party's openheartedness, Republicans put anti-gay-marriage measures on 11 state
ballots to drive voter turnout.
But the Foley scandal is making it difficult for the party to look the other
way. Last week some conservatives went so far as to insinuate that Foley proves
that every gay person is a pedophile waiting to happen. "You don't need 'gaydar'
to understand he has certain dispositions," Utah Congressman Chris Cannon told
the Deseret News. Televangelist Pat Robertson recommended that G.O.P.
leaders simply explain the situation this way: "Well, this man's gay.
He does what gay people do."
The resignations of Foley and Fordham sparked fears that other gay Republicans
would also soon be forced out of both their closets and their jobs. "Kirk
is the fall guy," says gay-rights activist Hilary Rosen. "It's going to be
open season on gay Republicans. It's the right wing's perfect storm.
They never wanted gays in their party anyway."
RULING WITH AN IRON FIST
Oddly enough, it was a sex scandal in 1998 that brought Hastert from obscurity
to the Speaker's chair in the first place. Gingrich had been ousted
because his brand of fiery leadership had become such a drag on the party that
it lost seats rather than gained them amid the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
But his anointed successor, Robert Livingston of Louisiana, suddenly backed out
amid revelations of an extramarital affair. That's when the party turned
to Hastert, a former high school wrestling coach whose affability and low-key
demeanor seemed to guarantee calmer times ahead. He was, after all, the
man who said he was too humble to brag about being humble.
And yet the way the House has operated under Hastert has been anything but
humble. He quickly came to be viewed as little more than a genial front
for then majority leader Tom DeLay, whose nickname -- the Hammer -- pretty much
summed up his leadership touch. "There has been no institutional rule,
means, norm or tradition that cannot be set aside to advance a partisan
political goal," says Brookings Institution political scientist Thomas Mann,
co-author of the recently published book whose title describes Congress as The
Broken Branch. In 2003, instead of fashioning a compromise that might woo
a few Democrats, Hastert and DeLay held what was supposed to be a 15-min. vote
open for three full hours as they squeezed the last Republican votes they needed
to pass a bill to provide an expensive prescription drug benefit to the Medicare
program. Far more than in the past, they brought bills to the floor with
no chance of amendment and allowed the normal appropriations process to be
circumvented so that pet projects could be funded without scrutiny. When
DeLay faced indictment by a Texas grand jury, Hastert changed the Republican
rules so that DeLay could stay on as leader -- though in the ensuing outcry, he
had to reverse himself. Hastert was successful, however, in purging the
ethics committee of its chairman and two Republican members who had reprimanded
DeLay for misconduct. Stretching the limits of arcane House rules and
shuffling committees around may not seem like earthshaking offenses, but they
are the same type of procedural strangleholds and power plays that the G.O.P.
had hoped to excise from the body politic 12 years ago.
"The Republican Party of 2006 is a tired, cranky shell of the aggressive,
reformist movement that was swept into office in 1994 on a wave of positive
change," Frank Luntz, one of the strategists of the G.O.P. takeover, wrote this
week in a column for TIME.com "I worked for them. They were friends of
mine. These Republicans are not those Republicans."
On policy matters, Hastert's leadership approach has been to act as though the
Democrats -- and sometimes the Senate -- simply do not exist. He squeezes
hard-edged partisan bills through the House to please the G.O.P. base, even
though they have no chance of ever getting through the Senate and reaching the
President's desk. "There have been numerous occasions when bipartisan
approaches, which would have benefited our conference more than Democrats, have
been rebuffed by the Speaker," complains a senior Republican aide, who says he
likes and respects the Speaker. "His strategy seems to be, 'Well, don't
worry about it. We'll blame [Democratic Leader Nancy] Pelosi.' That
might work in isolated circumstances, but when your party's numbers start to
tank, and people want to see that you can govern, that approach is not a solid
one."
Party leaders concede the point that their revolution hasn't lived up to
everything they promised. But they say voters still see the difference
between where the parties stand. Former Republican chairman Ed Gillespie -- one
of the authors of the Contract with America, on which House Republicans ran in
1994 -- says, "Our party is still better when it comes to spending than the
Democrats, stronger on national security than the Democrats and more likely to
share concerns about the coarsening of our culture that a majority of Americans
share than the Democrats are." Strategists are putting an optimistic face
even on the effects of the Foley scandal, saying their internal polling shows
little movement against the G.O.P.
Will the Democrats behave any differently if they retake Congress in November?
Some would undoubtedly try to use their majority power to exact revenge for
Republican overreach. And history has shown them to be just as capable of
the type of ideological drift that is tearing at the G.O.P.
For now, though, the question on everyone's mind is, How do the Republicans find
their way from here? A number of conservatives have begun to wonder aloud
if it wouldn't be better for the party to lose the House or Senate in November.
If the revolutionaries have become the redcoats, then perhaps it's time for
another uprising. Send the Republicans back into the wilderness so they
can forage for the kind of fresh ideas and guerrilla tactics that made them such
a force during their previous march on Washington. They could very well be
ready in time for the presidential election in 2008. And while they're out
there on the campaign trail, they just might rally around their old general, who
will be looking to cap his own hardscrabble journey from political pariah to
rehabbed revolutionary. That general, of course, is none other than former
Speaker Gingrich, who has been spotted in Iowa, New Hampshire and other
battleground states for more than a year now, taking potshots at the
Establishment he helped create and rearming himself to storm the next barricade.
TIME POLL
THE PRESIDENT
Do you approve of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as President?
• Disapprove 57% • Approve 36%
THE CONGRESS
Disapprove of the job the U.S. Congress is doing
• 57% disapprove • 31% approve • 12% Don't know, Say they would vote for a
Democrat if the congressional election were held today*
• 54% vote for a Democrat • 39% favor a Republican • 7% Other party/ don't know
Think the country would be better off if the Democrats won control of the House
• 49% agree • 38% disagree • 13% Don't know
THE FOLEY CASE
78% of poll respondents were aware of
the scandal involving former G.O.P. Congressman Mark Foley. Their views:
Do you think Republican leaders in Congress handled the Foley situation
properly, or do you think they tried to cover it up?
• Handled properly 16% • Covered it up 64%
Did the disclosure about Foley's sexually explicit instant messages to teenage
congressional pages and the handling of this situation by the House Republican
leadership make you less likely to vote for the Republican candidate in your
district, more likely, or did it really have no effect on how you will vote?
Less likely 25% More likely 4% No effect 68%
Do you think Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert should resign as Speaker
because of his handling of the Foley case?
• Yes 39% • No 38% • Don't know 23%
This TIME poll was conducted by telephone Oct. 3-4 among 1,002 adult Americans
by SRBI Public Affairs. The margin of error is 3 percentage points.
"Don't know" responses omitted for some questions.
*Asked of registered voters
With reporting by Mike Allen, Melissa August, Perry Bacon Jr.,
Brian Bennett, Timothy J. Burger, Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Ana Marie
Cox/ Washington, Jeffrey Ressner/Simi Valley
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