Foley tips party into crisis with core voters

Foley tips party into crisis with core voters
By Edward Luce in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: October 4 2006 18:35 | Last updated: October 4 2006 18:35


Only an “act of God” could reverse the Republican party’s sharply declining fortunes in the critical mid-term congressional elections that take place in less than five weeks, according to senior conservative consultants and opinion polls.

The latest scandal to hit the Republicans – involving a lawmaker, Mark Foley, exchanging suggestive electronic messages with under-age page boys on Capitol Hill – could prove the “tipping point” for social conservative voters already disillusioned with their party’s congressional and presidential performance.

According to a Reuters-Zogby poll on Wednesday, the Democrats have a clear lead over the Republicans in 11 of the 15 races they must win to regain control of the House of Representatives for the first time since 1994. They also have narrow leads in a number of other critical house races.

There are growing indications that the Democrats could also be in a position to win the six seats they need to recapture the Senate for the first time since 2002.

“The mood among conservative voters in America reminds me of the atmosphere among British Conservatives in 1997 shortly before Tony Blair became prime minister,” said Frank Luntz, probably the most influential Republican political consultant. “The level of incompetence and mismanagement by the Republican leadership has been so bad it would take an act of God to regain their momentum.”

Attempts by Republicans to draw a line under last week’s revelations that the party’s leadership had known for years that Mr Foley, a Republican representative from Florida, was conducting improper communications with under-age boys have so far failed.

It has also been exacerbated by in-fighting among Republican leaders with John Boehner, the Republican majority leader, suggesting that the scandal was the responsibility of Dennis Hastert, the Republican speaker of the house, and Mr Hastert implying his own staff were to blame.

The scandal, which is now being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, follows a guilty plea last month by Bob Ney, a Republican representative from Ohio, on a corruption indictment and the conviction earlier this year of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, another Republican lawmaker, for corruption.

“There comes a tipping point where these scandals pile up one upon the other and the voters start to react very negatively,” said Norm Ornstein, a veteran Congress-watcher at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “Unless something really unusual happens – say the US captures Osama bin Laden in the next month or we uncover another major al-Qaeda plot – it looks like Republicans have reached that point.”

But Republican strategists can still draw on a large war chest, which, at close to $200m (€158m, £106m), is almost twice as large as that of the Democrats. The election strategy remains two-pronged: to focus on the larger “war on terror” and to localise congressional races – partly through “attack ads” on Democrat candidates – in order to divert attention from scandals, the war in Iraq and the unpopularity of George W. Bush.

In an interview with Rush Limbaugh, the most widely followed conservative “talk radio” host, Mr Hastert indicated that the Republicans plan to refocus attention aggressively on the Democrats’ alleged weakness on national security. Mr Hastert implied that the page-boy scandal was a red herring.

“This [scandal] is a political issue in itself . . . and what we’ve tried to do as the Republican party is make a better economy, protect this country against terrorism and there are some people that try to tear us down,” he said. “We are the insulation to protect this country.”

However, Christian conservative groups appear alienated. “When a 16-year-old boy is not safe from sexual solicitation from an elected representative, we should question the moral direction of our nation,” said Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, a pro-Republican group. “If our children aren’t safe in the halls of Congress, where are they safe?”