UNTANGLING FOLEY'S WEB - Plenty of Damage but no Control

UNTANGLING FOLEY'S WEB - Plenty of Damage but no Control
by Clarence Page
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Published October 4, 2006


WASHINGTON -- They've been getting by on spin and raw power for so long that House Republican leaders apparently don't know how to handle a truly damaging scandal.

Fingers are pointing every which way as to exactly how and when top House Republicans responded to word that Florida Rep. Mark Foley was sending creepy e-mails to a former teenage male page. A new version of an old Watergate-era question now swirls around House Speaker Dennis Hastert: What did he not know and when did he not know it?

Hastert said he does not recall being told last spring by Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), the National Republican Congressional Committee chairman, about Foley's questionable e-mail exchange with the page, although Hastert does not dispute Reynolds' account. Wrong answer. Inability to recall alleged mash notes from a congressman to a teenage page makes one wonder what else the speaker may have lost in his amnesia.

Hastert and other leaders say they first became aware of "over-friendly" e-mails from Foley to the underage page last spring. "There wasn't much there other than a friendly inquiry," Hastert said of the 2005 message from Foley to the page.

An "over-friendly" e-mail would certainly raise alarm bells in my head and in the heads of quite a few other parents I know. Yet, Hastert and other House leaders didn't probe much further.

Foley already had been confronted last fall by Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.), chairman of the House Page Board. Foley was told to break off contact with the page, according to Hastert's office. Hastert told reporters on Monday that his aides and Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.), the page's congressman, had dropped the matter in accordance with the page's parents' wishes.

House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said on a Cincinnati radio interview that Hastert had assured him last spring that the matter "had been taken care of."

The story exploded onto Page 1 last week when ABC News reported the existence of far more lurid e-mails to other pages.

Suddenly, the vaunted GOP spin machine threw itself into gear. White House spokesman Tony Snow dismissively called the messages "naughty," then later jacked up his language to much stronger denunciations. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich said on a TV talk show that House leaders might have worried that if they pursued the matter they'd be "accused of gay-bashing." But Foley was not in hot water for being homosexual. He was in trouble for making the sort of suggestions by e-mail to teenage boys that would have been no less vile or, perhaps, criminal if made to a teenage girl under the custodial care of the House page program.

And, of course, none of this would be as damaging to House leaders had they not allowed Foley to remain head of the congressional caucus on missing and exploited children. That's the congressional equivalent of assigning a fox to guard the henhouse.

The first rule of damage control is to assess the damage. Unfortunately for Hastert and other House leaders, they tried to brush the Foley matter aside. Now it has come back to possibly damage their chances of keeping the House in the November elections.

Even the conservative Washington Times is calling for Hastert's resignation as speaker as the party faces midterm elections.

The only good news politically for Republicans is that their sinking polls so far have not been accompanied by soaring approval numbers for Democrats. The public appears to be weary of lackluster leadership on both sides of the aisle..

The Foley fallout sadly illustrates why absolute power corrupts so absolutely. Lack of accountability makes the powerful arrogant. The best way to offset an arrogant party in a democracy is by voting more power to the opposition party. Neither party is corruption-free, but competition helps to keep bad behavior in check.

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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: cptime@aol.com