Pressure on Hastert, Republicans
From Foley Scandal Intensifies
The Wall Street Journal
By DAVID ROGERS and JOHN HARWOOD
October 4, 2006
Amid new signs that Republicans' political woes are deepening, House Speaker Dennis Hastert rejected conservative calls for his resignation over the Mark Foley-congressional page scandal. But for the first time, there appears to be a real chance the Illinois Republican could opt to step down after next month's election even if his party retains power.
And with new polls showing the party slipping, Mr. Hastert faces immense pressure to respond more emphatically to the almost daily revelations of Mr. Foley's sexually explicit cyber-communications with teenage former pages.
"We have to do something different, more dramatic," said Rep. Ray LaHood (R., Ill.). "This is a political mess and what we've done so far is not working. Somebody has to take responsibility for this. It is on our watch."
At a news conference last evening in West Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Foley's attorney for the first time announced the former lawmaker is gay, and said Mr. Foley had been molested between the ages 13 and 15 by a clergyman. But the lawyer, David Roth, said his client had never engaged in sexual relations with a minor notwithstanding his online contacts.
The hailstorm of unfavorable publicity that has hit Republicans and President Bush -- extending beyond the Foley matter to Iraq -- have cost the party the initiative at a critical point in the midterm-election campaign, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted during the weekend.
The survey shows that by 41%-18%, Americans say news they "have seen and heard over the past few weeks" has made them less favorable toward continued Republican control of Congress; by 34%-23% they called themselves more favorably inclined toward Democratic control. It also shows a decline in Mr. Bush's job approval rating to 39% from 42% earlier this month.
Even before the Nov. 7 elections, there is mounting pressure on Republican House leaders over the Foley scandal. In an interview late Tuesday, Mr. Hastert said he would be willing to resign if he thought it would help the party but isn't convinced this is the case. "If I thought it would help the party, I would consider it, but I think just the opposite," he said.
Any abrupt departure could disrupt the rest of the leadership in the final weeks of the campaign. And one of the Republicans' weaknesses now is they have no clear transition figure.
If the party were to lose power, Mr. Hastert is already expected to step out of the leadership. He said Tuesday that if the party retains power, it is still his intention to run for speaker in the next Congress but "you have to count the votes."
The damage from the scandal now complicates that task because the office of the speaker is elected by the full House. If Republicans lose seats, any small block unhappy with the party's leadership would gain more say in deciding who is speaker.
President Bush came to the speaker's assistance Tuesday: "I know Denny Hastert... I know that he wants all the facts to come out," Mr. Bush said. And stung by a "Resign Mr. Speaker" editorial in the conservative Washington Times, which described his performance as "inept," Mr. Hastert spent the day on radio talks shows trying to tamp down the anger against him.
Mr. Hastert's aides trumpeted a letter Tuesday night from Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition supporting Mr. Hastert. And appearing with conservative radio-show host Rush Limbaugh, Mr. Hastert sought to shift blame to Democrats, saying the opposition is orchestrating the leaks of explicit instant messages between Foley and former pages.
"We have a story to tell, and the Democrats have -- in my view have -- put this thing forward to try to block us from telling the story. They're trying to put us on defense," Mr. Hastert said.
Republicans have discussed ending the page program entirely or appointing a high-profile attorney to review the situation. "We have to act quickly," said House Rules Committee Chairman Davie Dreier (R., Calif.), a Hastert confidant. And the speaker he wants to create a blue-ribbon panel to assess the situation and what more could be done to better protect teenagers in the program both during their participation and after they have left Washington.
"When they leave Washington we don't have much control over it," Mr. Hastert said. "We're trying to put something together that would help."
The pattern followed by Mr. Foley, a Florida Republican who resigned abruptly on Friday, was to pursue pages after they had ended their tenure at the Capitol. ABC News, for example, posted new communications Tuesday in which Mr. Foley appears to have interrupted a vote on the House floor in 2003 to engage in Internet sex with a teenager who was still in high school but no longer a page.
The graphic nature of the instant messages adds to their impact on voters. "This isn't a lobbyist moving money around for favors. This is pretty easy to understand what's going on here," said one Republican leadership aide. And Mr. Hastert says he has felt blind-sided by the recent revelations, saying that the sexual content goes far beyond the "red flag" Foley email his office became aware of last fall, which requested a page's photo but include no overt sexual overtures.
Nonetheless, the speaker was hurt by the fact that he went home to his farm in Illinois on Friday night, as the scandal was breaking. It wasn't until Saturday night that the leadership produced a united statement on the crisis, and associates worry the press-shy speaker will be typecast as a Washington version of Cardinal Bernard Law, who was faulted for not doing more to address child abuse by priests in the Boston Archdiocese.
As speaker, Mr. Hastert is most responsible for the page program, and when parents of a Louisiana teenager were upset by an August 2005 Foley email to their son, a former page, the complaint was taken to Mr. Hastert's staff last fall. But Mr. Hastert says he wasn't fully informed by his aides until recently, and even now he often mistakenly speaks of the issue being handled by the House Page Board, when in fact most of the six member panel were excluded from knowing of the complaint.
Instead, Rep. John Shimkus (R., Ill.), the board's chairman and a Hastert ally, chose to deal with the issue without informing Democrats and simply going to Mr. Foley directly and warning him to stop. Mr. Foley, whose political committees have contributed more than $700,000 to fellow Republicans in the last five elections, had some modest clout in the House. But the expedited, discreet handling of the affair most illustrates fears that if the complaint became public, it could hurt Mr. Foley and the party by reawakening public speculation about his being gay. He and party leaders were concerned such a revelation could cost him the support of voters.
"It was commonly known that Mark was gay," said Rep. Ray LaHood (R., Ill.). And Rep, Barney Frank, an openly gay Democrat from Massachusetts, said the whole handling of the initial complaint appeared driven by Mr. Foley's political situation. "Knowing as they did that Mark was gay -- and was conflicted about how to handle it -- made this more sensitive politically," Mr. Frank said.
Meanwhile, the latest Journal/NBC poll suggests even more problems for Republicans' campaign positions, with a 46% plurality of Americans now saying the war in Iraq is hurting the nation's ability to win the fight against terrorism. That is up from 32% earlier this month when Americans were nearly evenly divided over whether the war was helping, hurting or not making a difference in the war on terrorism.
The results show the signs of momentum from the president's early September political offensive calling voters' attention to the broader war on terrorism have halted. The poll came amid a double-barreled dose of bad news for Mr. Bush's party, from disclosures about Mr. Foley to questions about progress in Iraq. The survey didn't ask specifically about the sex scandal or recent assessments of the war.
"No incumbent party wants to run an election on these sorts of issues," says Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who helps conduct the Journal/NBC survey. Mr. McInturff predicted a renewed Republican effort to focus on terrorism. But Democratic counterpart Peter Hart calls it "a moment of crystallization" in the battle to determine whether the Republicans keep the House and Senate for the last two years of Mr. Bush's term. The survey of 805 registered voters, conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 2, has a margin for error of 3.5 percentage points.
The survey shows Democrats -- who need a net gain of 15 House seats and six Senate seats to recapture control of Capitol Hill -- holding a nine-percentage-point edge, 48%-39%, on the question of which party voters want to control Congress after the election. That is unchanged from early this month.
The Foley matter comes as voters have already been souring on incumbents in general, and the Republican-led Congress in particular. In the poll, voters, by 45%-38%, said it is time to give a new person a chance rather than re-elect their incumbent member of Congress; in early September, voters split on that question.
By 57%-37%, voters say America's safety from terrorism doesn't depend on success in Iraq, which has been a central assertion of Mr. Bush and Republican congressional candidates. And by 61%-29%, voters say Iraq is now in a state of civil war -- a conclusion the White House has tried to forestall in the belief it would further erode support for Mr. Bush's policy there. Even Republicans, by 47%-39%, share that assessment.
The poll also contains signs that the congressional Republican strategy of "localizing" elections to take the spotlight off a politically weakened Mr. Bush isn't working. Fully two-thirds of voters now say their decision for Congress will be a signal for the Bush administration -- with 39% signaling opposition and 28% signaling support. In April, only about half of Americans called their vote a signal for the administration.
The poll's best news for Republicans is what Mr. McInturff calls a "lessening of economic tension and pressure" as gasoline prices have fallen and the stock market has flourished. Voters now split, at 22% apiece, on whether the economy will get better or worse over the next year. In June a 40% plurality of voters predicted the economy would get worse.
Write to David Rogers at david.rogers@wsj.com and John Harwood at john.harwood@wsj.com
