Foley Scandal Too Big to Spin

WASHINGTON--Partisan panic in the wake of former Rep. Mark Foley's e-mail scandal seems to have caused some conservatives to forget their own sermons about personal responsibility. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and others show little interest in owning their own problems when they try to blame their usual suspects, Democrats and the media, without evidence to back up the charge.

"When the (Republican Party's conservative) base finds out who's feeding this monster, they're not going to be happy," a defiant Hastert told the Chicago Tribune five days after Foley resigned amid ABC News reports of his sexually suggestive e-mails and Internet messages to teenaged boys in the House page program. "The people who want to see this thing blow up are ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by (liberal philanthropist) George Soros."

I've looked at that quote every which way and I can't find any way that it makes Hastert look good. His unsubstantiated allegations were quickly denied by all of the parties he named. Instead of saving himself, Hastert sounded ironically like two of his conservative movement's arch-foes: President Bill Clinton, who criticized ABC News for its damaging scoops during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and Hillary Clinton, who once blamed an unnamed "vast right-wing conspiracy" for her husband's political troubles.

Besides, Democrats wish they were as clever as Hastert would have us think they are. Even if a left-wing conspiracy did know about the allegations, it would only raise more questions as to why Hastert did not know about them or, at least, act more aggressively to investigate Foley's initially ambiguous-sounding messages when Hastert learned about them months ago.

Hastert's office learned last fall about an odd e-mail that Foley had sent to a 16-year-old boy asking about the teen's birthday and inviting him to send Foley a photo of himself. Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Republican Campaign Committee, says he told Hastert last spring about that incident, which ended with a warning to Foley to halt contact with the boy. Hastert has said he doesn't remember that conversation but doesn't dispute it. After ABC News reported sexually explicit instant messages that Foley wrote to a different male page in 2003, Foley stepped down and Hastert suddenly was in hot political water.

Hillary Clinton's charge did enflame the Clintons' liberal base, just as Hastert's invoking the name of the billionaire Soros, a favorite whipping-boy of conservatives, undoubtedly was intended to enflame his conservative base. His base needs enflaming. Polls showed many core conservatives are disenchanted over the Iraq war, immigration, the deficit and other current issues even before the Foley fiasco unfolded.

With that in mind, efforts to blame the media or Democrats for the Foley fallout sound like the last refuge of the politically trapped, especially when Hastert's biggest critics include such prominent conservative voices as the Washington Times, which has called for his resignation.

Even feeble attempts by some conservative commentators to bring up former Rep. Gerry Studds, a Massechusetts Democrat censured in 1983 but reelected six more times despite an admitted affair with a male page fall flat. Democrats can come back with reminders of Rep. Dan Crane, an Illinois Republican who was censured for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old female page in 1983 and was defeated in his next election. Either way, it is Republicans who have made moral values a centerpiece of their appeal to "values voters," who put their highest priority on such issues. It doesn't help matters, after running as guardians of moral uprightness, to argue that you're no worse than the other guys.

Hastert did the right thing in a news conference on the day after his Tribune interview. He invoked Harry Truman's memorable quote "the buck stops here," and announced a House investigation into who knew what about Foley's creepy messages to pages and former pages and when they knew what they knew. He also announced full cooperation by the House with the FBI's investigation of Foley's possibly criminal activities.

That cooperation is particularly significant to those who remember Hastert's outrage over the FBI's search of Rep. William Jefferson's congressional office late one Saturday night last spring in their investigation of bribery allegations against the Louisiana Democrat. Hastert's concern for separation of powers may have been valid under constitutional law, but it did not play well with law-and-order conservatives to whom he seemed to sound more concerned with protecting lawmakers than rooting out lawbreakers. (An appeals court later ruled in favor of the FBI.)

Sometimes in politics, it pays to sweat the small stuff. Politics is 90 percent perceptions, by my humble estimates, and the negative perceptions left by Foley-gate hit Republicans in their core values. Having run for office as small-government "outsiders" who would clean up the mess in Washington, conservatives cannot afford to be perceived as having become part of the mess, even if they have.