Mark Foley's longterm practice of befriending pages while demonstrating obvious sexual desire for them--and the long awareness of this by pages, supervisors, staff and Congressional leaders--has the potential to be the greatest scandal since Watergate. That wonderful Howard Baker question at the Watergate hearings--"What did he know and when did he know it?"--is re-emerging as the theme that threatens to sink key Republican leaders.
Some Republicans are busy blaming Democrats for keeping this issue on the front pages and the TV news. But the real culprit is some of the Republicans themselves, who see a chance to get the scalp of Dennis Hastert and others, and want to take it.
Running in a House leadership election, in the words of Pennsylvania House Democratic leader Bill DeWeese, is a "rough and tumble" process. Nowhere does it appear more rough and tumble than in the U.S. House Republican caucus.
These are the guys who helped force the much-married Newt Gingrich out just four years after the 1994 takeover which he had quarterbacked. These are the guys who removed John Boehner as Republican Caucus Chairman for insufficient loyalty to Tom DeLay, only to reinstall him in elective leadership as DeLay's successor.
These are the guys who publicly encouraged Bob Livingston to bail out of the Speaker's race to succeed Gingrich after the revelation of an extramarital affair with a lobbyist whose legislation he was pushing. These are the guys who intensely quizzed Dennis Hastert on his sex life before giving him the go-ahead to succeed Gingrich.
These are the guys who recruited J.C. Watts to defeat Boehner, but then refused to back Watts for any internal caucus promotions. They were willing to go just far with affirmative action, and Watts decided it was not far enough and left the House.
Running for the House Republican leadership is like swimming in shark-infested waters. Somebody has to win the election, but the winner may well wind up as sharkfood.
After the exits of Gingrich, Dick Armey, DeLay, and Livingston, power vacuums developed. DeLay perhaps had the most power of anyone in the group, and so his departure leaves a very big hole.
Hastert got into elective leadership as a DeLay protege, and now that DeLay is gone, Hastert was in real trouble without Mark Foley's emergence as a major national figure. With Foley in the news, allies of the current Boehner-led majority coalition in the House Republican Caucus not only have the desire to get rid of Boehner-opponent Hastert, but they have the nuclear weapon to do so.
The regulation of sexual desire has been both the meal ticket and the Achilles heel of the Republican Party. The idealistic Republican position in support of premarital chastity and marital fidelity and against anything leading to public gay identities is undercut by the realities of people's lives. People--especially Republican people--cannot all meet Republican standards of moral purity.
The amount of forgiveness that can be doled out is potentially large. Sinners can make amends in many ways, especially ways that have to do with raising and spending money. Nothing creates the insecurity so helpful to fundraising like a secret that could destroy one's career if found out. So the most scandal-ridden Republicans perennially turn out to be among the most diligent Republican fundraisers.
The Washington Republicans are in a terrible quandary that will be difficult to escape.They have created a base interested or obsessed with a standard of sexual morality that so many of them cannot meet that enforcement within their caucus is practically impossible.
To become tolerant of gay rights and to allow their high-ranking gays and lesbians to openly pursue both sex and the fight for equality will threaten their self-created base. But to be intolerant of gay sexuality is only to drive it underground and to encourage the members they consider morally weak to completely hide their activities as long as they possibly can.
In the real world, some Republican people (and Democratic people, and independent people) pursue relationships that are morally questionable, especially by moral zealots. Democrats try to add dignity to people's lives by pursuing gay rights and by seeking to remove impediments to marriages and second and subsequent marriages, but Republicans have little public policy to offer the those whom they consider to be sexually weak-willed.
And so Republican gatherings--formal and informal--can be treacherous places. In George Orwell's 1984, an official document says "to know and to not know (simultaneously); that is the essence of doublethink." No one is better at doublethink than high-ranking Republicans, and their zeal to stamp out immorality has consequences among their own base that are quite severe.
I do not think Dennis Hastert can satisfy the upwelling of moral superiority among his troops and his allies. He appears guilty of treating Foley as a friend of longstanding, instead of as a prosecutorial target who should have been under House investigation.
That Hastert has gay friends and friends involved in extramarital affairs might make him a more broad-minded person in the sense of having a greater knowledge of human motivation and frailty. But that is not an asset among today's Washington Republicans, and his failure to go for the jugular when faced with human weaknesses only brightens the bulls-eye target now emblazoned on Hastert's chest.
Whenever Hastert goes, the Republican Party will have to face the vast gap between its ideals of self-sacrifice and its realities of personal gratification. The Washington Republicans are neither empathetic enough to win the support of a real majority of the American people, nor are they mean enough to hold onto their base.
Party meltdowns are wonderful for the opposition party, and the Democrats are well-poised to take advantage of whatever opportunities are offerred them.
The most important story, in short, is not the morality of Mark Foley but the morality of his enablers who talked and acted against gay rights and perogatives in public, but went far beyond legitimate gay demands in privately acquiescing in Foley's sexual cruising among the ranks of 16 year old pages. Such hypocrisy cannot last without grievous consequences.