Holy Moly
From MSNBC.com:
A new poll by Newsweek indicated the Foley scandal was doing significant damage to the Republicans' political fortunes and could sink their chances of holding onto control of Congress on Election Day, Nov. 7. The poll found that 52 percent of Americans, including 29 percent of Republicans, believe Hastert was aware of Foley's Internet communications with underage pages and tried to cover up Foley's actions. More of those polled, 42 percent, now say they trust Democrats to do a better job handling moral values than Republicans; 36 percent favored Republicans on the values question.
A new poll by Newsweek indicated the Foley scandal was doing significant damage to the Republicans' political fortunes and could sink their chances of holding onto control of Congress on Election Day, Nov. 7. The poll found that 52 percent of Americans, including 29 percent of Republicans, believe Hastert was aware of Foley's Internet communications with underage pages and tried to cover up Foley's actions. More of those polled, 42 percent, now say they trust Democrats to do a better job handling moral values than Republicans; 36 percent favored Republicans on the values question.
posted by juvenal_urbino | 7:55 PM
14 Comments:
This is another of those things I don't understand. I'm not sure why this incident would shake my faith in whatever party I voted for. If I were a Republican, I would write it off as one or two Republicans failing, not the values of an entire party.
The bad news for Democrats is that they are gaining support without actually doing anything. I'd rather them be doing something positive and productive rather than just waiting for the other side to implode.
From the "new guy on the block" invited by Al, so blame him! :-)
Michael - as a dyed-in-the-wool, "Yellow Dog" Democrat, I too wish they'd do something more positive. OTOH,I think it is more than one or two Republicans whose values are off base - starting at very near the top.
Welcome, unicorn. I blame Al for a lot of things.
It is amazing to me that this is what shakes the faith of a nation in a party.
I don't think it'd take too much to regain that faith. Apparently, a good Democrat scandal would do the trick.
Al finished 3rd in the poll:
Democrats 42%
Republicans 36%
Al 16%
I'm like Mikey, in that I'm stunned by these numbers. For the past 20 yrs., the term "moral values" has been so closely associated with "Republican position," the two were, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable. That was mostly a result of efforts by GOP strategists to plant just that association in the public mind.
How disheartening must numbers like these be, after all those years of effort? I mean, I'm a liberal, and they take my breath away just from the sheer surprise.
I also agree that it'd be nice if the Dems were doing something positive, rather than just benefiting from the unmasking of the GOP. It's not like there aren't Big Values Issues available to stake out a position on (torture, civil liberties, separation of powers, pre-emptive war, climate change, open government, energy policy, the wealth gap, etc.). And it's not like they're not going to have to stake out positions on those issues if they win either house in November.
Oh, Please - no more Democratic scandals! We had at least a generation's worth in the last decade.
Turn about is fair play.
JU -- you bring up a good point. IF the Dems when control, THEN they will have to take a stand on something. They can't just sit back and attack. Which should scare some of the Dem. leaders. At least I hope it does. Because I'm ready for them to do something.
I'm not getting my hopes up. For the past 10-15 yrs., we've had a choice between a party that stands up for nothing (Dems), and a party that stands up for the wrong things (GOP). I don't see anybody in the House or Senate who looks like they've got what it takes to change that, for either party.
The main (only?) benefit I see from the Dems' winning either house is that we'll finally, for the very first time in 6 yrs., see some pushback on the White House. (Which should also raise the temperature on those presidential signing statements.) Possibly some actual congressional oversight, too. Maybe. I'll believe it when I see it.
I truly appreciate all the love shown for me here... :-)
The numbers are surprising, but I think the fact JU brought up (how hard Republicans worked to associate voting for them with "moral values," especially characterizing homosexuality and promiscuity as being at the head of the class of "bad things") helps explain why this comes across to Joe Q. Voter as more than just 1-2 guys making a mistake.
The spin "Vote Republican = No Sex Scandals" turns out to be untrue. To be totally ugly about it, the story turns out to be that The Congressman Has No Clothes (and you can make up your own punchline from there).
Now...
To me, the challenge for the Democrats is this: the BIG issue on the table to seize and run with is the war, but seeing as their spinelessness in the beginning contributed to our being there in the first place, they'll have a hard time agreeing on how to spin this one.
So if I was the strategist for the Democratic Party, I think I'd emphasize two issues: energy (spin the price of gasoline) and wealth gap (the two go together).
I saw Bill Clinton on C-SPAN the other day campaigning for someone, and his approach was strange/interesting/effective: he branded what's going on in Washington as being a "small" group within the Republican Party. In effect, he said "We like Republicans and conservatism overall - they're our sisters/brothers - but these nutcases in charge have to be stopped." He spoke of the huge debt incurred since 2001 and said, "That's not conservative." He spoke about our borrowing money from Mexico to pay for his personal tax cuts, etc.
I'm officially rambling now...
Joe's back!!!!!!!! Whaddayaknow?!
Was it the Mets victory last night that did it?
:-)
Glad to have you back around. JU emailed me the other day wondering how to get some politically-conservative voices back around, and I was at a loss as to how. So in addition to just "you" being back around, more than one of us is glad to have your perspective, too.
To answer your question, my gas prices are definitely down. Not as much here as in other places I've traveled recently, but maybe 40-50 cents/gallon. So your point is valid - don't know if the timing is great to spin that particular issue, though I still think it is a significant problems for lots of voters.
Welcome back, Joe. Doesn't say much about me, maybe, but I'd already forgotten the scandal, and it's only a couple of weeks old. It isn't necessarily a good thing for Democrats, as I stated out earlier in the thread, that they are going to gain lots of votes off of this issue alone.
And like you, I'm tired of the announcers talking about the vastly superior American League.
Welcome back, Joe! Nice to have you around.
I just have to say bravo to the strategist that held onto the IMs until the perfect moment to cause max damage.
Painting this as a strategic Dem leak is a pretty tough sell, don't you think? Like I said, I wouldn't put it past them (or the GOP, either, were the cell phone on the other foot), but it just doesn't add up.
For one thing, the story didn't break at "the perfect moment to cause max damage." It would've been much more useful a couple weeks closer to the elections. Moreover, coming out when it did, it completely squashed the NIE and Woodward book stories, which were poised to do a lot of work for the Dems.
For another thing, I still find it very hard to imagine that members of the Republican caucus would have shared this kind of information about one of their own with the Democrats. The Republican leader of the Page Board, for example, didn't tell either of the other members of the board, not even his fellow Republican. (This problem also makes it hard to say this is a "Congressional" scandal, rather than a Republican one.)
And the last problem is that the media outlets who broke the story all say their sources were Republicans or the pages themselves.
I just don't see how a Republican congressman's misbehavior and the Republican leadership's mishandling of it is somehow the Democrats' fault.
~~
I'm rootin' for the Tigers, too. Because the Tigers really should win the World Series on those rare occasions when they have a chance. And because neither of the NL teams is good enough to deserve being rooted for, except by their own fans.
Weren't they just as inappropriate three years ago?
They were. But if it's a strategic Dem "leak," wouldn't it have been just as helpful to the Dems to leak it 2 yrs. ago, if not more so, given that it was a presidential election year?
I'll check out the WaPo article later this evening.
If they all thought he was creepy and inappropriate, why didn't any of them do anything?
I've found it's often the case that not everybody knows what supposedly "everybody knows," if you know what I mean.
I've read the WaPo article, now, and I'm not sure I see your point, Joe. There's almost nothing in it, good or bad, about Hastert or any other Republican leader. What am I missing?
It does say that at least some of the sources for some of the media reports were Democrats, so there's that. Although, none of them were officeholders.
Here's a WaPo article about Hastert, by way of MSNBC.
That's not quite what the article says, actually. It says a Dem operative shopped the more innocuous emails around, and nobody would run the story. ABC ran it when a Republican source brought it to them.
To me, that doesn't tell us much at all about what Hastert, et al., knew or when they knew it. The news outlets might have declined the story from the Dem operative because all he had were fairly innocuous emails. They might have declined it because, coming from a political hack from the other party, it smelled like a smear job.
ABC might have decided to run the story because their source was from Foley's own party, and therefore less likely to be politically motivated and therefore more credible. Or maybe because, with the Dem operative, it gave them a second source. Or it could be that the Republican source gave them information the Dem source didn't have -- information that was less innocuous.
There's just not enough information in this article for us to be able to draw a conclusion about who knew what when within the House.
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