HOME / readme: Policy made plain.

Folier Than ThouThe po-faced contest between Republicans and Democrats.

By Michael KinsleyPosted Friday, Oct. 20, 2006, at 6:49 AM ET

Here in Washington, we're all competing to see who can be more po-faced about Mark Foley and the congressional pages. Who can deplore Foley's behavior the most? Democrats, sensing a deeply wounded Republican Party, are going in for the kill. It's the final evidence that the GOP is terminally corrupt: A congressman was cyber-molesting teenage boys, and his party leaders evidently didn't even care. Republicans answer: Hey, we invented child molesting! As an issue, that is. We own family values, and we're not about to let the party of Monica Lewinsky* and Heather Has Two Mommies outflank us on the sexual morality front. And then there are gay voices, eager to remind people that being gay and molesting children are two different things, which, of course, they are. But just to make the point clear, gays want everyone to know that they defer to no one in their distaste for Foley's behavior.

RSS

So, everyone claims to be terribly distressed. We glare at each other, looking as grim as possible, and the first one to break into a grin or a smirk or a snort loses. Stop it! It's not funny! But then, who are all the people watching Letterman and Leno, Stewart and Colbert, and laughing—laughing!—at Mark Foley's shenanigans? Who are the people cracking jokes on the Internet? They are so distressed that they can't stop giggling, and they find the whole subject so distasteful that they can't get enough of it. This is not a traditional case of politicians' hypocrisy. This is politicians accommodating the hypocrisy of voters.

Perhaps it would be a better world if everybody were as disgusted by the Foley episode as almost everybody claims to be. But the truth is that most people are enjoying this story and can't get enough of it. If you gave them the secret power to wish the whole thing away, they'd say, "Are you nuts? This is terrific!" Poor Dennis Hastert is suspected, probably falsely, of being willing to sacrifice a child for the good of his party, and now the other party reaps the benefit. Do you think that if the devil told Nancy Pelosi she could undo the scandal, save these 17-year-olds from the trauma of e-mail from a sicko congressman, and give up her hopes of being speaker, that she would find such an offer tempting? I don't. And I don't think Nancy Pelosi is callous or cruel. If she thought it through, she might conclude that the good that can come from a Democratic Congress exceeds the evil that a few randy e-mails may have done to a few teenage pages. Meanwhile, most Americans, I strongly suspect, would happily sacrifice a few more pages just to keep the story going for entertainment purposes.

Then there is Gerry Studds (who, by a weird coincidence, died suddenly last week). Studds was a Democratic congressman who, in 1983, was censured for having an actual, physical affair with a congressional page 10 years before that. After his censure, he continued to run in his district (in Massachusetts, natch), to win, and to serve in Congress until 1997. Compare and contrast Mark Foley: It develops that he may have had physical something-or-other with a page after all. But even before this came out, he had resigned under pressure on the basis of those e-mails alone. Doesn't that prove that Republicans are more serious about Protecting Our Children than Democrats are? Don't they win the po-faced contest?

The Studds case is troubling. Do the Republicans have a point? Maybe, but there are a few points in mitigation, as well. One is the huge random element in what becomes a Washington scandal. You don't need ideological conspiracies or grand cultural tectonic shifts. Whether something becomes a scandal depends on how close we are to an election, on what else is in the news, on what Michael Isikoff had for lunch, and so on.

The Studds case came paired with that of Republican congressman Dan Crane, who had an affair with a female page. In a mutual disarmament agreement, both miscreants were "censured," which was actually a ratchet up from "reprimanded," or "scolded," or "tickled," or some other term recommended by an outside committee. Speaker Dennis Hastert says that if Mark Foley hadn't resigned immediately, he would have been bounced. Maybe. But Crane, like Studds, was renominated by his party in the 1984 election. That would be the Republican Party. (Unlike Studds, Crane lost.)

Back in 1983, Studds took the position that the page had been over the age of consent in the District of Columbia, which is 16, and consent for the affair had, in fact, been mutual. This, of course, left out the question of whether, as a member of Congress, he had some special duty to protect even 17-year-old congressional pages from middle-aged men like himself. He probably did have such a duty, though he never paraded around as a protector of children, as Foley did.

A final difference between Studds and Foley is that the Foley case exposed the tawdry mechanics of a congressman trolling for action among teenage pages. No doubt the Studds affair involved the pre-e-mail equivalent of these mechanics, but they never became public. Obviously, that doesn't excuse Studds. But it also does not establish anything superior about Republican moral values.

Correction, Oct. 20: An earlier version of this piece misspelled Monica Lewinsky's last name. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Michael Kinsley is a columnist for the Washington Post and the founding editor of Slate.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

You would think Michael Kinsley would draw the obvious comparison for the Foley scandal. It's not Studds, Crane or Monica. It's the House banking "scandal" of 1991-2. That non-scandal "scandal" was the predicate that set the Republicans up for sweeping the House in 1994. It was supposedly about how Congressmen (most, but not all, Democrats) subverted the system by bouncing checks at the member-run House bank, though as Kinsley pointed out at the time, the House bank was funded by the members' own money and most of the bounced checks were due to congressmen's own constituents ripping them off.

Ah, but what made it so powerful for the Republicans was the "metaphor" of the House Bank. Here was something real Americans could understand! Forget massive deficits and overspending by the government. The Democrats couldn't even be trusted to balance their own checkbooks, so how could they be trusted to balance the nation's checkbook?

And that is what is so wonderful about Foley. It is sweet, sweet turnabout is fair play. Guarding the nation against the terrorist is just so hard to understand. Have the Republicans blown the War against Terror? Oh, it's so complicated, who knows. But how can you trust the Republicans to guard the country against terrorists if they can't even guard 16 year old pages from randy old Congressmen?

Sure, the Foley scandal has as much to do with the War on Terror as the House bank had to do with the nation's deficit. Doesn't matter. Metaphors rule!

--santamonicamr

(To reply, click here.)

The most obvious difference between Stubbs and Crain's affairs with teenage Congressional Pages is that there is no evidence that their behavior was covered up, in fact, Congress acted to censer both of the Congressmen and allowed their constituents to make the final determination of their worthiness to hold public office.

In this case Republican Congressmen have testified, under oath, that Hastert's office had been informed and clearly knew of Foley's cyber-molestation of the Congressional Pages and of his drunken visits to page dormitories, yet the Republican Leadership took no formal action to stop or sanction Foley for his conduct. This is a fundamental difference and indicates that the Republican Congressional Leadership preferred to ignore Foley's conduct in an effort to avoid scandal. [...]

The Republican Party has been acting "holier than thou" for years and this incident shows them for the hypocrites that they are.

--LannonMac

(To reply, click here.)

Foley's transgressions are a big deal precise because he is a Republican at a time when the GOP claims the mantle of religious and moral righteousness to a degree not seen in generations.

Of course the Democratic Party forgave Studds' transgressions--they're the party that places a low priority on chastising consensual, lawful sex no matter how scuzzy the circumstances. The Democrats never held themselves out to the world as the party that catered to social conservatives for whom opposition to gay sex, abortion, and flag burning are more vital issues than good schools, health care, and even competent foreign and defense policies.

So, the Republicans are now reaping the harvest of their moral certitude. When Bush ran roughshod over Kerry on the question of "flip-flopping", how can the GOP do any less than submit Foley to a public stoning? Similarly for Hastert: If the GOP was the watchdog of the public morals, always campaigning on the lasciviousness ways of the Democrats, how can he not be pilloried for ignoring a black sheep like Foley?

I think the real moral of this story is that we cannot run our government on moral absolutes. Given the many crises we face at home and abroad, we have to stop scrutinizing and vilifying each other's minor moral transgressions and focus on the real issues.

But then again, I voted for Gore and Kerry.

--Patriot_Against_Bush

(To reply, click here.)

Mark Foley harassed people in a non-consensual manner. He could not be trusted, because he ignored the boundaries of consent. Studds had a consensual relationship. He did not ignore the boundaries of consent.

Was it unethical to have sex with a page, even if the page was consenting? Well, let's look at the year. 1973. What else happened in that year?

Oh, that's right. Homosexuality was finally removed from the DSM. It was finally recognized that being gay was not a mental illness. Gay folks of that time didn't have ordinary social outlets. They couldn't place personal ads, they couldn't approach good looking members of the same sex and do some flirting, and if you were found to have had sex with someone you loved, you were in danger of going to jail in much of the country. And any partner you might find was receiving mixed messages about whether it was a mental illness just to be willing to love you.

Even if the big deal was "sexual activity with a page, even if the page is consenting, and old enough", Studds deserves gentler treatment than Foley, because Studds was living in a cage that was constructed by a set of nasty prejudices held by an uncaring society.

But the big deal is consent. Studds had it; Foley didn't. End of the story.

--JohnPalmer

(To reply, click here.)

(10/23)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES