March 06, 2010

The return of Mark Foley

Posted by: Chris

I launched this blog way back in October 2006, just weeks after leaving the Washington Blade and moving to Brazil, as the Mark Foley scandal was breaking. Having overseen years of coverage about Foley, a longtime GOP closet case, I had too much I wanted to say about the man, the gay staffers who surrounded them, and the scandal more broadly.

More than three years later, I've moved back to D.C., the Blade may soon be reincarnated, and Foley-gate has resurfaced in the form of Eric J.J. Massa, a New York Democrat who will quit his congressional seat on Monday in the midst of sexual harassment accusations by young male staffers.

The similarities with 2006 don't end there. Corruption charges leveled at powerful Charles Rangel finally forced the New York Democrat to step down as chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, something he should have done months ago when it became clear he was part of the "swamp" that Nancy Pelosi promised she was going to "drain."

With voter anger at incumbents on the rise, many see the charges against Massa as the Foley-esque straw that may break the camel's back, producing a "throw the bums out" midterm election in November, just like in 2006, when Democrats retook Congress from the GOP.

Not so fast, says John Mercurio of National Journal's Hotline:

The media is cuing up the Massa = Foley meme this p.m. to set the stage for a mantra about how '10 increasingly resembles '06, when House Dems rode a wave of GOP ethics scandals back to power. To be sure, there are similarities between the two campaign cycles. Massa isn't one of them.

Foley was forced to resign in '06 after he admitted making inappropriate sexual advances to underage House pages. Massa's conduct may have been egregious. But there's no evidence so far to suggest the male aide he harrassed was younger than 18. More importantly, the Foley case erupted into a partywide scandal only when it was revealed that House GOP leaders had been aware of his conduct weeks before it was reported, but did little to address it. Nothing so far suggests Pelosi et al responded similarly.

Apparently, his Hotline colleague Reid Wilson didn't get the memo. Under the headline "Shades of '06 for Shell-Shocked Dems," Reid reports:

GOPers knew their efforts to keep control would fail, however, in late Sept. of '06, when Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) resigned amid allegations he had inappropriate contact with House pages. …

[Now,] Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) said he would retire after a single term in office; Capitol Hill buzzed with rumors that the ethics committee is investigating alleged harrassment of a male staffer, though Massa denied those reports and said a recurrence of cancer had forced him to step aside.

Mercurio has it right, in my view, and Rangel was also pressured by fellow Democrats to step down much more quickly than was Tom DeLay (R-Texas), for example, whose GOP colleagues changed the rules to keep him as Minority Leader even after being indicted. DeLay eventually resigned, and the public revulsion over DeLay, Foley and the House Republican leadership combined with rising frustration over Iraq to produce the 2006 midterms.

Things may not go well for Democrats this year, especially if they can't close the deal on health care reform and produce tangible improvement in unemployment numbers, but it's not 2006 all over again.

Tags: Eric Massa, gay sex scandal, Mark Foley, Tom DeLay