It's the 23rd round at the Foleygate Wrestling Arena and yet another revelation has landed a double roundhouse at Dennis Hastert's gut. The crowd stares in wonderment. Why won't he go down? How can he take all that punishment? What is keeping him on his feet?
The answer is his two weak knees. In the past week, the Democrats have been focusing on only one leg, and they have been ignoring the other. That leg has been weakened too, but right now that leg is holding up almost all of Hastert's massive weight...
At the all night Hastert Damage Control Sessions last week, about that time of night when even the crickets have gone to sleep and Denny has started rooting around for that last ice cold piece of pizza, someone must have asked him the question "But are you absolutely sure you can win in the 14th District?"
This has always been the real question, because everything they will decide to do subsequently will depend upon it. Does Hastert still rule in Kane County? Or is he in as bad shape there as he is in Cleveland?
There have always been two Dennis Hasterts. For those of you outside of the district, Hastert is Tom Delay's tag team partner and the brutal straw boss of the Bush agenda. In an election that is essentially a mandate on the Bush presidency, Hastert should have been an easy target. There is no one (left) in Congress who as been such a consistent supporter of the President and his policies, including even the little stuff. But Hastert's Democratic opponent John Laesch has been unable to get much traction in the 14th on Hastert's support of Bush because he has been running against the other Denny; the amiable ex-high school teacher and wrestling coach. The platform in the 14th hasn't been about the Iraq War or national security. It's about whether Hastert is a very nice guy.
So after the ties and shoes came off in the Hastert War Room in the basement of his mansion is Plano, the real question was, has the Foley scandal knocked out Hastert's "Captain in Gilligan's Island" image or not. And the spin makers decided that it hadn't. In fact, the Foley scandal may have turned the focus away in the 14th from what little attention they were paying to Bush and his policies and made it into an even more raw popularity contest than it was before. To underscore this, all the voters in the 14th district received late last week an expensive campaign brochure from the Hastert machine that was very short on Republican "accomplishments" and very long on misty photos of Hastert walking down the lane hand in hand with his wife. Prominent in this brochure was a long testimonial from his wife, telling us what a nice guy and good husband Hastert is.
Pushing Hastert in this way is just the right approach, because after all, how could such a salt of the earth local boy be guilty of such deep (and sexually oriented) corruption? And this means that Laesch still has an uphill battle, because to run against the nicest guy in the 14th District you have to prove that you are even nicer. And without a lot of cash to send out Valentine's cards to yourself, this can be very hard to do.
Democrats, me included, have been predicting Hastert's immanent demise for the last week, because we have only been looking at the continuing outrages streaming from Foley's Blackberry. And it is true that the Foley scandal as such has made Hastert so weak nationally that he has called on a weak president to ride to his rescue. But the source of Hastert's strange resilience is his position in the 14th. If the Republicans have decided that it is the lesser of two evils to keep Hastert in place, they can only have decided this because they believe that he is still safe in his own district. If it had looked like he wasn't, he would have already been thrown to the dogs.
Instead, banking on a Hastert election victory, the GOP has made him into the linchpin of their defense. They have explicitly conflated support for the Party with support for Hastert himself. He has become the rallying point for the stampeded Republicans in Congress.
So now is the time to take Hastert out. The DCCC needs to move now, today, and attack him where his is still strong, the 14th District. If Hastert falls, everything else falls into place. The DCCC might think that he is so weak already he might not win in November or that in any event he won't be coming back as Speaker. They may believe that he isn't worth the money at this point. They may even want him to win so that (as I have written elsewhere) they can flick the maggots from his bloated corpse at Bush for the next two years. But the GOP is off balance now. We are no longer talking about the "possibility of gaining a slim majority" in November. We are talking about a lot more. This is now the time to hit them and hit them hard. And one thing we need to do is to focus on the linchpin. If Hastert falls now, there WILL be a rout.
If the DCCC won't do it, then we have to. John Laesch needs a Netroots endorsement. And he needs your money. We can't let the GOP rally even do the semblance of a rally, not when we have them on the ropes. We won't get a chance like this again for years.
(Cross posted at www.Fireside14.com)