Dick Morris (yeah, I puke in my mouth just writing his name) has been surprisingly -- some would say shrilly --
negative on the GOP's chances in the wake of the Abramoff scandal.
Because this scandal is both partisan and local it will have a searing political impact. Nor should the recipients of Abramoff's dubious generosity dismiss their acceptance of his donations by saying it doesn't matter because everybody took his money.
Those who did get contributions from him are in for an Election Day surprise. Forty-four percent of the Fox News survey respondents said that if "an elected official from your state took a campaign contribution from Jack Abramoff or organizations that he represented" it would be a "major" factor in deciding whether to vote for him in the next election. Even 31 percent of Republicans felt this way.
Washington scandals come and go. But, about every decade or so, they metastasize into massive national affairs that embrace an entire political party. Republicans were victimized in 1974 by Nixon's misconduct. Democrats kept Congress in 1992 after the 1991 check-bouncing scandal, but they did so because so many of their old bulls retired. In their places, Bill Clinton's election swept into office young saplings who succumbed to the partisan wave of 1994, a wave kindled equally by disgust with Clinton and with the Democratic permanent Congressional majority.
The 2006 elections look to be another of these decadal bloodlettings, victimizing, this time, the Republicans [...]
Will the scandals translate into the loss of Congress by the Republicans in 2006? The generic 13-point Democratic lead in Congressional ballot would suggest that it might. Can popular revulsion overcome even Tom DeLay's gerrymandering? You bet it can!
Of course, pieces like this serve to send notice to the GOP leadership that they are not as secure in their gerrymandered House as they may believe. Morris is goading them to go on the offensive, and they have.
I've been saying that Democrats have made a mistake by getting sucked into competing "reform" legislation. The problem with the GOP's culture of corruption isn't that existing law doesn't cover their transgressions. It does. So let's take a page out of the NRA playbook and argue for enforcement of existing law.
And once we clean house of all the criminals currently stinking up the joint, then we can enact laws to further clean up the joint.
But this focus on ethics legislation gives the impression that this scandal is merely an ethical one, when in fact it's criminal.
The Agonist has more.)
Comments are closed on this story.