Sanford can’t save Democrats on ethics woes
By: Chris Stirewalt
Political Editor
June 29, 2009
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| President Barack Obama won many admirers for his pledge to have the most transparent administration in history. (AP photo) |
Writing and rewriting Michael Jackson’s obituary distracted the media from the latest draft of its preferred death notice — that of the Republican Party.
But now that we are down to the sad minutiae of Jackson’s life and death, some of the cameras have swung back around to the tale of the terminally weird Gov. Mark Sanford.
Sanford’s midlife meltdown pales in comparison with Jackson’s lifelong soap opera. But for political journalists, the Sanford affair is too perfect to pass up. The Republican-led impeachment of Bill Clinton is the central event in the professional lives of most of the media folks working in Washington today. To them, the story was really about the hypocritical moralism of conservatives. A decade later, proving that Republicans are just as skeevy as Democrats remains a go-to story. Getting Sanford’s tearful collapse the week after Sen. John Ensign admitted to bedding a married staffer was ambrosia. Two Clinton detractors and Christian family men undone by their own libidos sent packs of reporters into braying ecstasies.
But only one sexually tinged scandal has really hurt Republicans in the post-Lewinsky era. Former Rep. Mark Foley’s electronic improprieties with male pages badly hurt the GOP in 2006.
But the arrest and eventual imprisonment of two members of the House on unsexy corruption charges had done the real damage. Foley’s creepy e-mails just confirmed to voters that the Republican majority was rotten. Democrats apparently believe that Sanford’s shame will give them some cover on their own ethical lapses. How else to explain the decision to add 341 pages to an already bloated global warming bill after 3 a.m. on the day of the vote? Jamming through legislation no one had read on a vote so close that Democrats had to pull Rep. Patrick Kennedy out of rehab to get it passed is just brazen.
Minority Leader John Boehner was at his sardonic best as he flipped through the additions that Speaker Nancy Pelosi hoped no one would see.
Boehner was reminding good-government Democrats of the stimulus debacle in which another rushed vote allowed big bonuses for executives at bailed-out AIG.
Just as Sanford’s past moralizing hurts him now, Democrats have more at risk with these shady antics because they vowed to end “the culture of corruption.”
President Barack Obama won many admirers for his pledge to have the most transparent administration in history. Particularly appealing was his promise to hold non-emergency legislation for a five-day cooling-off period before signing the bill into law.
With the bill posted online, citizens would be able to find stinkers like the AIG bonuses or a hidden earmark and bring them to the attention of the White House. The president could then send the bill back to Congress for cleanup.
Having ignored that promise since his inauguration, the president utterly abandoned it last week.
But Obama is a pragmatic politician, and while it took good-government promises to win office as a reformer, winning his next term demands playing the game the Washington way. That includes signing bills rewritten by lobbyists in the dead of night.
Ask Sen. Chris Dodd how that can come back to haunt you.
Dodd is drowning under bad polls in Connecticut because of his insertion of the AIG bonus amendment, a sweetheart mortgage, boatloads of cash from the mortgage companies he was supposed to be regulating, and dubious real estate deals.
And even Dodd looks like a solid citizen compared with Rod Blagojevich’s man in Washington, Sen. Roland Burris. On the House side, Rep. Charlie Rangel has been under investigation for 10 months for tax issues and other alleged misconduct. But that didn’t stop him and many of his Congressional Black Caucus colleagues from going on a Citigroup-funded getaway to St. Maarten last fall.
And everyone on Capitol Hill is still waiting to see what happens to Reps. John Murtha, Peter Visclosky and Jim Moran — the top recipients of donations from a lobbying firm since busted by the FBI in a pay-to-play investigation.
Sanford now grimly says he will hold on to power, but he is already a pariah. His dishonesty and erratic, juvenile behavior have forced even friends to despair of him. What remains of the sad, odd drama will play itself out in the context of sex, betrayal and hubris, not corruption. If Democrats believe that Sanford’s spectacle will shield them from the consequences of their actions, they ought to think again.
