- Justin Webb
- 3 Oct 06, 04:23 PM
Over lunch in - a Capitol Hill favourite of impecunious interns and parsimonious correspondents - a fine chap who covers Congress for one of America's greatest newspapers told me the other day what these elections mean to him: misery.
You see the kind of folks who care - really care - about the mid-terms this far out from the vote are barmy partisans who spend the whole day surfing the net looking for bias. They dissect my friend's copy and challenge every supposed deviation from total impartiality (of which they know nothing and everything) with lengthy rejoinders and demands for clarification.
All of it proof - my newspaper friend acknowledges gloomily - that this November 7th is a REALLY BIG DEAL. Sure a few conservative Republicans are licking their lips and looking forward to the exquisite pain of defeat, the better to prepare for the libertarian future, but most see a Democratic victory as just that, a Democratic victory. And they don't like those words.
From the Left the feelings are even more intense: this is after all the last chance they have to poke the eye of the president, metaphorically speaking, and a failure now would surely call into question their capabilities given all that has gone awry for this White House and for the Republicans generally.
Watch this space: it's going to get mighty rough, and we ( as we are affectionately known) are in the firing line.
Justin Webb is the 91Èȱ¬'s chief North America radio correspondent.
- James Westhead
- 3 Oct 06, 03:51 PM
How bad can it get? For the Republicans, could the first day of the mid-term election campaign really have been any worse? Well perhaps if they were caught sending sexually explicit emails to underage children and then trying cover it up. Whoops... That is what former congressman Mark Foley and his party's leadership are actually accused of.
When confronted with the unwholesome internet messages Mr Foley had sent to teenagers, the disgraced representative resigned and checked himself into the current refuge of choice for scandal-struck politicians - the .
The big political question - as with any major scandal - is who will have to resign next to make it all go away? One possible GOP lightning rod is the House speaker, . It is he who seems to have been alerted to Mr Foley's peculiar behaviour some months earlier, failed to act on it, then denied he knew about it, then admitted he did but lamely defended his inaction. In the words of a stinging editorial from this morning, "Mr Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation…. that must examine his own inept performance." Not exactly a vote of confidence from a conservative Republican paper.
Even more alarming for Republicans is the possibility of more e-mail revelations . This was hinted at last night by ABC investigative reporter , who broke the original Foley-gate story. He said that he'd been contacted by a large number of other "pages" - the teenagers who help out in Congress - with further allegations against other members.
Much of it will turn out to be uncorroborated 'noise', but there's no question the whole of Washington is churning around the clock with rumours and anxieties about where - and who - this sleazy scandal will strike next. Perhaps day two could turn out even worse than day one after all.
James Westhead is a Washington correspondent for 91Èȱ¬ News.
