[Vision2020] Foley Hurting Congress’s Image, Poll Shows

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

A few days ago I forgot to respond to Pat Kraut, who compared the Foley scandal to Clinton and Monica.  It was incredibly stupid of Clinton, but Monica was an adult.  Foley was trying to seduce underage men, and an Arizona Congressman has not confirmed that he informed the clerk of the Congress about it 5-6 years ago.

October 10, 2006, The New York Times
Foley Hurting Congress’s Image, Poll Shows
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JANET ELDER

Americans say that Republican Congressional leaders put their political interests ahead of protecting the safety of teenage pages, and that House leaders knew of Mark Foley’s sexually charged messages to pages well before he was forced to quit Congress, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The poll, completed before North Korea announced that it had detonated its first nuclear test, also found that the war in Iraq was continuing to take a toll on President Bush and the Republican Party, and that the White House was having difficulty retaining its edge in handling terrorism.

The number of Americans who approve of Mr. Bush’s handling of the campaign against terrorism dropped to 46 percent from 54 percent in the past two weeks, suggesting that he failed to gain any political lift from an orchestrated set of ceremonies marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. In addition, the poll shows that Americans are now evenly divided over which party they think can better handle terrorism, the first time in the Bush presidency that Democrats have matched Republicans on national security, despite a concerted White House effort to seize the advantage on the issue this month.

With four weeks left before Election Day, the poll indicates that the scandal involving Mr. Foley, a former Republican congressman from Florida, is alienating Americans from Congress, and weakening a Republican Party that was already struggling to keep control of the House and Senate. By overwhelming numbers, including majorities of Republicans, Americans said that most members of Congress did not follow the same rules of behavior as average Americans, and that most members of Congress considered themselves above the law.

“Politics goes to people’s heads and they see themselves as their own little entity,” said Donna Mummert, 68, a Republican from Marsing, Idaho, in a follow-up interview after participating in the poll. “They forget why they’re there to represent us.”

Seventy-nine percent of respondents said House Republican leaders were more concerned about their political standing than about the safety of teenage Congressional pages. About half of respondents said that the House Republican leadership had improperly handled the Foley case, compared with 27 percent who said they approved of how it was handled; 46 percent of respondents said Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois should step down. And Americans are more likely to say that Democrats, and not Republicans, share their moral values.

The nationwide telephone poll was conducted Thursday through Sunday with 983 adults, including 891 registered voters. The margin of sampling error for the entire sample is plus or minus three percentage points and is the same for the registered voters.

The poll describes what is by any measure a difficult political environment for the White House and Republican Congressional leaders. Still, it is a measure of national sentiment rather than the likely outcome in the approximately 40 House races and 8 Senate races that will determine which party controls Congress next January.

In many of the races where Republicans are in danger of losing seats, Democrats hold relatively slight leads, according to local polls and internal party polls. Republicans are counting on their strong voter turnout operation, and sizable financial advantage over Democrats, to compensate for the difficulties they face.

There has been no change since mid-September in the gap between Americans who said they planned to vote for a Democrat over a Republican in their district this November: 49 percent to 35 percent. But Democratic voters are more likely than Republicans to say they are enthusiastic about voting this November.

The public’s view of Iraq is as dark as it has been since the war began in 2003, with two-thirds saying it is going somewhat or very badly, while only 3 percent are saying the war is going very well. Two-thirds said they disapproved of how Mr. Bush was handling Iraq.

Mr. Bush’s job approval rating has slipped to 34 percent, from 37 percent in September. That is one of the lowest levels of his presidency and poses a complication for the White House as it seeks to send him out on the road to rally base voters. Mr. Bush’s job approval rating has even slipped with his base: 75 percent of conservative Republicans approve of the way he has handled his job, compared with 96 percent in November 2004.

The president clearly faces constraints as he seeks to address the public concerns about Iraq that have shrouded this midterm election: 83 percent of respondents thought that Mr. Bush was either hiding something or mostly lying when he discussed how the war in Iraq was going. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said Mr. Bush was personally aware of intelligence reports before Sept. 11 that warned of possible domestic terrorist attacks using airplanes. When the same question was asked in May 2002, 41 percent said they believed Mr. Bush was aware.

“Iraq was a mistake, and even though he gets up and says it’s going O.K., it hasn’t been going O.K. since Day One,” said Gertrude Knowles, a self-described independent voter from Quincy, Mass. “Now he’s got to make it sound better than it is.”

So far, at least, it appears that, at least nationally, Republicans have had little success in pressing what have been their two biggest lines of attacks against Democratic challengers this fall: taxes and terrorism. The poll found that 41 percent of respondents thought Republicans were stronger on handling terrorism, compared with 40 percent who named Democrats, a statistically insignificant difference. Before Labor Day, Republicans had a 42 percent to 34 percent edge on handling terrorism.

And in a month in which Republicans have sought to discredit Democratic challengers as advocates of big spending and high taxes, 52 percent of respondents said that Democrats would make the right decisions on how to spend taxpayers’ money, while 29 percent said Republicans would.

Americans said that Democrats would do a better job than Republicans in making decisions on the war, on the economy and on taxes. Democrats are viewed more positively, or less negatively, than Republicans, with 39 percent saying they held a favorable view of Republicans, compared with 54 percent who said they held an unfavorable view. By contrast, 52 percent of respondents had a favorable view of the Democratic Party, compared with 40 percent who had an unfavorable view.

The problems for Congress have clearly been exacerbated by the Foley scandal. Eighty percent of Americans said they considered the Foley revelations either very serious or somewhat serious. Two-thirds said that House Republicans did not initially take the warnings seriously enough, and 62 percent said they believed House Republican leaders knew before last week that Mr. Foley had sent sexually explicit messages to teenagers.

“They just covered it up,” said Charles Young, a Republican from upstate New York. “We put them in office to do what is right for the country. It should have been brought to their attention and disposed of. We don’t need people in office who corrupt our children.”

The poll found that 69 percent of Americans thought that members of Congress considered themselves above the law, and 69 percent thought that members of Congress did not live by the same rules of behavior that they did.

The poll found that 47 percent of respondents believed that Democrats came closer to sharing their moral values, compared with 38 percent who said Republicans did. The Democratic standing in this area included some unlikely groups: 26 percent of conservatives and 43 percent of people who live in the South named Democrats as the party that came closer to sharing their values.

Marjorie Connelly, Marina Stefan and Megan C. Thee contributed reporting.