The GOP Is the Problem, Not Foley
By John Nichols

Too much focus on Foley draws attention from the real scandal. Yet,
even Democrats are having trouble getting beyond the salacious details
of one man's sad story.

Unfortunately, it appears those of us who have argued that the current
ruckus on Capitol Hill is not a Mark Foley Scandal but a Republican
Congressional Leadership Scandal may be losing the debate.

A week after Foley's political career imploded -- after details of his
emails and instant messages to teenage congressional pages began to
surface -- the fascination with the former congressman seems actually
to be on the rise. Thursday's New York Times features a lengthy profile
of Foley beginning on its front page today, while talk radio and the
blogosphere are abuzz with discussion of every new salacious detail
about a politician who until last Thursday was barely known outside the
precincts of central Florida and a few blocks of Washington, DC. My
most amusing progressive radio show on the dial, Stephanie Miller's
morning program, features daily reports on "La Cage Aux Foley."

Everywhere Americans look or listen, the shorthand for the whole affair
is "The Foley Scandal."

The focus on Foley is problematic for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, it turns what ought to be a discussion about the
win-at-any-cost approach of the Republicans who run Congress into a
wildly speculative discourse on one troubled man and what his
experience says about everything from pedophilia to workplace ethics to
privacy and gays in politics. Everyone is getting into the act, from
moralizing conservatives -- like Family Research Council's Tony Perkins
claiming that "tolerance and diversity" are to blame for the whole mess
-- to Desperate Democrats describing Foley as a "pedophile predator."
The tone of the discussion is especially disturbing at a time when
right-wing forces have placed anti-gay initiatives on the November 7
ballots in eight states. Prospects for beating those measures in states
such as Wisconsin, Colorado and Arizona are not helped by discussions
that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, reinforce inaccurate
yet persistent stereotypes.

While I have shied away from writing at much length about Foley's
personal story -- preferring to focus on the far more serious and
significant issues that have been raised about how the Republican
leadership places politics above all other concerns -- it seems that
some consideration of the congressman's circumstance is in order. I was
convinced of this when my wise colleague Katha Pollitt emailed the
other day with some smart questions about a line in one of my articles
on the scandal. In a piece discussing the pressures on Foley as a
closeted Republican, I wrote, "Unlike the vast majority of homosexuals
-- who, as a group, are less likely to be attracted to children than
heterosexuals -- the congressman began to engage in activities that
were inappropriate and potentially illegal. Details that have surfaced
in recent day suggest that Foley had made a mess of his life - a mess
that exploded on him and his party when it was revealed that the
co-chair of the Congressional Caucus for Missing & Exploited Children
had sent 'Do I make you a little horny?' e-mails to teenage boys."
Katha wanted to know whether I meant to suggest that closeted gay men
were more likely to be attracted to teenagers -- a notion about which
she was distinctly, and correctly, dubious.

I appreciated the question, and others from friends and colleagues
regarding Foley's personal story and whatever conclusions can be drawn
from it, because they provide an opening to explore the backstory of a
controversy that could yet depose the Speaker of the House.

As regards Katha's specific question, I don't buy the argument that
being closeted caused Foley to be attracted to particular groups of men
or boys. Sure, the need to cloak a huge part of his identity created
pressures on the congressman. But, right or wrong, I'm of the view that
our behavioral penchants and tendencies are set early in life. I share
the position of Matt Foreman, the executive director of the National
Gay & Lesbian Task Force, who says: "Given similar past sordid
situations in the page program perpetrated by male members of Congress
against female pages, it's absurd to blame the Foley spectacle on his
being gay, closeted or otherwise." In other words, what Foley did is
what Foley did. It makes little sense to try and find in his specific
actions indicators of broad patterns or universal tendencies among gays
or straights, people who are in the closet or people who are out.

So, then, the question becomes: What was up with Foley?

With all the new twists and turns in his story -- including this week's
declarations by the former congressman's lawyer that he's an alcoholic
and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse -- that's a tough question to
answer with precision.

But, as someone who has covered Foley for many years and had an
opportunity to spend a good deal of time with the man, let me offer
some thoughts:

I first got to know Foley a number of years ago when he was one of the
few Republicans who was speaking up on the issue of media
consolidation. Always interested in media issues -- especially as they
related to the film and music industries -- the congressman had a good
eye for the changing character of our communications after the passage
of the noxious Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Foley's insights about the collapse of the political discourse on local
radio stations that were bought up by national chains, as well as a his
concerns about the homogenization of music playlists, made him stand
out not just from his fellow partisans but from most members of
Congress. I appreciated Foley's intelligence, and his enthusiasm. He
was a less regimented Republican than most, which made him more
interesting than the average member of the party's House caucus. I
wrote about Foley frequently and we appeared at some of the same forums
on media issues.

I knew Foley was gay, and was aware that he was in a long-term
relationship with a Florida physician. As someone who saw him in a
number of settings, I never had a sense of him as being "on the prowl."
He was gregarious, even boisterous. I thought that Foley seemed oddly
immature for a veteran legislator; someone who always seemed to be
trying a little too hard. But in hindsight I suspect that he was trying
a bit too hard to fit in with folks who he did not want to stereotype
him as just another conservative Republican. Some people speculated
that he was experiencing a bit of a mid-life crisis as he passed the
age of 50 and looked at the prospect that he had hit a political
ceiling in a Republican Party. GOP leaders had made it clear that they
would not support him for higher office, but that very much wanted him
to hold onto a "safe" seat in a electorally volatile state.

Foley had always been a good politician, but in the first years of the
Bush presidency he began losing his touch.

It was no secret that Foley was struggling with questions of how "out"
he could be. The struggle heated up in 2003 when, as he was preparing
to seek Florida's open U.S. Senate seat, Foley became the subject first
of "he's gay" whispering campaign and then of articles in gay and
lesbian publications and finally daily newspapers that discussed his
sexuality in varying degrees of detail. Foley did not handle the
controversy well, and ultimately ended up folding that campaign. Two
years later, in 2005, he again toyed with making a Senate bid. But, by
that point, party leaders were clearly and unequivocally discouraging
him from seeking any office but the one he held.

Foley's political tightrope walk became an increasingly difficult one
as the Bush administration and Florida Republicans ramped up their use
of anti-gay messages to energize the party's social conservative base.
My sense of Foley in recent years was that the congressman was growing
increasingly isolated within his own party, and increasingly lonely in
Washington. He wanted out. And he had job offers, good ones, coming
from the entertainment industry, which is always on the hunt for
Republicans who can lobby on its behalf. Foley was unenthusiastic about
seeking reelection in 2006.

More than a year ago, he had begun hinting about exiting politics for a
lobbying gig, or perhaps what he considered a dream job in the movie
industry. Undoubtedly, complaints about his emails to pages were a
factor, although at the time no one outside Foley's inner circle and
the offices of House Speaker Dennis Hastert and a few other key players
in the GOP caucus knew of them

This spring, as the deadline for declaring his candidacy for another
term approached, Foley was pressured by Republican Congressional
Campaign Committee chair Tom Reynolds, R-New York, to make one more run
"for the good of the party." Reynolds wanted to keep open seats at a
minimum in what was shaping up as a difficult political year, Though we
now know that that the RCCC chair was aware of Foley's troubling
emails, holding the House was Job One. Foley finally agreed to seek
another term, and the rest is history.

But it is a more complex history than the shorthand version that
reporters who are covering this fast-breaking scandal -- including this
writer -- have tended to descibe.

There is more to Foley's story than the "sleazy hypocrite" label that
has been attached to him by Democratic critics in particular. Yes, the
congressman was a co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Missing and
Exploited Children, and, yes, his office was the source of a steady
stream of blunt pronouncements about the need to crack down on those
who prey on children. If one accepts that 16- and 17-year-old young men
who are past the legal age of majority and who are living away from
home are children, or if one is simply unsettled by abuses of the power
relationship between a senior member of Congress and teenage pages who
dream of political careers, then it is evident that the "hypocrite" tag
may be the kindest that can be attached to Foley.

But the congressman was not so hypocritical when it came to social
issues. He was one of the most prominent members of former New Jersey
Governor Christine Todd Whitman's "It's My Party Too" group, which has
worked to pull the GOP away from the grip of the religious right --
although you would not know about the association from the group's
website, from which all Foley references have been removed. Foley has
been reelected in recent years with support not just from moderate GOP
groups such as the Log Cabin Republicans and the Republican Majority
for Choice but with generous campaign contributions from groups that
generally back Democrats, such as the Human Rights Camaign and the
Service Employees International Union.

The Log Cabin Republicans, the party's chief advocacy group for gay and
lesbian rights, strongly endorsed Foley this year, noting that: "He has
consistently voted against the anti-family marriage amendment, and has
supported the hate crimes bill, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act
(ENDA), and the Early Treatment for HIV Act."

It is true that Foley was an imperfect player on issues of concern to
gays and lesbians. Early in his career, he voted for the Defense of
Marriage Act, and unlike another supporter of that foul measure, former
Senator Paul Wellstone, he never renounced the vote. Foley also faced
legitimate criticism for failing to be a leader in challenging the
military's failed "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. But his record was
still better than those of all but a few Congressional Republicans --
and, it should be noted, many Congressional Democrats.

So, while Foley may have refused to publicly acknowledge that he was a
gay man until this week, he chose frequently to vote as a supporter of
gay rights. That distinguished him from other Republicans who have
become the focus of scandals, such as former Congressman Ed Schrock.
Before the 2004 election, Schrock, a Virginia Republican who regularly
voted against gay rights and enjoyed Christian conservative support,
was ruined politically when recordings began to circulate of the
congressman using a telephone service on which men placed ads to
arrange liaisons with other men. Like Foley, Schrock quickly quit his
seat.

There are those who will suggest that the fact that both Schrock and
Foley were closeted Republicans is an important factor in this
discussion, and that being closeted really was Foley's primary problem.
One of the Florida congressman's most consistent critics, online
journalist Mike Rogers, told the Miami Herald, ''I do believe that he
had unhealthy sexual advances to these guys because he was living his
life as a closeted gay man. Healthy gay men who are mature and dealing
with their sexuality in a mature way don't hit on kids who are 16 years
old. What's his signature issue [child protection]? You don't know
whether to laugh or cry.'' Rogers has been covering these stories for a
long time, and he certainly has a right to assess them as he thinks
appropriate. But, again, I'm not of the view that being a closeted
Republican is the issue. There is no question that Foley struggled with
the challenge of how to be a prominent Republican and a gay man without
acting as a total hypocrite.

No doubt, in recent years in particular, he struggled with a sense of
isolation within a party that was, unquestionably, more understanding
and respectful of gays and lesbians in its congressional caucus during
the days when an ascendant Newt Gingrich was running the show. But
other closeted congressional Republicans -- and Democrats -- have
managed their lives without scandal.

My sense of Mark Foley in recent years was that he was becoming an
increasingly sad and lonely man. How that sadness and loneliness
related to his inappropriate and potentially illegal actions is
something that, no doubt, Foley and others will explore in the future.
But, I remain in agreement with the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force's Matt Foreman, when he says of Foley's circumstance: "It's a
tragedy for him and his family. I don't want to get into the pain of
the closet. It's irrelevant if he's gay or not."

Above all, however, I agree with something else that Foreman says:
"What's clear is that the House leadership elevated holding onto a seat
above the interests of young people in the page system. And they want
to talk about 'moral values'? Please."

Pity Mark Foley or hate him, try to understand this congressman or try
to demonize him, but understand that the fundamental truth of the
current moment is that Republican leaders in the House knew that one of
their own had a problem and chose to disregard that knowledge in order
to protect a "safe" seat and their shaky grip on power.

That, to my view, is the greater scandal.

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