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Corrupt Government Title: Hastert Faces Intense Pressure - new poll shows voter support for the republican party slipping Hastert Faces Intense Pressure As Foley Mess Roils Republicans By DAVID ROGERS and JOHN HARWOOD October 4, 2006; Page A1 With Republicans' woes deepening, House Speaker Dennis Hastert is holding fast against calls for him to resign over the congressional-page scandal. But there appears to be a real chance that the Illinois Republican could step down after next month's election even if his party retains power. A new poll shows voter support for the party slipping, and Mr. Hastert and his divided leadership face immense pressure to respond more emphatically to the stream of revelations about former Rep. Mark Foley's sexually explicit cyber-communications with teenage former pages. WALL STREET JOURNAL VIDEO John Harwood explains the latest WSJ/ NBC poll, which shows that due to recent scandals, more people want Democrats to be in control. John Harwood reports that the Foley scandal has split Republicans and forced President Bush to speak on behalf of Dennis Hastert. Also, Hampton Pearson examines how the Dow has reacted in the past when a president has presided over a split Congress."We have to do something different, more dramatic," said Rep. Ray LaHood (R., Ill.). "This is a political mess and what we've done so far is not working. Somebody has to take responsibility for this. It is on our watch." At a news conference yesterday evening in West Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Foley's attorney announced that the former lawmaker is gay and said Mr. Foley, a Catholic who attended Catholic schools, had been molested between the ages of 13 and 15 by a clergyman. But the lawyer, David Roth, said his client had never engaged in physical sexual relations with a minor despite the nature of his online contacts. The pattern followed by Mr. Foley, a Florida Republican who resigned abruptly on Friday, was to pursue pages after they had ended their tenure at the Capitol. ABC News, for example, posted new communications yesterday in which Mr. Foley appears to have interrupted a vote on the House floor in 2003 to engage in Internet sex with a teenager who was still in high school but no longer a page. IN THE POLLS • Graphic: Bush's approval ratings across multiple polls MIDTERM SURVIVAL GUIDE • Battlegrounds: An interactive look at closely contested senatorial and gubernatorial races. (Updated Sept. 28) • Representative Races: A look at the issues and matchups in nine congressional districts from Las Vegas to Seattle to Florida. (Updated Oct. 2) The Foley news is just the latest in a hailstorm of unfavorable publicity that has hit the Republicans and President Bush in recent weeks, costing the party the initiative at a critical point in the midterm-election campaign. Party leaders had hoped to run the final weeks of the campaign with the spotlight on what they consider their strength: battling terrorists. Instead, they are playing defense on everything from the sex scandal to dispiriting reports about Iraq. The damage was evident in a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, showing that, by 41% to 18%, Americans say that news they "have seen and heard over the past few weeks" has made them less favorable toward continued Republican control of Congress. By 34%-23% they called themselves more favorably inclined toward Democratic control. The survey, conducted last weekend, also shows a decline in Mr. Bush's job-approval rating to 39% from 42% earlier this month. With the elections just over a month away, on Nov. 7, there is mounting pressure on Republican House leaders to try to limit fallout from the Foley scandal. In an interview late yesterday, Mr. Hastert said he would be willing to resign if he thought it would help the party but isn't convinced this is the case. "If I thought it would help the party, I would consider it, but I think just the opposite," he said. For Mr. Hastert and other House leaders, it is a Hobson's choice. Do they risk allowing the scandal to fester without a top-level official taking responsibility, or do they appease critics with a high-profile resignation that could invite "chaos," as Mr. Hastert put it. Any abrupt departure could also disrupt the rest of the leadership in the final weeks of the campaign. And one of the Republicans' weaknesses is that they have no clear transition figure. Mr. Hastert and other leaders don't have as much control over their party as when former Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R., Texas) helped keep the troops in line. Conservative social activists are openly upset by Mr. Foley's actions -- and the leadership's response. "The fact that they just walked away from this, it sounds like they were trying to protect one of their own members rather than these young boys," activist Richard A. Viguerie said on Fox News yesterday, in calling for Mr. Hastert to step down. Meanwhile, a new crop of conservatives could seize the moment to push the party to do more to cut government spending, for example. Among this group, Rep. John Shadegg (R., Ariz.) last night defended Mr. Hastert, saying he should not be "railroaded out of office." Another, Rep. Mike Pence (R., Ind.) has been quieter. If the party were to lose control of the House, it is expected that Mr. Hastert would step out of the leadership. He said yesterday that if Republicans retain power, it is still his intention to run for speaker in the next Congress but "you have to count the votes." Close associates of Mr. Hastert don't rule out that, weary of the fray, he could opt to step down after Nov. 7 even if his party keeps its House majority. IM TRANSCRIPT • See an excerpt of an instant message exchange between Mark Foley and a former congressional page from ABC News. (Adobe Acrobat required) QUESTION OF THE DAY • Vote: Should Hastert resign as House Speaker because of his handling of the Foley scandal? MORE • Ex-Pages Brought Explicit Messages to Light • Those IMs Aren't as Private as You Think The damage from the scandal complicates the picture because the office of the speaker is elected by the full House. If Republicans lose seats, any small block of conservatives unhappy with the party's leadership would gain more say in deciding who is speaker. Mr. Bush came to the speaker's defense yesterday: "I know Denny Hastert... I know that he wants all the facts to come out," the president said. And stung by a "Resign, Mr. Speaker" editorial in the conservative Washington Times, which described his performance as "inept," Mr. Hastert spent the day on radio talks shows trying to tamp down the anger against him. Mr. Hastert's aides trumpeted a letter last night from Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition supporting their boss. And appearing with conservative radio-show host Rush Limbaugh, Mr. Hastert sought to shift blame to Democrats, saying the opposition is orchestrating the leaks of explicit instant messages between Mr. Foley and former pages. "We have a story to tell, and the Democrats have -- in my view have -- put this thing forward to try to block us from telling the story. They're trying to put us on defense," Mr. Hastert said. But the ABC News reporter who broke the original story yesterday said some of the pages themselves stepped forward with some of the most damaging emails. (See related article). WALL STREET JOURNAL VIDEO The Wall Street Journal's John Harwood reports that the Foley scandal has split Republicans and forced President Bush to speak on behalf of Dennis Hastert. Also, CNBC's Hampton Pearson examines how the Dow has reacted in the past when a president has presided over a split Congress.The page program offers teenagers academic and work experience in Congress. The pages, who stay one or two semesters and live in a dorm, run errands and help deliver documents, among other things. Republicans have discussed ending the program entirely or appointing a high-profile attorney to review the situation. "We have to act quickly," said House Rules Committee Chairman Davie Dreier (R., Calif.), a Hastert confidant. And the speaker said he wants to create a blue-ribbon panel to assess the situation and what more could be done to better protect those in the program both during their participation and after they leave Washington. "When they leave Washington we don't have much control over it," Mr. Hastert said. "We're trying to put something together that would help." The Federal Bureau of Investigation has said it is investigating the Foley case, but it isn't clear what kind of legal threat he might face, if any. An FBI official familiar with the Foley investigation said three separate cyber-crime units looked at emails in July and found no evidence of broken laws. "They were vanilla," the official said. Agents are looking to see if new emails that have surfaced explicitly suggested meetings with the juveniles crossing state lines for sex. Other potential laws include exchanging of pornographic material with minors. "Right now, we still don't know what, if any, federal statutes have been broken," the official said. Still, the graphic nature of the instant messages adds to their impact on voters. "This isn't a lobbyist moving money around for favors. This is pretty easy to understand what's going on here," said one Republican leadership aide. And Mr. Hastert says he has felt blind-sided by the recent revelations, saying that the sexual content goes far beyond the "red flag" Foley e-mail his office became aware of last fall, which requested a page's photo but included no overt sexual advances. Nonetheless, the speaker suffered from the fact that he went home to his farm in Illinois on Friday night as the scandal was breaking. It wasn't until Saturday night that the leadership produced a united statement on the crisis, and associates worry the press-shy speaker will be typecast as a Washington version of Cardinal Bernard Law, who was faulted for not doing more to address child abuse by priests in the Boston Archdiocese. As speaker, Mr. Hastert is most responsible for the page program, and when parents of a Louisiana teenager were upset by an August 2005 Foley e-mail to their son, a former page, the complaint was taken to Mr. Hastert's staff last fall. But Mr. Hastert says he wasn't fully informed by his aides until recently, and even now he often mistakenly speaks of the issue being handled by the House Page Board, when in fact most of the six member panel were excluded from knowing of the complaint. Instead, Rep. John Shimkus (R., Ill.), the board's chairman and a Hastert ally, chose to deal with the issue without informing Democrats and simply going to Mr. Foley directly and warning him to stop. Mr. Foley, whose political committees have contributed more than $700,000 to fellow Republicans in the past five elections, had some modest clout in the House. But the expedited, discreet handling of the affair most illustrates fears that if the complaint became public, it could hurt Mr. Foley and the party by reawakening public speculation about his being gay. Mr. Foley and party leaders were concerned such a revelation could cost him the support of voters. "It was commonly known that Mark was gay," said Rep. LaHood. And Rep, Barney Frank, an openly gay Democrat from Massachusetts, said the whole handling of the initial complaint appeared driven by Mr. Foley's political situation. "Knowing as they did that Mark was gay -- and was conflicted about how to handle it -- made this more sensitive politically," Mr. Frank said. Beyond the Foley scandal, the latest Journal/NBC poll suggests even more problems for Republicans' campaign positions, showing the signs of momentum that the party had enjoyed in early September -- from the president's political offensive calling voters' attention to the broader war on terrorism -- have halted. The poll was conducted over the weekend amid a double-barreled dose of bad news for Mr. Bush's party, from disclosures about Mr. Foley to questions about progress in Iraq. The survey didn't ask specifically about the sex scandal or recent assessments of the war. A 46% plurality of Americans now say the war in Iraq is hurting the nation's ability to win the fight against terrorism. That is up from 32% earlier this month when Americans were nearly evenly split on whether the war is helping, hurting or not making a difference in fighting terrorism. "No incumbent party wants to run an election on these sorts of issues," says Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who helps conduct the Journal/NBC survey. Mr. McInturff predicted a renewed Republican effort to focus on terrorism. But Democratic counterpart Peter Hart calls it "a moment of crystallization" in the battle to determine whether the Republicans keep the House and Senate for the last two years of Mr. Bush's term. The survey of 805 registered voters, conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 2, has a margin for error of 3.5 percentage points. The survey shows Democrats -- who need a net gain of 15 House seats and six Senate seats to recapture control of Capitol Hill -- holding a nine-percentage-point edge, 48%-39%, on the question of which party voters want to control Congress after the election. That is unchanged from early this month. The Foley matter comes as voters have already been souring on incumbents in general, and the Republican-led Congress in particular. In the poll, voters, by 45%-38%, said it is time to give a new person a chance rather than re-elect their incumbent member of Congress; in early September, voters split on that question. By 57%-37%, voters say America's safety from terrorism doesn't depend on success in Iraq, which has been a central assertion of Mr. Bush and Republican congressional candidates. And by 61%-29%, voters say Iraq is now in a state of civil war -- a conclusion the White House has tried to forestall in the belief it would further erode support for Mr. Bush's policy there. Even Republicans, by 47%-39%, share that assessment. The poll also contains signs that the congressional Republican strategy of "localizing" elections to take the spotlight off a politically weakened Mr. Bush isn't working. Fully two-thirds of voters now say their decision for Congress will be a signal for the Bush administration-with 39% signaling opposition and 28% signaling support. In April, only about half of Americans called their vote a signal for the administration. The poll's best news for Republicans is what Mr. McInturff calls a "lessening of economic tension and pressure" as gasoline prices have fallen and the stock market has flourished. Voters now split, at 22% apiece, on whether the economy will get better or worse over the next year. In June a 40% plurality of voters predicted the economy would get worse.
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