House Speaker Dennis Hastert took office in the wake of one Republican sex scandal, and it looks like he might lose his chair in the wake of another.In 1998, Bob Livingston of Louisiana was about to succeed Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House. But then it came to light that Livingston, who was among those leading the charge to impeach Bill Clinton for the president’s tawdry Oval Office frolics with 22-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky, was himself an adulterer. The hypocrisy was too much even for the Republicans.
In its moment of discomfort, the GOP turned to Hastert, a former high-school wrestling coach who, while just short of being a blockhead, was certainly amiable enough. Hastert had the immediate virtue of not being a controversial firecracker, like Gingrich, or a nut-case showboater like Livingston, who was once captured on video taking target practice by exploding a watermelon and explaining that he imagined it was Clinton’s head.
Those were the days when the Republicans had a certain style. And Hastert had the advantage of being sponsored by one of the party’s most stylish, Tom “the Hammer” DeLay, the now-indicted former congressman from Texas who resigned his seat after his political crony, corrupt super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, pleaded guilty to an array of crimes that was staggering even by Washington’s standards.
Now Hastert is in hot, hot water because, according to at least some Republicans, he knew as long as five years ago that Florida Republican congressman Mark Foley (now also resigned) took an avid interest in male House pages. Pages are high-school juniors, boys and girls typically 16 and 17 years of age, who work in Congress for a semester as messengers and clerks.
After ABC News reported Hastert was informed earlier this year that Foley swapped improper e-mails with congressional pages, the Washington Times, arguably the nation’s most conservative newspaper, called for Hastert’s immediate resignation. Those calls are likely to grow only louder in the coming days. As things now stand, Hastert looks either stupid or inept, although it’s unclear why his critics think he must be either one or the other.
What no one is saying, at least yet, is that there is another possibility: that Hastert is corrupt, that the Speaker sat on the knowledge, hoping that the midterm elections five weeks from now would allow the beleaguered Republicans to hold on to Foley’s until-now safe seat. Hastert, after all, let Abramoff and DeLay wheel and deal with impunity. And he did the practical equivalent of nothing to reform the House once their crimes — both those admitted and those still awaiting adjudication — came to light. If cold cash and hot favors were not out of the ordinary, under Hastert’s leadership, what’s a little boy-fancying?
While there is at the moment no evidence that Foley physically connected with his digital paramours, it is the thought of man-boy or adult-teenage sex that gives Foleygate it’s lurid, tabloid potency.
The mainstream press has been polite in its characterization of the Foley e-mails. As raunch goes, they are rather tame, almost first-year Princeton. Still, for parents and for many others, they are explicit enough, comparing and contrasting in detail the correspondents’ personal preferences in masturbatory styles. And while it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to discern the underage correspondents’ frames of mind, there does not appear to be overt coercion involved.
