Mark Weisenmiller

TAMPA, Florida, Oct 26 2006 (IPS) — The political fallout from an ongoing sex scandal involving a Florida congressman in the U.S. House of Representatives will likely pollute this November’s state – and national – election landscape in various ways, according to a number of experts.

Mark Foley, 52, a Catholic Republican, resigned from the U.S. Congress in late September following the revelation that he had sent numerous sexually-themed electronic-mail messages to male teenagers who worked as pages in Congress.

After Foley’s resignation, he admitted that he is gay, and also claimed that he was molested as a boy by a Catholic priest. Foley checked himself into a rehabilitation clinic to work on ending his alleged alcoholism.

Political science professors at a number of U.S. universities believe that that the scandal will definitely hurt the Republicans in this November’s elections – but to what degree is uncertain.

“There is certainly an awareness of it here in Texas, but trying to separate the impact of the Foley incident, along with the dissatisfaction with the Iraq war and also the economy, is very difficult,” said Dr. Norman Luttbeg, who has been a professor of political science at Texas A&M for the past 28 years.

“Voters here in Texas are just dispirited and it’s conceivable that the Foley thing will quickly go into history, but that the horrible handling of it by the House leadership, especially (Speaker of the House) Dennis Hastert, will be remembered longer than what Foley is alleged to have done,” he told IPS.

Luttbeg was referring to the allegation that Hastert was notified by Kirk Fordham, Foley’s chief of staff, three years ago that Hastert should tell Foley to stop being overly friendly to male Congressional pages. Scott Palmer, the speaker’s chief of staff, has told reporters that no such warning from Fordham ever occurred.

The House Ethics Panel is currently in its third week of hearings on the handling of complaints about Foley by Hastert’s office and other lawmakers and aides.

Prof. Larry Sabato, who teaches political science at the University of Virginia and has studied the national political scene for many years, said most voters do not reject a candidate based on a single issue – although he believes the Republican Party is facing a host of problems, both in terms of domestic and foreign policy.

“A proper investigation hasn’t even been completed yet, but it could cost them more seats than they are anticipating because people wouldn’t completely forget it,” he told IPS.

A CNN poll taken Oct. 13-15 of about 1,000 adults nationwide asked whether “the charges that a former congressman named Mark Foley behaved inappropriately toward teenage boys” would be important to their vote on Nov. 7. A full 55 percent said it would be “extremely” or “very important”, 21 percent said “moderately important”, and 22 percent “not that important”.

The same poll found that 57 percent of respondents believed Republican leaders had engaged in a “deliberate cover-up” of earlier allegations against the congressman. Forty-three percent said they thought Hastert should resign as speaker of the House.

Dr. Aubrey Jewett, an associate professor of political science at the University of Central Florida – not far from the district that Foley used to represent – believes that more than anything else, “It’s an event that crystallises the concerns that voters have about the ethics of the House leadership and the Republican Party.”

“For Florida voters, it is more amplified than for national voters because it happened in their state,” he said.

All of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs next month, along with 33 of the 100 seats in the Senate. Both are currently controlled by Republicans, although most analysts expect this will change, almost certainly as regards the House.

Even among the Republicans’ most loyal supporters – evangelical Christians – support has dwindled since 2004, when 78 percent voted Republican, to about 57 percent today, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Centre.

Jewett says that the Foley affair will likely spur increased fund-raising by both parties. “What I like to call ‘institutional investors’ – that is, organisations that often spend money on politics – have a history of spending money on both the Democratic and Republican Parties in close election years like this one, to make sure that they will still be influential in politics, no matter who is elected.”

Florida Republicans have been the heart of the national party beginning with the 2000 presidential election recount fiasco, when both Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush (George W. Bush’s brother) wielded political power.

Still, Jewett does not believe that the days of Florida’s Republican politicians enjoying power at the national level are over.

“Florida is a big money-bags state and the Republicans here have been very successful at recruiting young Republicans who are good at both fund-raising and other aspects of politics. So this state will be a power in national politics for many years,” he said.

“I think that people around here are seeing it as the latest of a series of contradictions in the Republican Party,” noted Dr. Ann Crigler, chair of the political science department at the University of Southern California. “I think that, because of the way the re-districting of the districts was done by the incumbents, it makes it very difficult for a challenger to get elected, no matter what the circumstances.”

“People are still talking about the Foley case, especially as it relates to the sixth U.S. Congressional seat battle between Patty Wetterling, a Democrat, and Michele Bachmann, a Republican,” said Kathryn Pearson, an assistant political science professor at the University of Minnesota.

Wetterling, whose son was abducted 17 years ago and never found, worked with Foley in the past – he was, ironically, the founder of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus. Since then, she has been a strong advocate of child safety issues and the Wetterling-Bachmann race is expected to be one of the closest races in Minnesota this year.

“I believe that this is a bad year to be a Republican in Minnesota,” Pearson said.

A number of investigations are currently ongoing regarding the Foley scandal, including within the Catholic Church itself. The priest in question, Father Anthony Mercieca, now 69 and living in Malta, has admitted to “fondling” Foley when he a 13-year-old altar boy.

However, Vicki Wells Bedard, a spokeswoman for the Diocese of St. Petersburg, Florida, told IPS that “to my knowledge, no Catholics in the diocese have come forward, to any of us in the diocese’s offices, alleging of sexual improprieties by Foley that happened here in Florida.”