Yesterday afternoon, a TPM reader asked what may soon be the most common question of the campaign season: “If the GOP can’t even keep a bunch of 15 year olds safe, how can they keep America safe?”
As a substantive matter, there’s a qualitative difference between counter-terrorism and covering up a congressman/sexual predator’s “problem,” but as a political matter, Republicans have made the issue of protecting children the centerpiece of several recent campaigns — and now the tables have turned.
In 2004, protecting children against lurking threats was a theme with the Republican House committee running advertisements against several Democratic candidates in Texas, Kansas and Indiana, accusing them of being out of step with “family values” because the candidates would “allow the sale of violent and sexually explicit video games and movies to our children.”
That theme has resurfaced this year. In the contest for Nevada’s Third Congressional District seat, the Republican incumbent, Representative Jon Porter, is running a spot that notes his work to crack down on pedophiles.
“As parents, we need to know that our schools are not hiring teachers that are sexual predators,” Mr. Porter says in the advertisement, which was paid for in part by the Congressional committee. “That’s why I wrote a law in Congress that gives our local school districts the information they need to ensure that sexual predators are not teaching our children.”
And in mailings sent in recent months to voters in Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District, the Republican incumbent, Representative Michael G. Fitzpatrick, criticized the Democratic challenger, Patrick Murphy, who had raised objections to legislation seeking to protect children from online predators that Mr. Fitzpatrick proposed. Democrats said Mr. Fitzpatrick distorted the position of Mr. Murphy, who they said did not believe Mr. Fitzpatrick’s measure went far enough.
In fact, the National [tag]Republican[/tag] Congressional Committee has directly made protecting minors a key part of their 2006 strategy. Carl Forti, a spokesman for NRCC Chairman Tom Reynolds, whose silence in the [tag]Mark Foley[/tag] affair may have been bought and paid for, said [tag]Democrats[/tag] shouldn’t “take advantage” of the situation.
No, of course not. It’s their issue and they exploited it first.
Were the circumstances reversed, I suspect GOP media consultants would be salivating at the opportunities here. If Dems wanted to play hardball — I’m not saying they should, necessarily, but if they wanted to — they’d tie the Foley scandal into a larger narrative about the Republicans and security.
Republicans are falling short in protecting U.S. troops (body armor, misguided mission); they’re falling short in domestic security (ports, airports); they certainly fell short in protecting families along the Gulf Coast (Katrina); and now they’ve fallen short in protecting teenagers who worked for them in Congress (Foley and the pages). In each instance, there was evidence the GOP could have acted on, but, due to politics or negligence, didn’t.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said yesterday that the allegations against Foley “are repugnant, but equally as bad is the possibility that Republican leaders in the House of Representatives knew there was a problem and ignored it to preserve a congressional seat this election year.”
How many issues, exactly, could the same quote be applied to?