The Issues are mere Distractions

Republican Representative Mark Foley has been busted for solicitation of former Congressional Pages. As the story develops, one has to enjoy how the normative value of the issue is totally diminimous relative to the electoral considerations. To be blunt; this hurts the Republicans because the Evangelical Christians won't like that one of their very own Congressmen is a pedophile, so they won't show up to vote on election day. This suppression of the single largest Republican demographic will likely be devastating.

If the Democrats were tactically smart, which is questionable, they wouldn't say a single thing about Iraq, the budget, or anything else which people are too dopey to critically think about. The Iraq War has been a visible debacle for the last two and a half years, but not enough people cared then, and they probably don't care now. The general consensus among American political theory is that the average citizen is honestly too stupid when it comes to foreign policy, they don't understand it, so rather than try to explain it to them; you simply wrap whatever your foreign policy happens to be up in so much mythological, infantile, jingoistic jargon that you portray anthing other than your position as unpatriotic. This isn't some far fetched liberal windbag argument I am making here, this is time tested, two hundred year old tried and true political gaming. British theorists have written quite extensively about this; I think Michael Doyle is one, he wrote around the 1930s I believe.

Anyways, the point is; if the Democrats were strategically calculating, they would find every teenage boy this Mark Foley ever harrassed and put them in front of the cameras 24/7 for the next six weeks so they could recount every petty, dirty, and sordid thing Foley said or did to them. Then, come election day, just enough Ma and Pa Kettles in non-coastal swing states will simply decide to stay at home rather than go and robotically vote for people like Rick Santorum. The most recent precedent I can think of to this is back in 2000, when Karl Rove speculated that the release of George W. Bush's previous drunk driving arrest was sufficient to cause 1.4 million Christian voters to stay home rather than vote in the Presidential election. Think about it; 1.4 million evangelicals didn't vote in 2000 because of a 15 year old drunk driving arrest; this Republican Congressman was trying to molest boys from his Congressional office two months ago! The potential for billable hours by Democratic strategists is astronomical the next few weeks. In the mean time; check out this story by ABC News in which one of Representative Foley's sex chats with a page is detailed... Amazing..

http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/10/new_foley_insta.html