Craig’s humiliating story, amplified in more than 10,000 blog posts, isn’t new, and not just because homosexual men have been trysting in the toilet area since the introduction of public restrooms more than a century ago. The conservative-hypocrisy angle goes way back, too. When I first moved to Washington, D.C., in 1980, Maryland Rep. Bob Bauman, arguably the single most anti-gay and sanctimonious right-winger in town (quite a feat), was busted for sex with a 16-year-old male dancer. Soon he was joined by Mississippi Rep. Jon Hinson, found in a compromising position in a men’s room down the hall from his House office, and the Franklin child-sex ring, which ensnared more than a dozen officials in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. I remember thinking, this will stop the moralizing windbags who are pushing aside old-fashioned, leave-us-alone libertarians.
How naive. In succeeding years, the hypocrisy just rose to a higher level. Both House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his (brief) successor, Rep. Bob Livingston, ripped into President Bill Clinton while they were having affairs themselves. When House Majority Leader Trent Lott asked all Republican senators to show up at Clinton’s 1998 State of the Union address as a sign of respect for the office, Larry Craig was one of only two senators who refused, later calling Clinton a “nasty, bad, naughty boy.”
By 2004, Karl Rove used fear of moral decay (as reflected primarily in gay marriage) to whip the conservative base into a frenzy that helped re-elect President George W. Bush and scores of Republicans. Post-election studies showed “values voters” were not as big a factor as the media initially reported, but this hardly discredited their importance: with Democrats tone-deaf on the issue, it looked as if the GOP could ride the “V”-train forever.
It couldn’t. Results from the 2006 midterms showed that lingering anxiety about homosexuality is being decoupled from the Republican Party, as Democrats picked up seats in Virginia, Wisconsin and Colorado even as those states approved anti-gay-marriage ballot initiatives. Conversely, Arizona easily re-elected Republican Sen. Jon Kyl while becoming the first state to defeat an anti-gay-marriage referendum, further evidence that the gay issue is becoming less partisan.
More immediately, the GOP may be collapsing under the weight of sleaze. Last week MSNBC tallied 10 sex scandals featuring Republican officeholders in the past decade, twice as many as afflicted the Democrats. And Josh Marshall’s talkingpointsmemo.com compiled a list of a dozen elected officials currently in trouble with the law for sex offenses or financial improprieties. Only one, Rep. William Jefferson, is a Democrat.
Predictably, most Republicans in trouble haven’t been shunned like Craig. Senate Republicans gave their colleague, Louisiana’s David Vitter, a nice ovation shortly after he confessed to having sex with prostitutes (note that a Vitter replacement, unlike Craig’s, would be named by a Democratic governor). But something is different this time: usually the party in control of Congress suffers the most from scandal. So far, it’s the minority—the Republicans—getting hammered.
The woes of Craig and Vitter won’t hurt the GOP nationally in 2008. To cause widespread political harm, a scandal must occur within 90 days or so of an election, as Rep. Mark Foley’s lewd e-mail messages to underage male staffers did last year. But Republican consultant Scott Reed is hardly alone in believing these GOP scandals are having a “devastating” cumulative effect. They demoralize the conservative base and make it harder to recruit topnotch candidates to run next year. Nominating Romney because he’s been married only once is not going to solve the problem.
In the long term, though, the end of the reign of family values may be a blessing in disguise for the GOP. It has tied its fortunes too closely to evangelical Christians, who make up less than one fifth of the American electorate. To expand the party in the new century, Republicans will eventually have to lift their suffocating veil of sanctimony. “First and foremost” for politicians of every stripe are vision, competence and commitment to a particular set of social and economic ideas, not some claim of moral superiority every bit as noxious as garden-variety hypocrisy.
