Posted on 05/28/2003 9:46:46 AM PDT by knighthawk
WASHINGTON - Welcome to the 2004 U.S. election campaign. If you think I'm too hasty, what with polling day still 18 months away, think again -- I'm actually weeks late.
U.S. President George Bush has filed his official re-election papers with the Federal Election Commission; he raised US$22-million for Congressional Republicans last week at a single event, and he's had his Top Gun moment on the USS Lincoln.
The Democrat hopefuls have done a couple of set-piece debates and sorted themselves between genuine Oval Office candidates and those simply fishing for the vice-presidency or even smaller fry.
But such moves are less important in gauging the state of the campaign -- in knowing how deep Americans are into it -- than the fact that the political slime has started to bubble.
It's bubbling nowhere more odiously than in Florida, where the 2000 campaign descended into farce and a constitutional coup was only narrowly averted by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Last week, Mark Foley, a Republican Congressman who has represented Palm Beach County since 1977, held a conference call with reporters to tell them he wouldn't answer questions about his sex life. He felt the need to do so because his putative homosexuality had suddenly begun to get ink.
Why would this be? Why should the matter become a matter of print journalist speculation now? Hasn't the Congressman been asked over and over about his orientation since at least 1996 and declined to make a public statement about it?
Yes, but there are reasons why the Democrats want to raise it again. They wouldn't bother if Rep. Foley intended merely to again run in his district, where he received 79% of the vote last time. But Foley is considering something much more dangerous; he's contemplating a bid for the Senate seat currently occupied by Sen. Bob Graham.
The incumbent Democrat is seeking his party's presidential nomination, and in the unlikely event that he gets it, he may decide against a simultaneous run for Congress. Indeed, he may not run for the Senate anyway; he had heart surgery last winter and might see retirement as the only alternative to the White House or the Veep's house on Observatory Circle.
Republicans hold a narrow majority in the Senate and a vacant seat in Florida would be a prime target. The Dems don't have a strong candidate there to fill Sen. Graham's shoes, so the prospect of facing an able centrist Republican in an open seat is unattractive.
Hence the smear against Rep. Foley. There are not official Democrat fingerprints on it, but these things are not left to chance in modern American (or Canadian) elections.
It would be a mile beyond the Democratic pale to raise the question of the Congressman's orientation overtly. Still less can the party of the left be seen to suggest that homosexuality, either within or without the closet, is a disqualification for office.
How, then, to make it an issue without seeming intolerant?
Easy -- disingenuously raise the issue as though it were a matter of serious psephological analysis. Make it an issue by speculating aloud about whether it is going to be an issue. Pretend that the crux of the matter is whether Rep. Foley can get away without making a public statement. Ponder the supposed difficulty of working alongside social conservatives in the Republican senatorial leadership.
There are several benefits to asking a candidate why he won't fess up. You tag him as a guy who has something to hide and who, by inference, cannot be trusted; you rile those -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- who think every homosexual has a duty to proclaim his orientation publicly; and you alienate those who simply would not vote for a homosexual.
The tactical beauty and moral odiousness of this approach is that you can thrum the chords of bigotry while pretending to engage in high-minded and disinterested analysis.
What's more, you get the matter discussed even by those, like me, who ardently oppose identity politics and believe Rep. Foley should be allowed to keep his sexual tastes private.
It is one of the most lamentable characteristics of our epoch, one that has its roots in Marxism, that all those who engage in political discussion are increasingly expected to allow public inspection of every nook and cranny of their private lives.
And it is an acute irony that the arrival of identity politics in the United States coincided almost exactly with the detection of a right of privacy in the Constitution in the early 1970s.
Rep. Foley should not be protected by a constitutional right of privacy, but by simple decency. He won't be, because modern politics, whether in the United States or elsewhere, does not observe such niceties.
As I said, welcome to the 2004 campaign.
Hugo Gurdon is editor-in-chief of The Hill.
Look out, Repubs, you ain't seen nothin' yet--
Guess I won't be showing you my scrapbook, then...
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