Joshua Green: Republicans might—or might not—want to look backward for lessons on handling life under a cloud
Legend has it that certain Eskimo tribes in northern Canada had a fiercely efficient way to dispatch elders who outlived their usefulness and became a burden on the community: put them on an ice floe and shove them off to sea. That kind of cold-eyed realism is hardly alien to the tribes of Washington, D.C., forever locked in their own struggle for survival. And if the Republican scandals centered upon the former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and the lobbyist Jack Abramoff suddenly metastasize this spring, as appears likely, Republicans may find themselves looking wistfully northward. After all, it’s an election year. ...
Despite recent advances in campaign and election strategies, political professionals have never really developed a science of dealing with scandal. When Washingtonians feel helpless, they tend to let historical analogy be their guide. The range of past scandals is practically limitless, but two now stand out by virtue of being Republican difficulties that dominated an election year: Watergate, of course, and Teapot Dome, which held the same psychic significance until Watergate eclipsed it a half-century later. The two episodes are illuminating because the party’s leadership approached them differently—with starkly different results.
After Watergate drove Richard Nixon from office, in 1974, Gerald Ford faced the unenviable task of leading his party in the elections three months hence. There can be little doubt that Watergate would have cost the Republicans at the polls regardless of what Ford did in the interim. But he still faced the fraught question of whether to pardon Nixon. Just a month into his term—two months before the election—Ford granted amnesty to his disgraced predecessor without extracting so much as a word of contrition.
Pardoning Nixon may have been the right thing to do for the country, as Ford claimed. But failing to hold him accountable carried a clear political cost: Ford’s approval rating dropped from 71 percent to 50 percent practically overnight. Two months later Republicans lost forty-eight seats in the House of Representatives and four in the Senate. The hangover from the pardon continued to weigh on Ford’s presidency and undoubtedly contributed to his defeat two years later.
It was a different story after the Teapot Dome affair, which came to prominence in 1923 during the presidency of Warren Harding. Much like the Abramoff scandal, this one was revealed in the course of a congressional investigation, when it came to light that Harding’s Interior secretary, Albert Fall, had surreptitiously leased drilling rights to emergency naval oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and elsewhere to the Mammoth Oil Company (actual name!) and another in exchange for $400,000 in bribes and payoffs. Harding himself managed to escape most of the uproar by dying later that year, sparing his successor, Calvin Coolidge, any agony over the question of a pardon. But Coolidge faced a plight no less daunting than Ford’s: he faced his own election the very next year. Hardly renowned for bold action, Coolidge thunderingly denounced the scandal, well in advance of the election. “I feel the public is entitled to know that in the conduct of such actions no one is shielded for any party, political, or other reasons,” he declared. “If there has been any crime it must be prosecuted … If there is any guilt it will be punished; if there is any civil liability it will be enforced; if there is any fraud it will be revealed.” Then he appointed two independent counsels, undermining his Democratic opponents. ...
So will Bush be Ford or Coolidge? Not the kind of comparison presidents fantasize about, surely, but in the current situation an apt one (some would say very apt). Bush’s indulgence of DeLay and—more important—his silence and stasis on the growing number of scandals besetting his party have left the unindicted Republicans in a very tough spot. If he does not change course soon voters, like Eskimos, are liable to give Republicans the cold shoulder on Election Day.
Read entire article at Atlantic Monthly (March 2006)
Despite recent advances in campaign and election strategies, political professionals have never really developed a science of dealing with scandal. When Washingtonians feel helpless, they tend to let historical analogy be their guide. The range of past scandals is practically limitless, but two now stand out by virtue of being Republican difficulties that dominated an election year: Watergate, of course, and Teapot Dome, which held the same psychic significance until Watergate eclipsed it a half-century later. The two episodes are illuminating because the party’s leadership approached them differently—with starkly different results.
After Watergate drove Richard Nixon from office, in 1974, Gerald Ford faced the unenviable task of leading his party in the elections three months hence. There can be little doubt that Watergate would have cost the Republicans at the polls regardless of what Ford did in the interim. But he still faced the fraught question of whether to pardon Nixon. Just a month into his term—two months before the election—Ford granted amnesty to his disgraced predecessor without extracting so much as a word of contrition.
Pardoning Nixon may have been the right thing to do for the country, as Ford claimed. But failing to hold him accountable carried a clear political cost: Ford’s approval rating dropped from 71 percent to 50 percent practically overnight. Two months later Republicans lost forty-eight seats in the House of Representatives and four in the Senate. The hangover from the pardon continued to weigh on Ford’s presidency and undoubtedly contributed to his defeat two years later.
It was a different story after the Teapot Dome affair, which came to prominence in 1923 during the presidency of Warren Harding. Much like the Abramoff scandal, this one was revealed in the course of a congressional investigation, when it came to light that Harding’s Interior secretary, Albert Fall, had surreptitiously leased drilling rights to emergency naval oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and elsewhere to the Mammoth Oil Company (actual name!) and another in exchange for $400,000 in bribes and payoffs. Harding himself managed to escape most of the uproar by dying later that year, sparing his successor, Calvin Coolidge, any agony over the question of a pardon. But Coolidge faced a plight no less daunting than Ford’s: he faced his own election the very next year. Hardly renowned for bold action, Coolidge thunderingly denounced the scandal, well in advance of the election. “I feel the public is entitled to know that in the conduct of such actions no one is shielded for any party, political, or other reasons,” he declared. “If there has been any crime it must be prosecuted … If there is any guilt it will be punished; if there is any civil liability it will be enforced; if there is any fraud it will be revealed.” Then he appointed two independent counsels, undermining his Democratic opponents. ...
So will Bush be Ford or Coolidge? Not the kind of comparison presidents fantasize about, surely, but in the current situation an apt one (some would say very apt). Bush’s indulgence of DeLay and—more important—his silence and stasis on the growing number of scandals besetting his party have left the unindicted Republicans in a very tough spot. If he does not change course soon voters, like Eskimos, are liable to give Republicans the cold shoulder on Election Day.