DeLay sees the writing on the wall indictment, gives up struggle to reclaim the Majority Leader post.
--Josh Marshall
WorldNetDaily, July 11th, 2002 ...
Rabbi Daniel Lapin, head of Toward Tradition, and Gary Bauer, former GOP presidential candidate, will co-chair the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, or AAJC. A statement released yesterday calls the effort "a unique synthesis of Jewish authenticity and Christian grass-roots muscle."...
The new cooperative, headquartered in Washington, D.C., will have an immediate constituency via Bauer's approximately 100,000-strong e-mail list. According to the statement, the advisory board of the organization will include Dr. James Dobson, Charles Colson, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Rev. Pat Robertson, Pastor Rick Scarborough, as well as Rabbi Barry Freundel, Rabbi David Novak, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Michael Medved, John Uhlmann and Jack Abramoff.
Noted without comment.
--Josh Marshall
James Dobson: "If the nation’s politicians don’t fix this national disaster, then the oceans of gambling money with which Jack Abramoff tried to buy influence on Capitol Hill will only be the beginning of the corruption we’ll see. Some religious leaders want new ethics rules for Congress, but that’s only a band-aid fix. Politicians need to root out this infection. Gambling – all types of gambling – is driven by greed and subsists on greed. That makes it morally bankrupt from its very foundation. Gambling creates addicts, breeds crime and destroys families. We need courageous office holders who will begin the process of shutting down lotteries, casinos and other gambling outlets."
Noted without comment.
--Josh Marshall
CNN's David Ensor has a follow-up here on that weird story about the NSA possibly snooping on CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour.
Says Ensor: "A senior U.S. intelligence official told CNN on Thursday that the National Security Agency did not target CNN's chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour or any other CNN journalist for surveillance."
What we may have here though is an issue of terminology.
Remember that what Andrea Mitchell said or asked in her interview of James Risen was this: "Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net? (italics added)"
To be 'swept up' in a net isn't the same as being 'targetted' -- just ask dolphins. And toward the end of Ensor's piece on the CNN website, there's some hint that this distinction might be what we're talking about ...
The senior official said that from time to time NSA surveillance overseas "inadvertently" acquires recordings or copies of communications involving Americans -- or what the government calls "U.S. persons," which includes most U.S. residents and employees of American companies. By law, however, such materials are required to be erased or destroyed immediately, the official said.Intelligence officials rarely comment on who they may or may not have collected information about, but because of all the speculation on Internet blogs, the senior official agreed to look into the matter for CNN. Another official privately said he was "puzzled" by NBC's decision to publish the raw transcript of the interview.
There's a lot of hinting and vagary here. But I think this gives some clue to where this goes.
--Josh Marshall
Non-denial denial ain't just a river in Egypt!
Mark Graul is the former Chief of Staff for Rep. Mark Green (R) of Wisconsin. Now he's Green's campaign manager in the congressman's run for governor of Wisconsin.
Democrats back in the state have been razzing him for a few months over the fact that his name pops up numerous times in Team Abramoff emails we published here back in October. Graul followed up with a series of wiggly non-denial denials.
Now, with the Abramoff story starting to heat up, he's starting to question the source of the documents themselves, i.e., me.
Yesterday, Graul had this to say to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ...
Graul, who is now managing Green's campaign for governor, said the report was written by a "liberal blogger with an ax to grind." Graul said he hasn't seen the original documents on which the blog was based.
And from today's Green Bay Press-Gazette ...
Meanwhile, the former chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Mark Green, R-Hobart, said Abramoff's plea bargain has no bearing on his past association with a former colleague of Abramoff.Mark Graul, who is now campaign manager for Green's gubernatorial bid, acknowledges attending a Milwaukee Bucks-Washington Wizards basketball game as a guest of lobbyist Jennifer Calvert in 2000.
...
The Wisconsin Democratic Party, citing purported e-mails between Calvert and Abramoff posted by an Internet blogger, claims Graul also obtained free tickets to other events in Washington with Abramoff's OK.
...
However, Graul denied having attended the other events, saying he was in Wisconsin on the days they occurred.
"I can assure you that I didn't go to them," said Graul.
Graul said there's no evidence the alleged e-mails are authentic and that he never met Abramoff.
Calvert's relationship with Abramoff as a co-worker ended several years ago, when she left Preston Gates & Ellis to help establish the government affairs business at Washington Strategies, a smaller lobbying firm across the Potomac River from Washington in Rosslyn, Va.
Graul said Thursday that he considered his attendance at the game at the MCI Center in downtown Washington with Calvert primarily a social event. He did not recall what business topics were discussed.
The two became acquainted when one of Calvert's clients was an association that represented the personal watercraft industry, said Graul.
Calvert's firm said Thursday she was out of town for the week.
If you're interested in delving into the minutiae of this, note that Graul is changing his story about the hoops game with Calvert from what he said last year. Also, this talk about whether he showed for this game or that is just more bamboozlement. As we said last October "do we have proof that Graul showed up at the skybox that night? No. What we have are Team Abramoff emails saying he was one of the lucky Hill staffers who they gave tickets to. I'll let you draw your own conclusions."
Now, Graul's new angle seems to be that he hasn't seen the letters, isn't sure they're real, doesn't this, that and the other.
Mark, a bit of free advice courtesy of TPM: just admit you got some freebie tickets and move on. These emails were produced by the relevant parties pursuant to a lawful subpoena. They are most definitely authentic.
Graul knows they're real. And that's why he's been ducking my phone calls about them for three months.
If Graul doesn't have anything to hide here, why won't he take my call?
Graul is far from the only congressional staffer to snag a few skybox tickets from the Abramoff gravy train. He's just doing more than any of the others to cover it up.
--Josh Marshall
In these days of easy ethics, who will take a stand for corrupt Abramoff money? That and other news in today's Daily Muck.
--Josh Marshall
As a political party, you can't run on corruption if you're not running for reform. But as near as I can tell there is no Democratic reform proposal in Congress. Maybe this or that representative or senator has some proposal, but nothing that the opposition party in any way, as a whole, has gotten behind.
So where's the plan?
How will we know that a reform plan goes far enough? When a lot of members of the Democratic caucus have to be dragged to it kicking and screaming.
I just set up this thread over at TPMCafe to discuss this. Tell us a few concrete, straightforward proposals that you think could go some real way to cleaning up today's Washington.
--Josh Marshall
In the field I used to work in, Colonial American history, one of the perennial questions was why the colonies were plagued by chronic political instability -- particularly, why the colonial legislatures seemed so intractable, so hard to organize or discipline. That's at least what it seemed like when compared to the Parliament in London, the body upon which each of these mini-parliaments modeled themselves.
There are innumerable explanations. But one focuses on the lack of executive authority and, underlying that, the lack of patronage available to those trying to gain and wield power.
A modern version of this is playing out now in the House of Representatives, and this article in tomorrow's Washington Post shows some of the centrifugal forces that are released when an effective patronage system begins to break down.
One of the great questions of the last decade is how congressional Republicans managed to maintain such unprecedented party discipline. The standard answer is that that's how Tom DeLay earned his nickname 'The Hammer', by squashing anyone who threatened to get out of line. Only that's not really quite how the House GOP Caucus functioned. Notwithstanding the reputation DeLay liked to cultivate, he worked a lot more with Carrots than Sticks. And that means money. Lots and lots and lots of money. A lot of it unaccountable money; a lot of it 'don't ask where it came from' money; but lots and lots of money, and as long as you were there with the caucus on the important votes, a lot of it would be yours.
You can't understand the K Street Project or the sort of slush fund Jack Abramoff was running without understanding that Tom DeLay had built a very effective patronage machine -- one that organized a great deal of the money in the city in the hands of the political leadership.
Most people now think that the Abramoff indictments effectively end any realistic hope for DeLay to reclaim the leadership. So the question is whether you end up with DeLayism without DeLay -- the same money and machine, just under a new boss.
On the one hand, you have acting Majority Leader Roy Blunt, who ants to push DeLay aside and claim the post for himself. But Blunt is a DeLay Man through and through, part of the machine in every way. On the other hand, you've got rebels who just don't think the GOP can get out from under these scandals without a real change in leadership and direction.
That's the fight the Post article talks about. But a big part of what's happening now isn't just which leadership slate takes over the House GOP Caucus. At a deeper level, the Abramoff scandal may do so much damage to the machine DeLay built -- by knocking out key leaders, exposing illegality and 'legal' corruption -- that whomever comes out on top may not be able to run the place with anything like the party discipline DeLay managed during his years in power.
--Josh Marshall
Doesn't it make you proud?
A headline from the Israeli daily Ha'aretz: "U.S. evangelist: PM's stroke tied to God's 'enmity' for Gaza pullout."
--Josh Marshall
Annals of co-location. Pat Robertson, fresh from work as medical consultant to God, plans to build evangelical theme park in Israel.
--Josh Marshall
What a guy ...
JTA: Pat Robertson announces that God struck down Ariel Sharon for dividing the Land of Israel.
Late Update: Now MediaMatters has the video clip of Robertson's most recent analysis of God's work in punitive cardiology.
--Josh Marshall
The Post's Chris Cillizza has a post on a topic I've wanted to know more about for a while: Grassroots Interactive, one of the many paper companies Jack Abramoff apparently had on hand to steer money to. From there, well, who knows what happened to the money once it went through the GRI rinse? The outfit was founded in May 2003 and its registered agent in Maryland was Edward B. Miller.
Miller subsequently became Deputy Chief of Staff to Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich (R). Apparently he's been cooperating with the DOJ investigation for more than a year.
This article from September suggests that of $2 million Tyco paid Abramoff to buck legislation that would have forced the company to pay taxes, $1.5 was diverted to entities like GRI, and then apparently used on other things beside helping Tyco stay one step ahead of the IRS.
In all the reporting on these stories the assumption is that Abramoff funnelled all this money, somehow or another, back to himself. And in the narrow sense of control of assets I'm sure that was often the case, at least for some period of time. But while Abramoff moved through many tens of millions of dollars quite a lot got pumped back into the DC Republican political machine.
Let's start with GRI. What happened to that money?
--Josh Marshall
The Times has an assessment of Ariel Sharon's prognosis. And it is very, very bleak. The article notes that the blood thinners prescribed for Sharon's earlier stroke -- caused by a blood clot rather than a hemorrhage -- greatly complicate treating this second stroke. Because of the blood thinners, reports the Times, this second event is "likely to be devastating and nearly impossible to treat."
The author of the piece quotes Dr. Matthew E. Fink, chief of the Division of Stroke and Critical Care at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, as saying that in a case like Sharon's the "likelihood of death is greater than 80 percent."
--Josh Marshall
A bit more information about this suggestion by Andrea Mitchell that Christiane Amanpour was among those snooped by one of the president's warrantless NSA wiretaps.
As discussed earlier, John Aravosis first caught the remark on an NBC transcript.
Later, the passage in question was edited out of the transcript at the MSNBC website.
Now TVNewser has a statement of explanation from NBC ...
Unfortunately this transcript was released prematurely. It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting, and it was not broadcast on 'NBC Nightly News' nor on any other NBC News program. We removed that section of the transcript so that we may further continue our inquiry.
This actually sounds like what I suspected. She asked the question. But either they hadn't intended to release the question on the transcript or someone hadn't thought through the implications of doing so.
Just to refresh everyone's memory, this was the exchange from Mitchell's interview with James Risen ...
MITCHELL: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?RISEN: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that
MITCHELL: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?
RISEN: No, no I hadn't heard that.
Despite the fact that it's framed as a question, Mitchell inevitably becomes in some sense a fact witness for the underlying claim. She legitimizes the question and strongly suggests she has at least some evidence that it is true.
Okay, so someone at NBC screwed up. Mistakes happen. But the bell can't be unrung.
In their response NBC confirms that they not only were but are in fact continuing to investigate whether Amanpour was in fact a target of one of these 'wiretaps'.
Now, that really puts this into altogether different territory.
You wouldn't just pull this Amanpour story out of your hat (this is a family website). To be even remotely credible, a claim like that would have to come from within the government.
Wouldn't it? I know I'm speculating. But think about it: who would be able to make such a claim and have enough credibility to make a major news organization take the suggestion seriously?
--Josh Marshall
I'm not completely certain I have the timeline right on this. But this late article from Ha'aretz says that Ariel Sharon was given a CT scan after the surgery to relieve bleeding in his brain was completed and that on the basis of that test he was taken back for further surgery. The latest from the Jerusalem Post was simply that surgery had been completed after six hours.
Late Update: Now the Jerusalem Post confirms and elaborates. The CT scan revealed additional areas of bleeding in the brain. Thus the return to the operating room.
--Josh Marshall
What a guy ...
Pat Robertson says God is punishing Ariel Sharon for dividing the Land of Israel.
--Josh Marshall
Count 'em: 17 recess appointments this evening from the president -- including a slew of cronies and hacks the president couldn't manage to get through a senate controlled by his own party. Here's the list just posted at the White House, which TPM Reader JW was kind enough to send us.
--Josh Marshall
Jack Abramoff pled guilty to charges stemming out of the SunCruz case today. Here's a copy of the plea agreement just added to the TPM Document Collection.
--Josh Marshall
Crony all-nighter!
From Roll Call: "President Bush is expected to announce a list of recess appointments to a host of key federal positions as early as tonight or Thursday morning, including two controversial nominations that Democrats have attacked as patronage appointments for unqualified nominees."
Former senate staffer Tracy Henke and Julie Myers (wife of Michael Chertoff's chief of staff and niece of former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Richard Myers) are the names the article mentions. Both are in line for DHS appointments.
--Josh Marshall
I shudder to think what the final story will be with this breaking news that Ariel Sharon suffered a "significant" stroke tonight in Jerusalem.
The latest word is that he has been rushed into surgery to alleviate "massive bleeding and [that he] was being transferred to an operating theater."
Needless to say, I'm no doctor. But 'significant' in this context sounds to me like a euphemism for 'major'. And coming right on the heels of a relatively minor stroke only weeks ago, that sounds very bad.
I won't speculate any more on the medical prognosis; but what is the fate of the recent tectonic shifts in Israeli politics -- Sharon's bolting of Likud in conjunction with the major shift in the direction of Labor Party -- if Sharon is no longer on the scene?
Late Update: These details don't change the basic story. But I just wanted to update this post by noting that Sharon did not fall ill in Jerusalem but rather at his ranch in the Negev. And he was driven by ambulance -- an hour long drive -- to University Hospital in Jerusalem. According to the sketchy reports contained in this late Ha'aretz article, his episode began with chest pains and later developed into paralysis of the lower body. The web headline in the Jerusalem Post as of 6:16 PM is: Sharon fighting for his life.
--Josh Marshall
Haaretz: "Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was rushed into surgery at Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem late Wednesday night, after intra-cranial bleeding was detected, following what doctors described as a 'significant stroke.' There was no immediate assessment of the damage he may have suffered. Doctors said earlier that the prime minister was receiving breathing assistance as his condition was assessed."
--Josh Marshall
Okay, this really does require a bit more explanation.
As John Aravosis points out here, Andrea Mitchell is pretty clearly telling us that she has at least some evidence that Christiane Amanpour got swept up in the warrantless NSA eavesdropping that's been in the news for the last two weeks.
To me, since there's so little we know about the methods and targets of this surveillance, the key issue is that, whatever the substantive merit of these wiretaps, doing them without a warrant seems to have violated the FISA law.
If the present law doesn't allow something that is indeed necessary, the president has to get Congress to change the law. At a minimum, the president needs to fully inform Congress of what he is doing and the legal/constitutional basis upon which he believes he is acting.
Otherwise, Congress isn't in a position to exercise its constitutionally mandated oversight role.
Yet the president is arguing that his powers as commander-in-chief give him the authority to set aside that law. Such an unlimited assertion of presidential authority just has no place in our constitutional system; and his continued assertion of such authority is a plenty big enough scandal right there.
But if this were to take a truly Nixonian turn and it turns out that this was being used against political enemies, anti-war groups or journalists then we're talking a whole 'nother ballgame.
More reporting needed.
Late Update: Now apparently NBC has edited the detail about Amanpour out of the transcript.
--Josh Marshall
Here's our run-down of the key points of what happened today in the Abramoff story.
--Josh Marshall
WaPo: "Jack Abramoff represented the most flamboyant and extreme example of a brand of influence trading that flourished after the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives 11 years ago. Now, some GOP strategists fear that the fallout from his case could affect the party's efforts to keep control in the November midterm elections. Abramoff was among the lobbyists most closely associated with the K Street Project, which was initiated by his friend Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), now the former House majority leader, once the GOP vaulted to power. It was an aggressive program designed to force corporations and trade associations to hire more GOP-connected lobbyists in what at times became an almost seamless relationship between Capitol Hill lawmakers and some firms that sought to influence them."
--Josh Marshall
"DHS to Base Grants on Risk" -- headline at the Washington Post website. Another memento of our up-is-down world.
I'm waiting for: "Fireman to prioritize buildings on fire."
"The sick to be first in line for medicine."
Actually ...
--Josh Marshall
One thing that's clear when you look closely at the deal that came down today is that they take the investigation a lot closer to Tom DeLay than it seemed on first blush. Specifically, it refers to Tony Rudy (see pages 21 and 22), once a key DeLay staffer, then a colleague of Abramoff's and now a key player at Alexander Strategy Group -- Ed Buckham's shop.
(A lot of this story turns on how Rudy got from Team Abramoff over to Team Buckham, aka Alexander Strategy Group. But that's for another post.)
This from John Bresnahan in Roll Call (sub.req.) ...
According to the Abramoff plea document, a Congressional staffer is alleged to have performed a series of acts during a period extending from 1999 to January 2001 that benefited Abramoff’s clients, including derailing an Internet gambling bill and blocking postal rate increases for magazine publishers.“Staffer A,” who is not named in the plea deal, is believed to be Rudy, DeLay’s former deputy chief of staff, according to media reports. In return for these actions, Rudy’s wife, Lisa, reportedly received $50,000 in 10 payments from a nonprofit group. That organization was not named in the plea agreement.
This particular reference is on page 13 of the plea agreement.
Will have more on this in our run-down of the day's events.
--Josh Marshall
One thing I'm curious about is how today's Abramoff news is playing in districts and states of those who seem most likely to be the targets of the on-going investigation -- Ney, Burns, Doolittle, DeLay, etc. That's not an exhaustive list; and perhaps not each of those guys will get nailed. But you get the idea. If your congressman or senator looks like he's in hot water, let us know how the local media is playing the story.
--Josh Marshall
Haaretz: "The police have prima facie evidence indicating that Austrian brothers Martin and James Schlaff were involved in transferring $3 million to members of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's family, possibly with the intention of bribing Sharon. The existence of this evidence was revealed for the first time in a document the police recently submitted to the Rishon Letzion Magistrate's Court. The document was made public Tuesday night by Channel 10 news."
--Josh Marshall
But what does it mean for Ralph (Reed)? Ed Kilgore brings us up to speed.
--Josh Marshall
Best Abramoff joke of the day?
Bob Ney (R-OH) still thinks he's running for reelection in November.
Okay, gallows humor, admittedly. But you do have to sort of wonder whether at some point the guy has to take stock of his situation and options. As near as I can tell either two or three men have made plea agreements in which they admit to bribing Ney and agree to testify against him in forthcoming testimony (Scanlon and Abramoff are two; it's not clear to me whether Kidan will be testifying directly against Ney.)
Now, everyone deserves their day in court. And perhaps a good lawyer can help Ney beat the rap at trial. But you've got to figure that in the context of a election campaign there's more than enough on the table already to make capital punishment a near certainty.
--Josh Marshall
Earlier today we posted the 'criminal information' from the Abramoff cased. The full plea deal is out now too and we've posted it to the TPM Document Collection.
--Josh Marshall
There's a lot of speculation right now about what's in and what's not in the criminal information -- the facts that Abramoff admitted to today, the ones that will be the basis of his plea agreement.
More than a few readers, lawyers of various sorts, express suspicions that so little new factual information is continued in the document. There's no mention of any members of Congress beside Rep. Ney (R-OH), against whom two others have already agreed to testify. Nor is there any mention of executive branch officials -- not even David Safavian, who's already under indictment in the case.
Others see this altogether differently. The 'information' is quite open-ended. (Note that page three refers to bribes to "public officials and their relatives" which seems to allude to possible indictments involving if not necessarily against spouses of members of Congress.) And note too that prosecutors don't have to provide exhaustive details about what they expect a defendant to testify to -- especially if some of it is the focus of a continuing investigation.
The question lingering in the background here, of course, is whether political officials at the DOJ have leaned on prosecutors to limit the scope of the investigation for political reasons.
For the moment, given all I've seen to date and heard, I'm not inclined to believe that that is happening. This seems more like the beginning of a long process. They go after Ney first and continue their investigation, with Abramoff's fate hanging in the balance, depending on how cooperative he chooses to be in providing information on coconspirators and sundry bad acts.
But who knows? We have to wait to see how it plays out.
Let us know what you think in this thread we just set up over at TPMcafe.
--Josh Marshall
The Post now has up some further analysis of the Abramoff plea agreement and where things are likely to go from here on other congressional and executive branch officials.
--Josh Marshall
Looking over the Abramoff deal what stands out most on first blush is what it doesn't contain. The criminal information refers to bribery of "public officials". But the facts set forth all relate to transactions we know about. And the only member of Congress referenced is Rep. Ney (R-OH), even if not explicitly by name, and one of his staffers.
We've published the actual document. So I'll be curious to see what our lawyer readers make of it. But from a layman's perspective, it really seems like the DOJ really has Ney nailed as he's ever going to get. Remember, both Scanlon and Kidan have already both agreed to testify against him. A 'criminal information' doesn't have to be exhaustive. But I'd figure they'd want more from Abramoff at this point than just Ney. So what more, if anything, has he agreed to give up to get this deal?
--Josh Marshall
We've just posted the Abramoff 'criminal information' -- the facts admitted to that are the basis of the plea agreement -- to the TPM Document Collection. He's charged with conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion.
--Josh Marshall
TPM Reader LH considers the Abramoff Affair and another scandal from yesteryear. We join in the email in progress, after some preliminaries ...
There is a lesson to be learned from the "Abscam" investigations that should be applied to any examination of that constellation of events that fall under the heading of "The Abramoff Matter." (hereafter TAM). That lesson is that TAM exceeds the scope of the legal system and, specifically, the Justice Department. This is what "Abscam" taught us. If you recall "Abscam" was a DOJ sting operation that offered bribes to congressmen. It turned out that it was a very successful sting and several members of Congress were prosecuted. But then the operation was terminated although if anything was learned it was that there were more opportunities for success. It was terminated precisely because of its success. The DOJ determined that they might be able to unseat as much as a third of the sitting Congress if they continued. DOJ determined that if they did continue then what began as a law enforcement project could alter the political balance within the Legislative branch. The DOJ decided, rightly I believe, that it was not their place to fundamentally alter that political balance.And so it will be with TAM. At some point TAM will become a potent enough matter to be profoundly political in nature and those involved in the legal system will have to withdraw. To do otherwise would be to improperly engage the legal system in a political contest and undermine the foundational premise of an independent judiciary. This is the tightrope that Fitzgerald is walking in the Plame matter. So long as he is pursuing the violation of a particular Federal statute he is on solid ground. But were he to find himself standing on the threshold of something that, if pursued, could alter the political balance of power then he would have to retreat. Otherwise he would fall into that political contest and improperly involve DOJ in the public arena of political combat.
It would be wise of those of us who are offended by the realities of TAM to resist the temptation to view TAM as a fundamentally legal matter. Rather we should debate it within the arena of political and social ethics. If we cannot win the contest on the basis of these ethical principles then no legal system can save us from ourselves.
Thoughts?
--Josh Marshall
Abramoff plea deal expected to be announced as early as tomorrow, says the Houston Chronicle.
Here's Bloomberg's version of the story.
--Josh Marshall
Over at TPMCafe, Max Sawicky notes and decries a possible parallel between 2006 and 1974.
'74 was the Watergate election, a mid-term which brought in a big crop of reformist Democrats, more than a few of whom are still around thirty years later. In retrospect, the '74 midterm looks quite different than it must have at the time. It recemented the Democratic hold on Congress that would endure for two more decades. And it anticipated Democrat Jimmy Carter's win two years later.
Judged from the perspective of thirty years on, however, '74 and '76 were more like speed bumps or momentary retrenchments in the conservative realignment of American politics which started at least as far back as 1966. It picked up steam again in 1978. Ronald Reagan was elected president two years later, etc.
Max says "Watergate ushered in a generation of Democratic politicians with little in the way of ideological commitment other than honesty. Not long after Watergate we got the Reagan revolution."
I'm not sure that's it precisely, though. Or perhaps the disagreement is one of cause and effect. A more economical answer, I think, is that the country was in the midst of a broad shift toward the right. The scandals surrounding Watergate upended the political dynamic in the country but not the ideological one. And as soon as those implicated in Watergate left the scene the broad pattern reasserted itself.
Of course, this may be an overdeterministic view of the past. A bunch of small changes could have made things turn out differently.
But it does at least suggest one point worth considering: the other side's scandals can reshuffle the political cards temporarily. But it probably won't be for that long if the scandals aren't intrinsically connected to the bases of the afflicted party's power or if their fall-out doesn't catalyze a some deeper political and ideological reconfiguration in the country. Nixon's dirty-tricksterism wasn't at the heart of the rise of the American right in the late 20th century. So it continued on without him.
--Josh Marshall
