The American Spectator notes:
According to one political consultant with ties to the DNC and other party organizations, "I'm hearing the Foley story wasn't supposed to drop until about ten days out of the election. It was supposed the coup de grace, not the first shot."
So why the rush? According to another DNC operative: bad polling numbers across the country. "Bush's national security speeches were getting traction beyond the base, gas prices were dropping, economic outlook surveys were positive. We were seeing bad Democratic numbers in Missouri, Michigan, Washington, Arizona, Florida Pennsylvania, even parts of New York," says the operative.
... So how to remedy? "You pull out the bright shiny things that distract the average American voter away from the issues we all know they care about -- national security, anti-terrorism -- and focus on the ugly: Foley and Iraq."
The Democrats seem confident that their scheme worked, based on their bounce in the polls after the scandal broke.
But have you noticed that major news media has drastically reduced its coverage of the story, and prominent Democrats have suddenly ceased their Foley talking points? My guess is that it has to do with Speaker Hastert's promise to fully investigate the source of the incriminating instant messages and to work to dismiss anyone with knowledge of the IM's who did not immediately come forward with them. This morning, the former page at the heart of the alleged IM "prank", Jordan Edmund, was questioned by the FBI here in Oklahoma City.
Meanwhile, Ken Silverstein, a reporter for Harper's Magazine, reports the following:
The Republican leadership is lying when they claim that Democrats have engineered an “October Surprise”; there was never a plan undermine the G.O.P. or to destroy Hastert personally, as the speaker has vaingloriously suggested.
... In May, a source put me in touch with a Democratic operative who provided me with the now-infamous emails that Foley had sent in 2004 to a sixteen-year-old page. He also provided several emails that the page sent to the office of Congressman Rodney Alexander, a Louisiana Republican who had sponsored him when he worked on Capitol Hill. “Maybe it is just me being paranoid, but seriously, This freaked me out,” the page wrote in one email. In the fall of 2005, my source had provided the same material to the St. Petersburg Times—and I presume to The Miami Herald—both which decided against publishing stories.
It was a Democrat who brought me the emails, but comments he made and common sense strongly suggest they were originally leaked by a Republican office. And while it's entirely possible that Democratic officials became aware of the accusations against Foley, the source was not working in concert with the national Democratic Party. This person was genuinely disgusted by Foley's behavior, amazed that other publications had declined to publish stories about the emails, and concerned that Foley might still be seeking contact with pages.
Though the emails were not explicitly sexual, I felt strongly that Foley's behavior was inappropriate and that his intentions were clear. Why would a middle-aged man ask a teenager he barely knew for his photograph, or what he wanted for his birthday? I contacted Foley and he strongly denied any ill intent. He told me there was “nothing suggestive or inappropriate” about his emails to the page, adding that if the page “was intimidated, that's regrettable.”
I have no doubt that Silverstein is telling the truth; the 2004 and 2005 emails had been shopped around to a number of sources as Silverstein claims, including two newspapers in Foley's district. No one published a story because, as Silverstein notes, there was nothing explicitly sexual in the emails. And no one wants to be accused of practicing sexual McCarthyism.
But again, Silverstein's confession does not include any mention of the notorious sexually explicit instant messages. The dissemination of those messages is the heart of the Foleygate scandal.
My prediction: Foleygate will be this year's Enron. Democrats will beat the drums until it is discovered that their fingerprints are all over the scandal. And when there is no longer any chance of convincing the American people that their involvement was purely innocent or accidental, the story will disappear.
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