File this one in the Endorsements You’d Rather Not Have category:  Variety reports that disgraced former Republican Congressman and sender of solicitors of underage boys for sex Mark Foley is backing Barack Obama for president.

Let’s just say I don’t believe Team Obama will be touting this one as loudly as the Powell endorsement.

UPDATE: Several commenters say Foley has denied this report. I’m not seeing anything in Google News aside from a statement Newsbusters has printed: “The story on Variety’s website, based on a second or third-hand account of my private conversation, is incorrect. I have already voted by absentee ballot in Florida. Although I didn’t vote for Senator Obama, I intend to keep my choice private.”

It’s not exactly news that the Republican Party is in the doldrums at the moment. It lost control of both Houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, its president is at historic lows in the polls, it has lost a string of special elections and its incumbent Congressmen are retiring in droves, and the odds are better than even that they’ll lose the White House in the Fall.

As usually happens when one of the two major parties is in a down cycle, the pundits and activists alike come out of the woodworks proposing a plan to save the party — invariably by making it more suitable to their own particular preferences. The latest entrants in this fray are a superb long piece in the New Yorker by George Packer, “The Fall of Conservatism — Have the Republicans run out of ideas?” (via memeorandum) and a call by moderate California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for a “rebranding” of the GOP (via Glenn Reynolds).

Packer provides a look at the rise and fall of the modern Republican Party, which begins with Goldwater’s massive defeat in 1964 and a quick turnaround leading to Richard Nixon’s stunning blowout victory four years later.

[The Nixon] Administration adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few.

A more charitable characterization would be that the overwhelming majority of Americans saw their culture under assault from an urban elite and a sympathetic Supreme Court. But the battle lines are about right no matter how one looks at it.

Political tactics have a way of outliving their ability to respond to the felt needs and aspirations of the electorate: Democrats continued to accuse Republicans of being like Herbert Hoover well into the nineteen-seventies; Republicans will no doubt accuse Democrats of being out of touch with real Americans long after George W. Bush retires to Crawford, Texas. But the 2006 and 2008 elections are the hinge on which America is entering a new political era.

This will be true whether or not John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, wins in November. He and his likely Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, “both embody a post-polarized, or anti-polarized, style of politics,” the Times columnist David Brooks told me. “McCain, crucially, missed the sixties, and in some ways he’s a pre-sixties figure. He and Obama don’t resonate with the sixties at all.” The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the 2008 race is the last one standing—despite being despised by significant voices on the right—shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces.

[...]

After Reagan and the end of the Cold War, conservatism lost the ties that had bound together its disparate factions—libertarians, evangelicals, neoconservatives, Wall Street, working-class traditionalists.

This isn’t a new observation — after all, the Soviet Union fell seventeen years ago now! — but it has in fact been difficult to keep that coalition together without a common enemy. Then again, the GOP has won two of the four presidential elections wrested control of the Congress for several years during that span. So, clearly, they must have had something to offer besides warmed over 1960’s bromides.

Rcently, I spoke with a number of conservatives about their movement. The younger ones—say, those under fifty—uniformly subscribe to the reformist version. They are in a state of glowing revulsion at the condition of their political party. Most of them predicted that Republicans will lose the Presidency this year and suffer a rout in Congress. They seemed to feel that these losses would be deserved, and suggested that, if the party wins, it will be—in the words of Rich Lowry, the thirty-nine-year-old editor of National Review—“by default.”

[...]

Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

I tend to agree with both Lowry and Buchanan. The party became the enemy it preached against for so many years, embracing big government solutions, a moralistic foreign policy, and a huge appetite for pork. The K Street Project, the cover-up of the Mark Foley scandal, the Duke Cunningham mess and similar events demonstrated that holding on to and capitalizing on power was more important to some of the party’s leadership than the principles they had campaigned on.

At the same time, though, young activists are always disappointed in their leaders. Even when there’s no corruption involved, politicians naturally engage in compromise, logrolling, and the other distasteful but necessary facets of governing.

Packer also engages in some unfair jibes, such as:

By the end of the century, a movement inspired by sophisticated works such as Russell Kirk’s 1953 “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot” churned out degenerate descendants with titles like “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).”

Rather obviously, these aren’t aimed at the same audiences. The former was for the elites, the latter for the masses. Surely, there was plenty of nonsense in the 1950s (say, the various tracts of the John Birch Society) and plenty of quality nowadays (including some books cited elsewhere in Packer’s piece). A mass political movement will always have both highbrow intellectualism and populist red meat.

Schwarzenegger, campaigning last week with John McCain, had some advice: The party should be, well, more like Arnold.

“The Republican idea is a great idea, but we can’t go and get stuck with just the right wing,” Schwarzenegger said. “Let’s let the party come all the way to the center. Let those people be heard as much as the right. Let it be the big tent we’ve talked about. Let’s invade and let’s cross over that (political) center,” he said. “The issues that they’re talking about? Let them be our issues, and let the party be known for that.”

He observed that his own political opponents, including former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, tried to define him in much the way McCain is being defined by Democrats – as joined at the hip with Bush. “It didn’t work,” he laughed. But “how does (McCain) beat the Democrats? By offering a better future. He needs to offer hope, he needs to go in and show he can solve the problem in Iraq and have better relations with other countries again … and bring the economy back.”

But Schwarzenegger didn’t need rebranding; his “brand” is a larger-than-life persona he created over the years. McCain can’t very well run as an action hero. Packer ends his piece, though, by noting that McCain might just well manage to win as, well, John McCain.

McCain appeared to a warm reception. I had seen him in New Hampshire, where he gave off-the-cuff remarks with vigor; when he is stuck with a script, however, he is a terrible campaigner. Looking pallid, he sounded flat, and stumbled over his lines—and yet they were effective lines, ones that Obama would do well to study. “I can’t claim we come from the same background,” McCain began. “I’m not the son of a coal miner. I wasn’t raised by a family that made its living from the land or toiled in a mill or worked in the local schools or health clinic. I was raised in the United States Navy, and, after my own naval career, I became a politician. My work isn’t as hard as yours—it isn’t nearly as hard as yours. I had an easier start.” He paused and went on, “But you are my compatriots, my fellow-Americans, and that kinship means more to me than almost any other association.”

That’s the right message and a powerful one. But, really, it’s not as different from Nixon’s as Packer’s revisionism would have us believe. McCain is trying to forge a common definition of what it means to be “American” and identifying himself as the candidate most able to protect those values. He’s got an uphill fight, going against a younger man with a lot less baggage, but he’s got a puncher’s chance.

What’ll be interesting, whether McCain wins or loses in the Fall, is what lessons the GOP takes from his campaign. If he loses, one suspects we’ll see calls for a return to a harder line conservatism, which could well relegate the Republicans to regional status for a while. If he wins, I suspect we’ll still see calls for a harder line conservatism, since McCain will have run under the conservative banner, but there will also be more push for a bigger tent.

A liberal blogger charges that Fred Thompson is breaking the law by raising so much money and still not formally declaring himself a candidate.

Lane Hudson, a left-wing blogger, filed a complaint against former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) on Monday, accusing the likely presidential candidate of breaking the law by violating the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) “testing the waters” clause. Hudson, known for posting e-mails from former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) in last year’s page scandal, said Thompson “has been presenting himself as a candidate, he has been raising large sums of money beyond what would be required to explore a possible candidacy and he has signed a long term lease on a headquarters for his campaign.”

In his complaint, Hudson lays out a number of examples ranging from Thompson’s extensive fundraising to quotes from the senator and his advisers. “Fred Thompson is breaking the law and it’s time somebody did something about it,” Hudson said in a statement. “So, this morning, I filed an FEC Complaint against him. For far too long, he has been ignoring the letter and spirit of Federal Election Law for his own political benefit. It reeks of the same disregard for the law that we have seen from the Bush Administration, Bob Ney, Duke Cunningham, Tom Delay [sic], and Mark Foley.”

In an e-mail, Thompson spokesman Jim Mills said only, “We’re following the law.”

The FEC Monday afternoon could only confirm that it has received the complaint. The complaint will be treated as a “matter under review.” Within five days of receiving the complaint, the FEC must notify the Thompson exploratory committee and provide it with a copy of the complaint. The committee then has 15 days to respond to the FEC and say in writing “why no action should be taken.”

A number of press reports have raised questions about the extent of Thompson’s early efforts and whether they run afoul of the “testing the waters” clause. The law is particularly vague in this area as there are no set dollar amounts a would-be candidate is prevented from raising. Thompson’s $3.4 million June haul as outlined in a report to the IRS does not meet or exceed any specific legal guideline.

You can read the whole complaint at Hudson’s site.

Whether Thompson is within the letter of the law, he’s certainly violating its spirit. ABC’s Jake Tapper notes that there’s plenty of precedent for the FEC’s calling shenanigans on candidates who get too cute.

Previous pre-candidates who tried the “testing the waters” committee — including Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., Rev. Pat Robertson, and Rev. Al Sharpton — invited FEC scrutiny.

The rule is pretty simple. If you spend more than $5,000 on campaign activities, you’re a candidate, whether or not you’ve officially declared. The question is what constitutes “testing the waters” activity, and what constitutes “candidate” activity.

In 2004 the conservative National and Legal Policy Center filed a complaint with the FEC alleging Sharpton was using the “testing the waters” committee to run an “off-the-books campaign,” not declaring his candidacy officially while clearly a candidate, thus avoiding disclosure rules. The FEC investigated the matter, and arrived at a settlement with Sharpton.

The FEC ruled that Robertson had violated the “testing the waters” rules in 1988, fining him $25,000.

Practically speaking, however, it’s academic. As Chuck Todd explained back in May, the advantage of delaying formal declaration of candidacy is that it “allows Thompson to forgo filing a detailed report” on his spending with the FEC but “once he’s an official candidate, he’ll have to file retroactively.” On the other hand, as Tapper notes, “If Thompson waits until September 6 to formally declare his candidacy, he wouldn’t have to disclose any of the cash given to his campaign until January 31 — after many major contests are over, including the Iowa and Nevada Caucuses, and the New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan and Florida primaries.”

The Politico’s Mike Allen scoops Bob Novak on his own column:

Robert D. Novak plans to report this weekend in his always-delicious tidbits column (which doesn’t run in The Washington Post, but is usually in Saturday’s New York Post):

“Former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert has indicated to a close former aide that it is likely he will not run for a 12th term from his northern Illinois district and may even resign from Congress before his present term concludes. That runs counter to widespread speculation on Capitol Hill that Hastert will continue in the House for another two years as a private member with no leadership responsibilities. Since last year’s Democratic takeover of Congress moved him out of the speaker’s office, he has enjoyed returning to his former specialty of energy issues as a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. A footnote: If Hastert does not run, a leading candidate will be his chief of staff, Mike Stokke. Before going on Hastert’s staff, Stokke was an aide for both the Illinois state legislature and the governor’s office in Springfield.”

If only he had done this when the Mark Foley scandal broke, the Republicans might still hold the majority.

Glenn Greenwald chides The Politico for continually featuring a “vapid, petty, and inane” stories like John Edwards’ expensive haircut and Mitt Romney’s makeup consulting on its front page. He’s right, I think, as far as it goes. These stories are amusing and make sense from a business standpoint, but they’re hardly cutting edge journalism or worthy of front page treatment.

Greenwald then makes a less defensible point:

One of the reasons why vapid petty-personality “journalism” of this sort has so disadvantaged liberals and so advantaged right-wing fanatics is because the latter are not only willing, but droolingly eager, to exploit these sorts of themes, while liberals in general are highly reluctant, almost embarrassed, to do so.

Now, c’mon. It’s true that many right-of-center blogs, including this one, have had some fun at John Edwards’ expense. Then again, many of us have put his haircut spending in proper context and a large number of us rallied to condemn Ann Coulter for questioning Edwards’ manhood. The Romney makeup story probably won’t have legs. But that’s only because there’s no video.

Surely, it’s not because there’s some higher code of intellectual honesty on the left. I give you Michael Moore, ladies and gentlemen. How about the totally unfounded insinuations that Rush Limbaugh was having sex with underage prostitutes? Or the ridiculous claims that Mark Foley represented “the real face of the ruling Republican party”?

The fact of the matter is that partisans on both sides take a less critical look at stories that embarrass the opposition. Personal scandals that happen across the aisle show the hypocrisy and moral degeneracy of the other side whereas those amongst ones confederates are the personal faults of a single man and talking about them at all is the shameful politics of personal destruction.

Several of us, Greenwald included, make an honest effort to be fair minded about these mini-scandals and break from the herd on occasion. Sometimes, though, it’s just too tempting to fall for the really juicy or funny ones. Especially if the object of derision is someone you don’t like that much to begin with. That’s human nature, though, and not an especial tendency of either side.

UPDATE: Greenwald has updated his post in response. I answer in a follow-up: “Democrats and the Wimp Factor.”

The Senate Ethics Committee has absolved Harry Reid of wrongdoing, saying he “did not break Senate rules in accepting free ringside seats at boxing matches from the Nevada Athletic Commission.” As the NYT explains, “Senate rules bar members from accepting gifts worth more than $50 but make an exception for anything paid by federal, state or local government.”

This decision was likely correct, as was the more controversial ruling absolving the House leadership in their handling of the Mark Foley scandal. While the conduct in both cases was questionable, there were probably no violations of the letter of the law. (Indeed, as I’ve noted before, I’m not sure Reid did anything wrong at all. Senators from Nevada tend to be amenable to the needs of sports betting and casino gambling, anyway.)

House Democrats might nonetheless be on the right course by considering the “creation of an independent ethics arm to enforce new rules on travel, lobbying, gifts and other issues that Democrats intend to put in place on taking power next month.” Asking Members to rule on each other’s conduct, let alone the ethical behavior of incredibly powerful committee chairmen or the Leadership, puts them in an incredibly difficult position. Further, peer evaluations are almost always easier than those by independent arbiters, since reciprocity is the norm and people need to work together in the years to come.

As Carl Hulse notes in his piece, however, similar proposals have come up before and been shot down. For one thing, the Constitution clearly gives each House near plenary powers in policing Member conduct. This means that “any independent group would have to work with the existing ethics committee” or otherwise be integrated into the Congressional apparatus. That’s not enormously difficult, though. They could function in a way similar to the Base Realignment and Closure groups, making recommendations that would be subject to an up-or-down vote by the House or Senate.

Glenn Greenwald examines the evidence and finds that Rahm Emanuel lied when he told George Stephanoupolous that he was not aware of the Mark Foley emails before they ABC News’ Brian Ross broke the story, making him “guilty of exactly what he was accusing the GOP House Leadership of. And his hypocritical, pious lectures about the ‘warning signs’ which GOP Leaders had were dishonest at their core.” That’s exactly right, although he’s also right that this does not mitigate the malfeasance on part of Hastert and company.

While Greenwald’s candor on that score is refreshing, what comes next is slightly amusing:

It’s possible that the Democratic takeover of Congress can result in genuine and meaningful — and desperately-needed — change for our country. But it’s also possible that it could result in nothing notable, that it will produce only the most marginal and politically risk-free actions, all justified by the need not to do anything too “extreme” due to a fear of harming their 2008 electoral prospects.

The latter is more than “possible;” it is virtually assured. Neither party has a monopoly on virtue. Indeed, most Members of Congress are honorable people genuinely trying to serve the public. The incentive structure, especially in the House with its biannual elections, though, is for the majority party to maximize fundraising and minimize risk. That’s not going to change just because the leadership changed hands.

Brian Ross reports that, “The House Ethics Committee Report includes new information that top Democrats were also aware in 2005 of Mark Foley’s inappropriate e-mails to congressional pages at about the same time as outgoing Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office was informed.”

I’m not sure what to make of that, really. The presumption was always that Hastert and company chose to cover up the scandal for political reasons. The only way politics could explain the Democrats’ keeping silent for so long was to keep it for closer to the election, which would be repugnant. That did not happen, however; the information was leaked by a Republican.

So, what explains this? Is there an institutional mindset that this sort of thing is permissible? Or did people honestly read the initial e-mails and think they were not particularly serious?

The House Ethics Committee has found that no rules were violated in the Foley scandal.

The House ethics committee has found that Republican leaders did not break any rules in handling allegations against former Rep. Mark Foley, but that they were negligent in protecting the teenage pages, a congressional source said. No one will be reprimanded, the source said.

The ethics committee plans to hold a news conference Friday on its investigation into Foley, whose alleged e-mail exchanges with former congressional pages prompted his resignation earlier this year, a congressman and a GOP aide said.

Perhaps the rules could use some tweaking.

It appears Denny Hastert is out one way or the other.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s future is in doubt even if the Republicans retain control of the House because of unease among GOP lawmakers about his handling of the Foley page scandal and what a House ethics committee investigation might conclude about him, according to several Republican aides.

House Chief Deputy Whip Eric I. Cantor (R-Va.) said last week that the House Republican leadership elections scheduled for Nov. 15 should be postponed until the ethics committee delivers its final report. House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) confirmed yesterday on “Fox News Sunday” that he and Hastert have discussed that possibility. “We’ll see how Tuesday goes and then we’ll make some decisions.”

If there was even a decent chance Hastert would be back, no senior Republican would be willing to go public with talk of change. It’s well past time for new leadership.

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent analysis of what to make of the losses the Republicans are expected to suffer five days from now.

Substantial, yes. Historic, no. Before proclaiming a landslide, one has to ask Henny Youngman’s question: “Compared to what?” (His answer to: “How’s your wife?”) Since the end of World War II, the average loss for a second-term presidency in its sixth year has been 29 House seats and six Senate seats. If you go back to Franklin Roosevelt’s second term, the House loss average jumps to 35. Thus a 25/6 House and Senate loss would be about (and slightly below) the historical average.

[...]

Yes, the campaign has been nationalized. But will the results be? In the House, a good five seats (Bob Ney, Tom DeLay, Don Sherwood, Mark Foley, Curt Weldon) are likely to be lost to scandals having nothing to do with Bush or Iraq. Of the losing Senate races, only Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania can be said to be dying for the sins of their party.

The other races, if lost, will be lost largely for local reasons. In Ohio, the state is rocked by an enormous Republican scandal at the gubernatorial level that is taking the whole party down with it, Sen. Mike DeWine included. In Montana, Conrad Burns is in trouble because of his association with Jack Abramoff, not George Bush. In Virginia, a state that should not even be in play, George Allen has run the worst campaign in living memory, stumbling onto one ethnic land mine after another — “macaca,” the Yiddish mama, N-word allegations. And in New Jersey, the one Democratic seat that could conceivably go the other way and save Senate control for the Republicans, the drag on Sen. Bob Menendez is the very nonnational issue of official corruption.

Aside from noting that Burns has been damned near as inept as Allen in addition to the corruption issue and that Santorum is not only ideologically against the tide in his state but running against the son of an immensely popular and recently departed moderate Democrat governor, that’s almost dead on.

That’s not to say that the Iraq War, Abramoff/K-Street Project scandals, and the general perception of the Congressional Republicans as moribund are not playing a significant role in the poll numbers. Krauthammer acknowledges as much. He’s right, though, that losses in the 25/6 neighborhood would be incredibly mild given all that since they are below what one might expect under even favorable circumstances six years into a presidential term.

UPDATE: One wonders whether this says more about the Republican Party’s emergence as a natural “majority” party (in the sense of being the favorites to win the presidency and majorities in both Houses of Congress in a first-past-the past system, rather than 50 percent plus one) or the awesome feebleness of the Democratic Party in capitalizing on an amazing opportunity to win a huge number of seats.

This is not to dismiss real problems with the GOP leadership or success of the Democrats at at least making the negative case as to why the Republicans should no longer govern. I’ve written before about the institutional advantages the Republicans have, especially in the House, that makes losing the majority noteworthy. Still, the sheer confluence of events pointing to defeat for the Republicans should be enough to create a tidal wave of 50 or more seats in the House. That simply doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.

A very funny and effective ad campaign that not only reminds people in Florida’s 12th CD that they have to vote for Mark Foley in order to elect Joe Negron but makes it a little more palatable to do so: Punch Foley for Negron.

via Marshall Manson

John Hawkins polled a large number of conservative bloggers on the 2006 election (I was asked but didn’t participate) and got some interesting results.

1) Do you think the GOP is going to retain control of the House?

Yes (38) — 61.3%
No (24) — 38.7%

According to all the reputable polling I’ve seen over the past couple of weeks, the Republicans are going to lose at least 20 seats. Yet, for some reason, there is still a sense among a large number of conservatives that the polling is simply wrong. I’m afraid they’ll be sadly disappointed come election night.

2) Do you think the GOP is going to retain control of the Senate?

Yes (56) — 90.3%
No (6) — 9.7%

Here, they’re in synch with the polls. Of course, given their answers to the first question, it’s coincidental.

On the following question, bloggers were allowed to make anywhere from 1-6 unranked selections from 25 different options that were presented. Their answers come after the question with the number of bloggers selecting each choice in parentheses and the percentage of bloggers picking each answer following that.

3) The Republican Party has been having a lot of difficulty during this election cycle. If you had to pick 1-6 reasons for that, what would they be?

Top Tier Issues

W) The way the war in Iraq has gone. (48) — 77.4%
P) The GOP isn’t doing enough to control spending. (46) — 74.2%
K) Republicans don’t fight back hard enough against Democratic attacks. (37) — 59.7%
D) Because the GOP is perceived as being too soft on illegal immigration. (32) — 51.6%
S) The perception that the GOP is corrupt. (32) — 51.6%
J) President Bush’s approval rating. (21) — 33.9%
O) The GOP isn’t being aggressive enough in the war on terror. (19) — 30.6%
R) The perception that the Federal Government did a poor job of handling Hurricane Katrina. (19) — 30.6%
V) The Mark Foley scandal. (17) — 27.4%

Aside from choice J) being rather odd–Bush’s approval ratings are a symptom, not a cause, of Republican “difficulty”–nothing too surprising here about the choices. The rankings are somewhat more controversial.

The Iraq War is, without question, far and away the biggest issue this cycle. Indeed, that spending is rated almost as high is bizarre. Among fiscal conservatives, though, it’s a major reason why enthusiasm is so low.

Karl Rove told NPR’s Robert Siegel Tuesday that Republicans will retain both Houses of Congress two weeks hence. When Siegel said this was extraordinarily optimistic, Rove retorted, “I’m allowed to see the polls on the individual races. And after all, this does come down to individual contests between individual candidates.” The ensuing discussion tangentially focused on an important distinction: The difference between publically available media polls, especially those that focus on general attitudes about the two parties, and the “inside” polls of each race that concentrate on likely voters.

Bob Novak, who despite playing a partisan hack on television is respected even by the likes of Kos, provides a race-by-race analysis of the contest, although the origin and reliability of the polls used is not disclosed. Nonetheless, his results look about right: “If election were held to day, Democrats would take over the majority in the House with a 21-seat pickup” combined with a Democratic pickup of four seats in the Senate, two short of what’s needed for a switch.

More interestingly, though, he predicts that this will not be a so-called “wave” election, where a strong national sentiment against a party “negates seat-by-seat analyses.”

The reasons for the 2006 wave talk: a) the huge generic edge by Democrats over Republicans in current party preference, which never has been a good predictor of House elections; b) the mood inside the Washington Beltway, also a poor predictor historically; c) the run of bad news for Republicans and the Bush Administration; and d) unpopularity of President George W. Bush and the Iraq War.

The Bush-Iraq popularity is a constant and a major factor in many (but not all) races. But the corrosive political fact of higher gasoline prices has been mitigated, and the impact of the Mark Foley scandal has diminished. Still to be determined is how the conservative base’s unhappiness over government spending and immigration will factor in the election.

Indeed, despite substantial hand-wringing in many quarters (including this one) there seems not to be much continued reaction to the Foley mess outside the districts of three or four GOP leaders implicated in the cover-up.

Novak also contends that Jim McTague’s recent report in Barron’s, which argued that the Republicans would suffer much smaller losses than suggested by the conventional wisdom (8-14 seats in the House and three in the Senate), “confuses cause and effect” by making predictions based on the fact that the bigger fundraiser tends to win. Novak correctly notes, “. Bigger spenders historically may win 93 percent of House races, but in most cases the spending advantage can be accounted for by the fact that no one gives money to long-shot, no-chance challengers.”

The other interesting thing to note about Novak’s prediction is that it presumes that every single “leans Democrat” seat in both the House and Senate will fall. Statistically, that’s unlikely. Still, there’s plenty of margin for error in the House, since the Democrats only need to pick up 16 seats to take the majority.

CNN reports that Muhsin Musa Matwalli Atwah, a member of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list and planner of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings, was killed this past April in an airstrike by Pakistani forces near the border with Afghanistan.

Chris in Paris, writing on the popular AMERICAblog, is furious.

CNN tows the line, again. Sure the world is better without someone like him, but why the big announcement and hype now? The air strike happened months ago in April and suddenly out of nowhere, it makes a splash. Give me a break. If only Tom Ridge was around to call more alerts, on queue, during the election season. These people are so pathetic and I can’t wait until they get thrown out on their asses. I have had it with the fear card being over-played and so-called accomplishments being over-hyped. Yes, I have had enough.

[Update: Josh Marshall has a similar, but much more understated, reaction: "Hmmm. Guy involved in the embassy bombings killed in April. And it's October. Okay."]

Umm, maybe because the DNA tests confirming his death were just completed? And it’s not like there’s a lot of hype over this. No banner headlines. No proclamations that the war is almost over. Just a hyperlink on the front page of CNN.com with a bland headline. (Indeed, if you look at the screen capture thumbailed at right, you’d swear that “Rent Movies from Netflix” was the top story of the day.)

The man had been a major al Qaeda operative for fifteen years and was responsible for the deaths of at least a couple dozen Americans. He has been confirmed dead and taken off the Most Wanted list. Surely, that rates some mention? You want hype, look at the Natalie Holloway and Jon Benet Ramsey stories. Or Mark Foley. Or Macaca. This, friends, ain’t hype.

Mark Danziger argued in a column yesterday that American journalists would be more highly regarded if they took some cues from their predecessors.

In World War II, Ernie Pyle found and publicized flaws in our military — but he did it in the context of supporting the larger war effort. In Vietnam, Joe Galloway spent his first night in the field as a journalist manning a machine gun emplacement.

That’s not what we ought to expect from our media today. We don’t need journalists as cheerleaders (not that Pyle or Galloway ever were) or as combatants. But I do know that a lot of us would feel better about the criticism leveled by the media at things the U.S. is doing if we were sure that — in the event of an ambush by enemies determined to kill some of us — they wouldn’t just see it as a good story.

I’m not asking for White House-led journalism, just journalism from people who convince me that they really do have our best interests —as opposed to our best stories — at heart.

The same could be said for our citizen journalists, too. Surely, we can take sides in the partisan fight without losing sight of the fact that it’s an intramural one. We can be happy when enemies of our country are eliminated, even if it provides some incremental advantage to incumbent politicians we would like to see defeated in the next election.

That what’s good for America is good for President Bush doesn’t negate the fact that it’s good for America.

UPDATE: Mark Halperin et al write the following on ABC News’ blog under the heading “The Note: Pending: Six Days of November Surprises”:

How the (liberal) Old Media plans to cover the last two weeks of the election:

1. Glowingly profile Speaker-Inevitable Nancy Pelosi, with loving mentions of her grandmotherly steel (see last night’s 60 Minutes), and fail to describe her as “ultra liberal” or “an extreme liberal,” which would mirror the way Gingrich was painted twelve years ago.

2. Look at every attempt by the President to define the race on his terms as deluded and desperate; increasingly quote Republican strategists saying that the President is hurting the party whenever he enters the fray.

3. Refuse to join the daily morning Ken Mehlman-Rush Limbaugh conference calls, despite repeated invitations. LINK

4. Imbue every Democratic candidate for whom Bill Clinton campaigns with a golden halo.

5. Paint groups that run ads or do turnout for Republican candidates as shadowy, extreme, corrupt, and illegitimate; describe their analogues on the left as valiant underdogs, part of a People’s Army (with homage to Rich Lowry).

6. Care more about voter disenfranchisement than voter fraud.

7. Take every Republican quote expressing some trepidation about the outcome and banner it.

8. Drop any pretense of covering good news from Iraq (uhm&.) or good news about the economy, including some upcoming positive macro numbers (Quick, Note readers: name the current Secretary of the Treasury.). LINK

9. Amplify Obama-mania as a metaphor for the Democratic Party being the party of excitement and the future.

10. Fail to follow Bob Novak’s analysis of the difference between Democratic and Republican oppo plants. LINK

11. Lock in the CW (which, shockingly, could be wrong) that the winner of two out three Senate races in Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri will control the Senate.

About right.