Centrist: Congress’ Burgeoning Sex-Harassment Crisis
The floodgates of sexual-misconduct claims against members of Congress are open, predicts Damon Linker at The Week: “How many senators and House members and elected and appointed officials at the federal, state and local levels will be forced to resign? And how many men will remain in these positions when it is all over?” Linker thinks Joe Biden’s no longer a real presidential contender. And just “think of all the pages and interns and young staffers” who’ve worked on Capitol Hill or at federal agencies and the Supreme Court. How long until they talk? We already know, Linker notes, that millions have been paid out to settle harassment claims against members of the House. “The reckoning is coming.”
From the left: Dems’ Hypocrisy on Corruption
Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey have a question for Senate Democrats: “Is bribery OK for a senatorial colleague as long as jurors aren’t unanimous as to guilt?” As they write at Foreign Policy’s Web site, that seems to be the message Dems are sending regarding NJ Sen. Bob Menendez, whose corruption trial ended last week in a mistrial. The accusations against him aren’t new, and they’re backed by plenty of evidence. Yet Democrats demur. One reason, Wittes and Hennessey suggest: Menendez would be replaced by someone picked by a Republican governor if he steps down now. Which may be, but it’s no excuse: “The standard for service in the Senate should be something higher than whether an accused felon can convince a least one juror of twelve to vote for his acquittal.”
From the right: What If Ken Starr Was Right?
Ross Douthat at The New York Times has long believed Bill Clinton should’ve resigned over his affair with Monica Lewinsky but that “the Republican effort to impeach him was a hopeless attempt to legislate against dishonor.” Now he’s not so sure, after re-reading Kenneth Starr’s report, memoirs from Team Clinton and contemporaneous news reports. The president was sued for sexual harassment, “tried to buy off a mistress-turned-potential-witness with White House favors, and then committed perjury serious enough to merit disbarment. Which also brought forward a compelling allegation from Juanita Broaddrick that the president had raped her.” Democrats seemingly overreached to defend the indefensible. After all, “If exploiting a willing intern is a serious enough abuse of power to warrant resignation, why is obstructing justice in a sexual harassment case not serious enough to warrant impeachment?”
Liberal pollster: The Trouble With Trump’s Twitter Feed
President Trump’s Twitter feed is often mentioned as a political weakness, but former Obama campaign chief Jim Messina says there’s now data to back it up: his group’s polling of those who voted for both Obama and Trump: “Consistently, the members of our focus groups worried that Trump was so pre-occupied with picking Twitter fights and the general chaos of his administration that he was not focusing on making the economy better,” he writes at Politico. Messina’s team crafted negative messages about Trump on the economy and fed them to participants. Some, however, were also given talking points tying Trump’s Twitter rants to the main message: “When we re-surveyed Obama-non-Clinton voters six weeks later, those who’d been exposed to the tweeting message had a much dimmer view of Trump than those exposed to other messages.”
Anchor: Press Can’t Get Baited Into Losing Objectivity
Veteran newsman Chris Wallace writes at The Washington Post that President Trump “has done everything he could to delegitimize the media — attacking us institutionally and individually.” His purpose is “to raise doubts over whether we can be trusted when we report critically about his administration.” Yet the media should stop helping him do so: “I believe some of my colleagues — many of my colleagues — think this president has gone so far over the line bashing the media, that it has given them an excuse to cross the line themselves, to push back . . . I think it’s a big mistake.” Wallace says the media’s responsibility to be objective doesn’t mean they have to be stenographers. But when reporters try to match Trump’s administration “in invective,” they’re “giving up” the media’s “special place in our democracy.”