Larry Craig

Steve Kornacki has a smart piece over here explaining Larry Craig's move to plead guilty to charges that he was soliciting sex in a men's room.

By quietly copping his plea (and by doing so through the U.S. mail) he kept his secret safe for more than two months. Had he lawyered up and fought the charges, we would have known instantly. And it’s not like beating the rap would have done much for Mr. Craig’s reputation, given the chatter that has surrounded his sexuality – and men’s room habits – for years. It’s true that his guilty plea was probably bound to come out at some point – but, slim as it was, it was his only chance to keep the public in the dark.

Craig's reaction to his arrest has a historical precedent.  read more »

John McCain thinks it isn't enough that Larry Craig is stepping down from his committee assignments in the Senate, and has urged him to resign.

But closer to home, political gadfly Henry Stern thinks Craig should hold onto his seat. In a column Stern just emailed around, he wrote:

The voters of the State of Idaho are Craig's employers. They can vote him out when he comes up for re-election in 2008. He has been an elected official for 33 years. Should he resign now, for having deceived the voters for a generation? I would think not. If every public official who fooled the voters had to resign his position, there would be more special elections to fill vacancies than regular elections. And the people who won the special elections might also deceive the voters.

If local precedent is any guide, Stern has a point. After all, how many members of the New York State legislature are holding onto their committee assignments after having been indicted or arrested?

So forget my earlier assurances that I was done with Larry Craig for the day....

Craig has called a news conference for 4:30 (Eastern time), where he apparently will read a statement. 

A clue of what Craig will say, though, can be found in public comments this afternoon from Mike Crapo, Idaho's other Republican Senator. Crap tells the Idaho Statesman that he spoke with Craig this morning and received the same explanation that Craig offered to the world yesterday for his restroom arrest.  "I take him at his word," Crapo told the paper.

And so, even though his public restroom habits have previously been called into question and even though his home state newspaper ran an exhaustive exploration of his sex life today that strongly suggested a pattern of gay behavior, Craig is sicking with his story that the Minnesota incident -- which, mind you, produced a guilty plea on lewd conduct charges from the Senator -- was all a misunderstanding. And now, apparently, he is asking his allies to vouch for him with their own reputations. 

Will other fellow Republicans follow Crapo's lead and publicly take Craig at his word? His public appearance is just a few minutes away...

I was all done posting Larry Craig-related items, but I couldn't resist this one.

A few minutes ago, MSNBC ran a report on the scandal and then called on three talking heads to discuss it. The whole segment ran about five minutes. One of the participants was Matthew Continetti of the neocon rag the Weekly Standard, who used half of his alotted time to express his utter indignation that MSNBC would devote time to something as tawdry as the Craig matter while ignoring a recent Newsweek report about al-Qaeda. "I think it says something about American media that we’re talking about Senator Craig and not this very important piece in Newsweek," Continetti harrumphed.

Which, of course, raises the question: If talking about Craig is so offensive, why did you agree to do the segment?

And while we're at it, let's not let Continetti try to write off the Craig matter as just another cheap sex scandal. Doesn't the revelation that one of the Republican Party's most conservative members -- a man who has stood and cheered, if not led the way, as the party has demonized gay people and sought to etch into the Constitution of the United States laguage explicity denying rights based upon sexual orientation -- is himself gay warrant some serious discussion?

**UPDATE (2:02): Appearing on MSNBC, Mike Duncan, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, just called the Craig scandal a" Democrat effort to take the focus away from a very unpopular Democrat Congress.” Which is odd, since if anything, it's distracted attention from Alberto Gonzales' resignation.

Suzanne Craig's eyes reddened and filled with tears as she listened. After her husband's denial, she said, "I'm incensed that you would even consider such a piece of trash as a credible source."

To which Craig added, "Jiminy God!"

Before moving on to the next question, Craig turned to his wife and said, "Sorry, Hon."

That is from today’s Idaho Statesman, describing a scene in May when the paper played for Larry Craig and his wife a tape of an interview with a 40-year-old man who claimed to have had sex with Craig in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station.

The paper actually spent five months investigating “rumors about Craig dating to his college days,” and wrapped up its inquiry in May, without reporting anything. Without this week’s Minnesota restroom revelations, the Statesman’s story might never have run.

And when I pictured Suzanne Craig listening to that tape, I briefly wondered  if the story ever should have run, and if the paper had crossed a line in, essentially, tracking down every person Craig may or may not have had sex with in his life.

(More after the break)   read more »

I’m going to devote a few posts to the Larry Craig drama this morning, because it raises a variety of issues, some immediate and political, and others a bit more complex.

The immediate political question is what effect this will have on ’08 Senate politics. The 62-year-old Craig, who first won his Senate seat in 1984, is up for re-election next year. His retirement had been considered possible – mostly because of the increasing chatter about his sexual orientation and restroom conduct that preceded this week’s developments – and now it can be called certain. The real issue is whether he will stick it out through next year, or resign early.

There’s a chance that the Minnesota airport revelations will open the floodgates and similar reports of past conduct by Craig will come pouring through. That would surely hasten his exit. Then again, what’s already emerged might be enough. A story in today’s Idaho Statesman, which had been investigating Craig’s sexual activities for the previous five months, described how his wife’s eyes “reddened and filled with tears” as she sat with her husband in May when the Statesman played the tape of an interview with a man who claimed to have had sex with Craig. You can only imagine what she’s telling him to do today. There’s also the prospect of pressure from within the Republican Party, which would surely like Craig to leave the stage as soon as possible. (Indeed, Craig has already left Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, which tried in vain to hide this video of Craig endorsing Romney and his “family values.”)

(Various '08 scenarios after the break)   read more »