Its been a lousy week for Democrats. At a time when they should have a CEO-dominated White House on the ropes over corporate scandals and economic mismanagement, it is the Democrats who are being identified with sleaze in the run-up to the mid-term elections.
Take the case of New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli. In July he was "severely admonished" by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting gifts from David Chang, a crooked Korean-American businessman, including cash, suits, a grandfather clock, a 52-inch television and a $5,000 watch. Torricelli might have got away with it. He is known as a tough fighter and seemed likely to hang on to his Senate seat in November. As new revelations came out last week, sending the New Jersey media into a frenzy, his pal Bill Clinton called from England several times to say, "Keep on fighting."
"I will," said Torricelli, an admirer of the former president. The Senator plugged away at issues popular in New Jersey - gun control, abortion rights and the environment - but with the Sopranos on HBO and his Republican challenger, businessman Douglas Forrester, hammering him on corruption charges, Torricelli wilted. Then Chang gave a television interview in which he claimed, among other things, to have met Torricelli in a 7-Eleven in the company of a "prominent New Jersey waste-disposal contractor", which is TV Mafia boss Tony Soprano's profession.
On Monday the Senator, once so popular he had raised $100 million for the Democratic Senate races, announced tearfully that he was quitting the race. The clincher was a newspaper poll showing him 13 points behind Forrester. He could not be responsible for the Democrats losing their one-seat Senate majority, he said, asking plaintively, "Why are Americans not a forgiving people?" Voters are not in a forgiving mood towards greedy corporate titans and public officials.
But Forrester may have forgotten the old adage, beware getting what you ask for. The Democrats have put forward former senator Frank Lautenberg (78), ethically unchallenged and wealthy, in his place. Republicans are furious. They protested to the New Jersey Supreme Court that a party cannot replace a candidate because of poor poll showings five weeks before an election.
The court turned them down. Now it will go all the way to the US Supreme Court, the same body that decided to stop the election count in Florida and gave the presidency to George Bush.
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Take the case, too, of Democratic Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, a staunch liberal whose margin in Senate elections of less that 55 per cent makes him vulnerable to a Republican challenge. His campaign has been accused of dirty tricks because of a secret and probably illegal tape- recording made at a strategy session of his Republican challenger, Congressman Greg Ganske, and passed to the Harkin camp. During the session, Ken Mehlmann, the White House political director, participated by speaker phone on how to defeat Harkin in the mid-term election. The person who made the tape was Brian Conley, a Des Moines business executive and long-time Democrat supporter who was invited to the enemy camp after "switching sides" in the summer and donating $50 to the Ganske campaign.
Republicans alleged that the donation was part of a plot by Harkin aides, who supplied the tape recorder, to gather secrets from the opposition. Harkin admitted his campaign's guilt by replacing his veteran campaign manager and chief of staff, Jeff Link. Young people on his campaign staff had "made a mistake", he told a press conference, as he appealed to voters to focus on the issues of education and Medicare and "not all these political shenanigans".
Senator Harkin was coasting along on a 10-point lead. Now he, too, has begun to look vulnerable as critics ask Watergate-type questions, such as what did he know and when did he know it. The story came to light when a newspaper quoted the Republican candidate telling the two dozen people at the strategy session, "You've never seen a campaign where anyone will attack him [Harkin\] like we're going to."
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Then there's the case of Carl McCall, the New York State comptroller who is running for governor of New York against incumbent George Pataki in November. Mr McCall won the Democratic primary when Andrew Cuomo dropped out of the race in September as his polls slumped. It turn out that several years ago Mr McCall, who has sole responsibility for investing state pension funds, wrote letters on official stationery asking executives of corporations in which his office had major investments to help his family members get jobs.
In 1977 he wrote to a Bell Atlantic executive praising him on a merger with Nynex, noting that New York owned four million shares in both companies, and mentioning by the way that he was sending a resume in a separate letter. This was for his daughter, who was later hired by Bell and then fired for credit card improprieties. Two other letters were sent to companies in which New York had invested seeking jobs for his wife and a cousin. The issue may not seriously damage McCall, who is behind in the polls in any event. Most New Yorkers can't imagine there isn't a politician doing the same for his family and friends.
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It hasn't been a happy week either for the normally cautious White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. He mistakenly told reporters that the House and Senate had agreed to an Iraqi war resolution when only House leaders had done so. Then his crack to the media that "one bullet" would be cheaper than a war against Saddam Hussein didn't go down well with White House colleagues and he had to backtrack. US policy forbids the assassination of foreign leaders. It prompted the Iraqi vice-president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, to come up with a counter-proposal, a duel between George Bush and Saddam Hussein, with Kofi Annan as referee. After all George Bush did make it personal, saying last week that Saddam Hussein was "the guy who tried to kill my father".