Scott Swanson
Ever been to Washington, D.C.?
It’s quite an experience.
My first trip to the capital was a real eye-opener. With about 10 years of experience as a reporter under my belt – long enough to develop a healthy strain of cynicism about the political process and a lot of the people who run it – I had switched gears a bit and was teaching college journalism.
Despite having worked with many politicians, including some in Washington, I had never been there. But here I was on the way to a conference and I had a chance to stop in D.C.
It’s a very impressive place. This was our nation’s nerve center, the place where the rubber met the road, where great men and women had built the United States into what we know.
My journalistic instincts, fueled by the afore-mentioned cynicism, were hitting on all cylinders as I walked around the city, gazing at the huge federal department headquarters, the Congressional office buildings, the Library of Congress, the Capitol, the White House. For any reporter who’s driven to dig up stories on what’s happening behind the scenes in the public arena, Washington is paradise.
Pandora’s box got opened a long time ago in Washington, though. Sometimes bad stuff happens in our nation’s seat of power. I’m guessing I’m not the only one disgusted by some of the recent news out of D.C. The war situation is troubling enough, but this situation concerning now-ex-Congressman Mark Foley is really embarassing, especially for his Republican Party.
Anyone who’s spent time around politicians, even on the local level, knows that it’s a tricky game they play, trying to keep people happy and get things done. It’s a balancing act and the people who are skilled at it generally are good at manipulation and playing the game.
Often, too, they have their peculiar flaws, but given their other skills, their personal “quirks” get overlooked on the leadership level. This is true of athletic coaches, company presidents, artists, religious leaders – and politicians.
Sometimes it all gets out of hand. That’s why some prominent football and basketball coaches have been fired in recent years. And that’s why Congressman Foley just resigned from the House of Representatives.
Foley, a Republican who represented Florida’s 16th District, has apparently been e-mailing and text-messaging teen-age congressional pages – boys – with lurid and suggestive sexual messages for years. Now he’s busted and he had to quit.
In that center of giant egos, Foley apparently was rather popular among the pages for the simple reason that he would actually acknowledge them and converse with them.
What’s really troubling about this whole story is not so much that there was a pervert who got himself elected to Congress.
That isn’t new. It’s that the Washington good-old-boy network that apparently covered this up, or at least ignored it, for years. The Family Values Party’s leadership appears to have known a lot more than they’re telling about Foley’s activities with the pages, but apparently did little to stop him.
Face it. Human nature lends itself to a good-old-boy approach to life, even here in America.
When I lived in Southern California, I knew people there who chose to attend a certain university, not because they thought they’d necessarily get a better education there but because they expected to be taken care of when it came time to find a job.
In a lot of communities, it’s not your qualifications that get you a job as much as your connections. We’ve all heard the stories about close-mouthed communities that protected their own people who were guilty of vile crimes during the days of the civil rights struggle in the South.
“Good-old-boy” isn’t good when it perpetuates wrongs and that’s what’s happened in the G.O.P. Of course, it’s happened plenty of times with the Democrats too, so there isn’t too much room here for finger-pointing.
The Republicans need to do some serious soul-searching and make some changes at the highest levels because this is not what their party needs to be associated with – deviant behavior and the turning of blind eyes.
There may be a lesson in this for us here in Sweet Home too.
We are a relatively small, close community in which many of the movers and shakers are people who have lived here for a long time, some whose families have been here for generations.
When things go south in our lives or someone else’s around us, the natural tendency is to protect ourselves by ignoring or failing to rectify the situation.
Problems, not just the kind Foley has, don’t go away. It’s better to address them up front when they’re small than to wait until they’re huge and they’re affecting a wide range of people, some of whom kept their eyes and mouths shut too long.