How the Stevens Raid Proves Rudy Can't Win

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From The American Prospect:


How the Stevens Raid Proves Rudy Can't Win

The latest GOP scandal doesn't bode well for the Republican presidential candidates -- Giuliani in particular -- as they try to gain traction with their scandal-weary base.

Terence Samuel | August 1, 2007 | web only



Karl Rove, thinking ahead about the Bush legacy, schooled some Republicans last week about what really happened to them last November. The GOP debacle at the polls, he said, was not the result of President Bush's overall poor job performance ratings or the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. Instead, he said, it was the widespread taint of corruption that doomed so many Republican candidates.

This week, in the midst of a growing rumble that the attorney general should resign or be impeached, we wake up to front-page newspaper pictures of a modest two-story house in Alaska. The house belongs to Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator in history. Uncle Ted, as he is called in the 49th state, is under investigation for bribery and conspiracy related to a renovation project on his resort home outside Anchorage.

Stevens is a crusty, sometimes petulant, lawmaker with enormous power, and it hard to imagine that after almost 40 in years in the Senate, he is going to go down for putting his house up on stilts in some northern lights version of "Extreme Home Makeover."

The Stevens probe, along with investigations into a long list of other (mostly GOP) lawmakers, can only serve to reinforce the culture-of-corruption story line that worked so surprisingly well for the Democrats last fall. This, of course, is the last thing Republicans need going into 2008, where the political environment is promising to be especially unkind to them.

What does this portend for the field of GOP presidential candidates now flailing about to get some traction with the disheartened, scandal-weary, GOP base? .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=how_the_stevens_raid_proves_rudy_cant_win