With the sexual indiscretion of Republican Rep. Vance McAllister has come calls from some prominent Republicans for him to resign, which has spawned charges of hypocrisy from prominent Democrats. But going beneath the surface of the matter blunts, if not invalidates, the latter’s claim.
The Democrats’ assertion stems
from comparing McAllister’s kissing of a married aide revealed last week to the
admission in 2007 by Republican Sen. David Vitter of committing
a “serious sin,”
widely believed to involve his utilizing a few years earlier prostitution
services. Two prominent Republicans, organizational party leader Roger Villere
and political leader Gov. Bobby
Jindal, have called for McAllister’s resignation, but neither asked the
same of Vitter at the time those years ago. Democrats hope this charge can convey
a (tiny) advantage in its upcoming fall campaigns and perhaps spill over to
Vitter’s run for governor next year.
The political rationale should be
obvious as to the differential treatment by Republicans. McAllister just won a
special election to fill the seat a few months ago, and is best known for complaining
about being a congressman and bucking the party on the high-profile issue of
government involvement in health care. His taking a powder would make for a
wide open race in the fall but heavily favoring Republicans in a year, the
midterm during a president’s second term, they are advantaged, while his
staying in, because of lingering knowledge of the incident of just a few months
earlier, would decrease the chances (even if they still would be favored) of their
holding the position if he were forced into a runoff with a Democrat. The state
party also wants nothing to distract voters from the unfavorable reelection
climate for Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu,
now an underdog
to retain her seat.
By contrast, Vitter already was
halfway through his first term as senator, but already had served a few of them
in the House, with an election three years away and the events in question by
that election had happened nearly a decade earlier. Further, his leaving of
office would have allowed Democrat then-Gov. Kathleen
Blanco to appoint undoubtedly a Democrat to serve at least 18 months until
the special election, after the GOP had just lost the Senate majority. Vitter
also was anything but an outsider to the party; although a maverick on some
issues and a bruising political fighter on others that displeased some powerful
figures in the party both elected and not, he also made efforts to build the
party and was reliably conservative.
So expediency as a factor seems
obvious: Vitter was a party asset both electorally and ideologically, with
years to work on winning back portions of his voter majority that may have
wavered as a result of his admission, whose exit certainly would keep his spot
from the party through 2008 and that increased the chances of this continuing
past then. In the case of McAllister, the GOP has no special loyalty to him nor
sees him particularly as an asset, the next election it thinks stands an
extremely high chance of producing a Republican in the position more of an
asset, if he stayed in that would decrease the chances of holding it, and that also
could decrease chances of knocking off Landrieu.
This differential treatment has gotten
into a wad the panties of both the party
machinery of Democrats and their only announced candidate for governor
state Rep. John Bel Edwards,
with the latter railing about the presumed differential treatment as “hypo-hypocrisy”
(which translated literally means “less than normal hypocrisy,” which in
context comes across more as a compliment, so maybe English usage isn’t quite
his strong suit). But two factors differentiate the 2007 case of Vitter and the
2014 case of McAllister than moots this argument.
Keep in mind the context
regarding the two individual critics, which also includes in Villere’s case his
representation of the state GOP. Jindal could not have been expected to say
anything about Vitter then because he was in the midst of his second in total,
first successful campaign for governor, and one of the cardinal rules of
winning a campaign is that you talk and stay concerned about yourself, not
anybody else’s personal life, at least publicly. In fact, at the time Vitter
made his announcement, Jindal was gearing up for a major campaign tour so that
distracted from the Jindal campaign, and later rumors circulated in
the media that Jindal coordinated with other left unidentified “top” party
officials to try to force Vitter out. So Jindal speaking out now and not then by
no means indicates any hypocrisy on this part, just political feet of clay when
it came to broadcasting his alleged preference to see Vitter go.
In the instance of Villere, he
represents, at least symbolically, the state party, which requires a consensus
for it to act. Since there was significant dissension in the party then about
Vitter’s resignation, the party he headed then stayed silent on the issue, so
the most Democrats could claim now was that the GOP was insufficiently united then
as an organization officially to put out a formal request for a resignation, in
contrast to the unity expressed now in the case of McAllister.
And even that weak charge
dissolves completely under an inconvenient fact: there’s no conclusive evidence that Vitter committed an act of marital
infidelity. There’s no recording, as in McAllister’s case, nor any
admission as provided by McAllister, just a ton of circumstantial evidence.
While that may seem a technicality, it’s a necessary condition if a party or
its partisans are going to call for one of their own’s head on the basis of
something you can’t prove legally. You can in a legal sense go out there and
call for a resignation because a phone number under his name showed up in the
evidence in a trial for a woman accused of running a prostitution ring, or that
it’s conduct unbecoming of a Member of Congress to have that phone number found
in that situation, or because he parts his hair the wrong way, but, given what
evidence was there and what statements Vitter made, you border on slander if
you declare the guy ought to go because he was unfaithful to his wife.
That doesn’t mean some may make
that call, and this dodges the issue of whether marital infidelity in and of
itself should disqualify one from office (recall that in the case
of Pres. Bill
Clinton, arguments that he should step down were infinitely stronger because
he deliberately obstructed investigation of what turned out to be his legally
proven lies using taxpayer resources). But in reviewing each case as they are
and in the responses they have garnered, together they simply represent apples
and oranges. While no doubt prompted by their never-ending run of bad news to
find anything to make their party look better, the assertion by varying state
Democrats that GOP calls for McAllister to resign over demonstrated and
admitted infidelity while too few of them agitated for Vitter to do the same over
circumstantial evidence about yet unproven infidelity denotes some kind of Republican
hypocrisy simply is inaccurate.
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