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OK, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), the gig is up. Everyone is talking about your vague confession to the Associated Press after your phone number was discovered among the records of a woman accused of running a prostitution ring. That ship has sailed. We don’t know where you are, but, still, we want to help. The immediate aftermath of a sex scandal is no time to catch up on one’s reading. So, as you grapple with your next move, we’ve put together this helpful historical guide we like to call “What To Do Right After They Catch You.”
Some of your colleagues — and they know who they are — may be well served to go ahead and cut out the chart and save it. You just never know when those secret paramours are going to turn on you.
Ex.-Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.):
Do it again. Although the longest consecutive sitting chairman of the Ways and Means Committee was discovered frolicking with a stripper named Fanne Foxe in 1974, he nonetheless managed to win reelection. Only weeks after his constituents seemed to have forgiven him, Mills was photographed in a drunken dance with the stripper in Boston. The second indiscretion forced him to give up his gavel, and he did not run again. Foxe wrote a book called The Stripper and the Congressman.
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.):
Stay and fight. After Frank admitted to a lengthy relationship with male prostitute who then used the unwitting congressman’s apartment to service clients, few predicted that his political career would survive. But Frank wasn’t about to go quietly into the night. He suffered through an ethics investigation and an hours-long floor debate on his activities. He came away with a House reprimand in 1990, and now he’s one of the most powerful people in Congress.
Ex-Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.):
Take the high road — all the way home. When Vitter’s predecessor in Congress was forced in 1998 to admit that he had been unfaithful to his wife “on occasion,” Livingston was leading the charge against Democratic President Bill Clinton for his indiscretions and alleged dishonesty about them. Livingston shocked his colleagues when he took the floor and announced his resignation, saying one last time that Clinton should resign too. He went on to build a lobby firm and make millions.
Ex-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.):
Escape immediately, then check into rehab. Foley reportedly “knew he was finished” the moment ABC News confronted him about explicit e-mails he sent to House pages. He resigned that day, before then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) had a chance to try to expel him. He later said he had sent the e-mails while drunk and checked himself into a treatment center for alcoholism.
Rep. Price’s new look an homage to our safety
Many Americans have experienced the loss of a cherished item at the hands of airport screeners, but for Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) it was something a little more personal: his mustache.
“It was TSA,” the lawmaker joked when asked what prompted him to shave his neatly trimmed facial hair.
Price explained that airport screeners would not allow him to take his mustache trimmer on a plane, forcing him to use an electric version.
But he wasn’t used to that gadget, and he quickly found himself in the vicious cycle of trimming each end of the ’stache in an effort to even it out. Before he knew it, there was not enough left to salvage.
“It was TSA,” Price repeated. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
Finally — Doh! — Congress is talking about an issue that people actually care about If the contest had been one to determine which Springfield is the most uppity, Illinois’s capital city surely would have won.
That wasn’t the contest, though, and it was the tiny Vermont version of the town that won the most votes to host the “Simpsons” movie premiere. Springfield, Vt., managed to get more than 15,000 votes for the honor, despite having only 9,500 residents.
That fact has Springfield, Ill., which got about 1,000 fewer votes, in a full-fledged tizzy, complete with a newspaper editorial that began: “The Simpsons as New Englanders. Please.”
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) signaled to his homestate protesters yesterday afternoon that the battle seems to be lost, even though Springfield, Vt.’s movie theaters are almost defiantly less fancy than those in Springfield, Ill. Spokesman Joe Shoemaker said well-placed Vermonters are simply too powerful for the majority whip, a longtime fan of the of cartoon sitcom, to overcome.
“He’s so concerned about all of the voter fraud that he has asked Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy to launch an immediate investigation into the allegations of voter fraud,” Shoemaker said of his boss. “But since the chairman is from Vermont, we don’t hold out a lot of hope.”
Johnson’s new book destined for greatness, as soon as the stuff it’s about actually occurs
Haynes Johnson has an opening scene and a final chapter, which is enough to get a book deal when your aim is to write about something that hasn’t happened yet.
At least, it’s enough when you’ve written and co-authored 14 other books and brought home a Pulitzer Prize.
Johnson’s 15th tome will start with the funeral of President Gerald Ford and end with an assessment of the challenges facing George W. Bush’s successor. In between: the 2008 presidential campaign.
He’s writing it with Washington Post chief political correspondent Dan Balz. “He’ll be Mr. Inside and I’ll be Mr. Outside,” Johnson said.
“It’s going to be about the making of the president, 2008, but without Teddy White’s mystique and romance,” Johnson said Tuesday, referring to the late Theodore H. White’s groundbreaking books about presidential campaigns.
Johnson, who covered every president from Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton for the Post and the Washington Star, added, “I think this is the most important election I can remember.”
Well, after it happens.
Jackie Kucinich, Albert Eisele and Jonathan Kaplan contributed to this page.
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