When North Korea detonated its first nuclear bomb Monday morning, it was hard to tell which sound echoed louder on Capitol Hill: the collective panic over volatile dictator Kim Jong-Il having atomic weapons or the Republican sigh of relief that the Mark Foley scandal was no longer the media's banner headline.
From now until Election Day, these two stories will run side by side in the newspapers and on TV, but as far as D.C.'s legislators are concerned, Foley and North Korea are 8,000 miles and several kilotons of plutonium apart. If only Congress could hear beyond its own din, it would realize Americans are wondering the same thing about two seemingly unrelated events: How was this allowed to happen?
In the case of Foley, the Republican from Florida caught hitting on and having cyber sex with underage male pages, the fallout came faster than the six-term congressman could type on AIM. What stirred public outcry, however, wasn't just Foley, who ironically chaired the House committee to protect exploited children. The disgusting part of this affair is that it seems GOP leadership knew about Foley's behavior for at least a year - an entire year - and did nothing.
And then there's North Korea, which just became the eighth nation in history to openly test an atomic weapon. Based on what the experts are saying, Pyongyang didn't get the Hiroshima-sized blast it might have wanted, but even a small bomb or partial success was big enough to get the world's attention. Considering how isolated and secretive North Korea is, we might not know for days or weeks if it's telling the truth, but that 4.2 on the Richter Scale could only be one of two things: a nuke or a Wile E. Coyote amount of TNT.
Watching the talking heads on CNN and Fox in the wake of North Korea's coming out party, two things in particular stood out. The first is that while autumn started in September, October is officially pre-election spin season. Kim Jong-Il hadn't even finished pressing the trigger button before the Senate's minority leader, Democrat Harry Reid, pounced on President Bush and demanded "a full review of his administration's failed North Korea policy." And with the tremors still trembling, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell spun it right back that the Democrats were politicizing the issue - a buzzword meaning only the GOP is allowed to frame the debate.
To his credit, McConnell was actually onto something when he said Americans are tired of playing partisan politics in the face of a real threat, but he still missed the point. It's not the partisanship that has Americans disillusioned with D.C. and poised to turn the House over to the other party. It is the utter lack of responsibility. That's the second thing apparent from watching the North Korea fallout - it was the Mark Foley play all over again except on a different stage, with no one claiming responsibility and nobody standing up to do their job who wasn't just going through the motions.
To borrow from public policy wonk David Callahan, what none of the politicians seem to understand is that spanning the divide of conservatives and liberals, America is full of Cares and Care-Nots. Right now, regardless of the right and the left, people in this country who care are furious. Faced with the page scandal, the GOP leadership's gut reaction was to deflect blame and hide behind alibis. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, said the Foley incidents didn't happen until after the boys were congressional pages. Oh, so that makes it OK? And when the scandal broke, John Boehner, the majority leader, said he never told Hastert about the Foley problem, only to change his story a few days later. And Western New York's own Tom Reynolds said he, too, did all he could when he "took it to my supervisor" (something Hastert doesn't recall). Good grief.
It's fitting that with Nov. 7 less than a month away, these two particular turns of events have stolen the national spotlight. The North Korea crisis won't unfold with the same blatant ineptitude as the moral catastrophe that is the Foley affair, but keep an eye on who truly stands up to take responsibility and own their challenges. Americans should find it no less loathsome with how we ended up with a nuclear North Korea than how we allowed a potential pedophile to keep running the House committee on child welfare. For years, U.S. leaders have called a nuclear North Korea unacceptable, but for the Americans who care it's not nearly as unacceptable as U.S. leaders without accountability. And until Capitol Hill figures that out, North Korea will be on the same page as Mark Foley.
