Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a prime agitator in the DeLay-Abramoff-Cunningham scandals, is blasting Nancy Pelosi’s support of Jack Murtha to be House Majority Leader. Murtha, CREW says, is “one of the most unethical members in Congress.” ~Michael Crowley

Political junkies will remember that CREW was the watchdog group that was responsible for bringing a lot of publicity to the Mark Foley scandal and ensuring that the Foley story simply wouldn’t die after a few days.  They have generally been on the GOP’s case for the past several years, but they gained new prominence in their prominent role in publicising the Foley revelations.  Mark “El Guapo” Levin became outraged at the obvious left-wing conspiracy that was pushing the Foley story, and in his version CREW was one of the chief villains of the entire scandal.  Of all the laboured efforts to make the Foley scandal anybody’s fault but the GOP’s, Levin’s was in a class all its own for sheer paranoia and absurdity. 

Now we find CREW laying in to Nancy Pelosi’s choice for Majority Leader and, by extension, attacking Pelosi as being very chummy with someone they regard (and not entirely without reason) as deeply unethical.  Good for them–it is almost as if they were a nonpartisan watchdog group concerned with ethics in government!  Presumably they missed the memo from Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy HQ that said, “Ignore Democratic corruption and ethics violations.”  Alcee Hastings, you may be next (we can only hope).

The conventional wisdom is beginning to shape up that Pelosi has blundered badly with her minimalist approach to supporting Murtha.  (For normal people who are not following the minutiae of intra-House leadership elections, allow me to recap: Pelosi wrote a letter personally endorsing Murtha’s bid for Majority Leader–how terribly unexciting.)  After all, when Andrew Sullivan and the NROniks agree, it must be true, right?  Yeah, that’s it.  I am not sure why this is such an obviously bad move on her part.  She appeases at least two groups of her members (both antiwar Democrats and more conservative Democrats find some representation in Murtha), retains Murtha’s loyalty, continues her feud with Hoyer as usual and does nothing unexpected or confusing that might prompt questions about her leadership.  Everyone among the House Democrats assumed that this was coming, and so apparently it will both a) have little effect on the Majority Leader election and b) not significantly damage Pelosi’s standing with the members.  Murtha may well lose anyway, in which case she has simply made her feud with Hoyer, which was an open secret to people who follow the Hill with the obsessiveness of Kremlinologists, more public.  If Murtha wins, we will be reading the same pundits very soon telling us how “shrewd” and “clever” she was.  She has done this at precisely the moment when the least number of people are paying attention to politics in the week after the election, ensuring that whatever negative fallout there is for her it will be contained.  She may speak, as The Economist memorably put it, like the cross between a Stepford wife and Jesse Jackson, and she may spew forth nonsense about the Speaker’s gavel being in the hands of “the children,” but she has as good a set of tactical political skills as anybody in the business.  Personally, I think it will be a welcome change to have a Speaker who wrestles and fights with the Majority Leader instead of being his handpuppet (as Hastert was DeLay’s).  Whether it is a “good thing” for Democrats in achieving their “goals,” such as they are, I am unsure.  It will probably have little effect, but if it does I, for one, won’t be too upset.  Anything that makes divided government ever-more divided and beset by gridlock and infighting sounds like a positive development to me.  The more time they waste bludgeoning each other in internecine battles is less time they have to harrass us and ruin the country.    

Honestly, I am puzzled as to why anybody expected anything different from Pelosi.  According to what little I know about her, she was educated in the Baltimore school of Democratic machine politics and has practiced this brand of reward-and-rule ever since.  Rule #1 of this kind of politics is “take care of your own.”  (We may as well get the obvious ethnic references out of the way now: with Pelosi as Speaker, there are going to be a lot of very un-PC references to Italians and the Mafia style of doing business in the next two years; we can already see pundits getting their Tivos ready to record a Godfather marathon for research purposes.)  Rule #2 is “punish the disloyal.”  Rule #3 is CYA. 

The reward-and-rule approach places a high premium on personal connections and loyalties, and it tends to breed a kind of ethical indifferentism when one of “your” guys is caught up in some murky business.  One of the reasons why local and state Democratic party machines are always so rife with corruption (see New Mexico, Louisiana, New Jersey, Illinois, etc.) is that this sort of “take care of your own” approach predominates over other considerations.  This sort of politics thrives best in ethnic wards of yore or overwhelmingly Democratic states where people assume that corruption is a synonym for government.  People in these states take corruption as an inevitable product of the machine to which there is no realistic alternative, which causes them to overlook most of the abuses, because you can either work inside the machine or you can go nowhere politically.  There is something quite amusing about the fact that the 110th Congress, elected allegedly with some minimal mandate of bringing integrity, responsibility and accountability to Congress, will be led either by a Pelosi/Hoyer or Pelosi/Murtha combo.  If the GOP can clean itself up and gets it house in order, it might be able to run a credible clean and good government campaign in ’08, and they will probably have some good targets to vilify, no matter which one wins the contest for Majority Leader.