http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=w061009&s=scheiber101006The truth about Dennis Hastert.
Fool on the Hill
by Noam Scheiber
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 10.10.06
Can there be any doubting the conspiracy at the heart of the Mark Foley scandal? For years, much of official Washington has harbored a shameful secret about a certain congressman. Republicans looked the other way because they worried about their fragile majority, while the media played the role of willing enabler. Most knew the truth would come out eventually, but few had the guts to face it.
I refer here, of course, to the fact that Dennis Hastert is a bumbling half-wit--something that became apparent to the world last week but had been common knowledge in Washington for almost a decade. It was roughly eight years ago, after all, that Tom DeLay installed Hastert as his front-man, knowing full well that Hastert was no more capable of being speaker than the average sheepdog, to which he bears a remarkable resemblance. (Just after Hastert accepted the speaker's gig, a reporter asked him how he felt. Hastert's one-word response: "Scared.") But, rather than call DeLay on this lapse in judgment, House Republicans joined forces with the press to perpetrate an elaborate cover-up.
Reading back over the last several years of Hastert coverage, one is astonished by the lengths to which reporters go to avoid outing him as a guileless nincompoop. One common approach--frequently deployed in stories about dumb-but-powerful politicians--is to interpret Hastert's apparent lack of intelligence as evidence of his enigmatic character, as though Hastert were a walking riddle with jowls and a Midwestern accent. So, for example, you get passages like this from Jonathan Franzen's 11,000-word New Yorker profile of Hastert in 2003:
No other G.O.P. elephant is described by the blind more variously than Hastert. If you're a lobbyist or a good-government watchdog, he is the seventeen-year veteran of Washington politics whose younger son, Ethan, has worked for Vice-President Dick Cheney and whose older son, Joshua, is a K Street defense and technology consultant. If you vote in Hastert's district, he is the deeply Illinoisan former coach who spends every weekend at home with his wife and their dogs. ... If you're John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, you say that the Speaker "is not a closet moderate." If you listen to one of Hastert's funny, self-deprecating campaign speeches, you can't help liking him. ... He is an irrelevant, indispensable, modern, old-fashioned, moderate, archconservative nobody somebody.
(good stories)..........
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