When I was a little kid, I suffered from a skin disease called psoriasis. It’s not uncommon, but it is strange: It makes your skin overproduce cells and become unsightly and painful; it’s often hereditary; and it has no known cure and also no sure cause — it flares and subsides according to some mysterious logic that doctors and researchers still haven’t been able to decode.

There are, however, a few specific things we know can trigger a flare-up: stress, for one, and a wound or sickness, like the flu. The wound can be very slight: Even piercing your ears can set off a whole-body reaction, utterly submerging the original problem zone under the breadth of the body’s response.

I thought about psoriasis this week, as fallout from the Mark Foley affair continued to hit. Those who are outraged at the apparent extent of the damage wrought on the Republican Party by the news that Foley harassed underage pages have a right to be: Foley’s sins were his alone, and it’s just not clear who in the leadership knew what and when. To say Foley is a failure of the party is an politically motivated exaggeration.

But trying to blame Foley for all the terrible things now happening to Republicans is misguided. Events post-Foley are now taking the same course psoriasis does: A little wound is made, and suddenly catastrophic symptoms sweep the whole body politic.

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If you don’t believe me that things are very, very grim for Republicans right now, take a look at the evidence. Last week, polls blaringly headlined in The Washington Post and USA Today showed Democrats gaining big momentum; each story relied on a different poll. (The USA Today/Gallup poll showed Democrats and Republicans, on Sept. 17, neck-and-neck on the generic ballot; last week, this split had amazingly metamorphosed into a 59/36 lead for Democrats.) On the front page of The Post, Republican leaders mourned their condition, suggesting they may be resigned to losing the House.

And many Republican candidates are rushing to cancel planned campaign events with New York Rep. Tom Reynolds and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, both implicated in the Foley scandal. John McCain even canceled several campaign appearances to shore up Reynolds: “Sen. McCain’s office cited scheduling conflicts, though his spokesman couldn’t say exactly what the events conflicted with, saying, ‘We haven’t figured that out yet,’ ” the Buffalo News reported.

That the Foley affair should have this sort of sweeping effect may seem terribly unjust. And, indeed, when I was a child, the onset of psoriasis thanks to a little scraped knee seemed unjust to me, especially because of the special unfairness of the symptoms: There’s no worse affliction to a middle-schooler than the one that ruins your looks. But it’s not unjust, not really: in both cases the wound is triggering a deeper illness within.

After all, though Foley set all this bad news in motion, it’s not Foley that’s driving the Democrats’ poll numbers up. An October AP-Ipsos poll, taken after the Foley scandal had broken, showed that “political corruption” was still at the bottom of voters’ concerns going into the November election, just like it was this summer. Rather, Foley evidently woke voters up to their real feelings on other, deeper problem areas for Republicans this fall: the war in Iraq, health care, the revelations — in a devastating book released today by Bush’s former No. 2 man for faith-based initiatives — that the administration doesn’t really care about evangelicals’ goals and is using them for political gain, even privately calling their leaders “the nuts.”

In this context, the arrival of Foley on the scene looks positively just to me.

Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.