Eve Fairbanks
2007-10-08 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

WASHINGTON -

Poor Larry Craig. The Idaho senator who dared Minnesota police officers to arrest his high-powered self after getting busted for soliciting sex in a public restroom back in June, who pleaded guilty to a resulting misdemeanor charge despite myriad opportunities to claim his innocence and who, once the plea became public, claimed those nasty police officers tricked him into his guilty plea, couldn’t even catch a break from a judge.

Last week, Minnesota judge Charles Porter denied Craig’s attempt to reverse his admission of guilt in a withering decision that called Craig’s arguments “illogical” and, hilariously, obliquely suggested Craig was a “predatory restroom stalker.”

Despite the judge’s takedown — and despite Craig’s former promises that he would resign — Craig has announced that he will remain in the Senate. The reason? “As I continued to work for Idaho over the past three weeks here in the Senate, I have seen that it is possible for me to work here effectively,” he said in a statement.

“Over the course of my three terms in the Senate and five terms in the House,” he continued, “I have accumulated seniority and important committee assignments that are valuable to Idaho, not the least of which are my seats on the Appropriations Committee, the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Veterans Affairs Committee. A replacement would be highly unlikely to obtain these posts.”

In other words, Craig believes he is such a wonderful asset to the body politic that nobody in Idaho’s political roster could adequately replace him. He thinks so highly of his own service that he soldiers on, even though Republican leaders in the Senate are openly begging him to step down. (”It’s embarrassing for the Senate,” National Republican Senatorial Committee head John Ensign told The Washington Post last week.)

In recent months, we’ve seen a strange phenomenon emerge in Washington: Scandal-plagued lawmakers refuse to stop clinging to their offices, like disgraced cowpokes hunkering down in town even after the sheriff has told them to leave.

There’s Bill Jefferson, the indicted Democrat representative from Louisiana who stashed $90,000 in alleged bribe money in his freezer and managed to get himself re-elected last November, despite having been stripped of his powerful Ways and Means Committee seat by an angry Nancy Pelosi.

There’s Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator from Alaska, who reportedly traded favors with state contractors and defiantly promised to run again in 2008, despite his party’s discouragement.

And there’s John Doolittle, the California representative who is under investigation for ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and yet will run again next term. Doolittle even called some fellow Republicans who suggested he step down “weasels.”

If there are any weasels in town, it’s these four. Their arrogance is amazing: Even though their continued presence damages their parties, their malfeasance is overwhelmingly documented and the ongoing criminal investigations are surely huge distractions from their work, these lawmakers believe they are such gifts to the nation that they have a duty to stay in office. Even Tom DeLay had the dignity to resign when things got too hot.

But perhaps it’s not entirely their fault. They come from a political culture that increasingly sees public service less as a calling to which people can contribute their talents when those talents are in their prime, but rather as a vehicle for greatness — a job in which it happens to be particularly easy for people to fulfill their talents.

This is backward. Recently reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln and his three chief rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination, I was struck by his rivals’ willingness to join Lincoln’s Cabinet after they were all defeated, for the sake of the party and the anti-slavery cause.

Can you imagine Hillary Clinton agreeing to be Barack Obama’s secretary of the treasury, and John Edwards his attorney general? Even imagining either of these two agreeing to be Obama’s vice president is a stretch. The office is below them. And that’s a shame.

If Larry Craig has any respect for public service as an enterprise that transcends his own ambitions, he must step down. As it happens, I think the law under which Craig got busted is unfair. It doesn’t matter. Craig’s behavior throughout this scandal has been a joke. Even if due process somehow reveals his character to be only mediocre and not downright rotten, we deserve better than Larry Craig.

Examiner Columnist Eve Fairbanks is an assistant editor at The New Republic.