POLITICO: 10 moments that rattled race for Congress

10 moments that rattled race for Congress
By: Josh Kraushaar
October 28, 2008 06:37 AM EST

A case can be made that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) made the gaffe of the election when she went on MSNBC’s “Hardball” and suggested that Barack Obama and other Democratic members of Congress held anti-American views. Her comments changed what looked like an easy path to victory into a political dogfight with a very uncertain outcome.

Her little-known opponent, Elwyn Tink­lenberg, raised more than $1.3 million in a week — more money than most Democratic challengers raise in an entire year. And a newly released poll shows that a whopping 40 percent of voters in Bachmann’s district said they were less likely to support her after she made the comments.

Here at Politico, we picked the next 10 moments on the congressional campaign trail that either changed the state of a race or the overall political climate this election year. While none has had the sudden and severe impact of Bachmann’s comments, each has played a role in changing the nature of the campaign.

• Special election losses for House Republicans. When Republicans couldn’t hold the seat of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois, they knew storm clouds were on the horizon. When, three months later, the party lost two House seats in the heart of the deep South, recriminations against the House GOP leadership began.

Now, Democrats are in position to pick up House seats in some unlikely places: Wyoming, Louisiana and rural Kentucky. But the warning signs were foreshadowed much earlier in the cycle with those special elections.

• Sali’s shenanigans. It’s generally not a good idea to give your opponent’s campaign staff bunny ears in the middle of a televised interview. Or to consider turning in a fourth-grade book report late as one of the pivotal moments of your life. But this GOP freshman class president has turned into the class clown and is facing the wrath from voters back home.

Bill Sali’s embarrassments have single-handedly given Democrat Walt Minnick an even chance to unseat him in an Idaho district that is one of the most Republican in the country.

• Feeney’s apology ad. Any time a member of Congress has to publicly apologize on television, it’s done out of desperation. (Even Bachmann couldn’t muster the magic words in her ad.)

And Tom Feeney, one of the most outspoken conservatives in Congress, looked downright somber when he apologized for a junket he took to Scotland on Jack Abramoff’s dime. His insistence that he made a “rookie mistake” was not judged as credible by critics, given that he was Florida’s influential House speaker before running for Congress.

The apology seems unlikely to save his flagging campaign and, if anything, may have made his situation worse. Before airing the ad, Feeney held a 1-point lead over Democrat Suzanne Kosmas in one Democratic poll. The same poll now shows him trailing her by 23 points, and Republicans are already close to writing off his seat.

• Coleman’s “Angry Al” ad. Sen. Norm Coleman’s campaign telegraphed its campaign strategy against former “Saturday Night Live” funnyman Al Franken early on: Make Franken an unacceptable alternative for Minnesota voters. So Coleman ringed together Franken’s angriest and most expletive-filled moments in recent years for the public to see.

The strategy backfired — though the ad brought down Franken’s favorability ratings, it also cost Coleman in a state where “Minnesota nice” prevails. Once polling showed Coleman losing ground, he decided to take down all his negative ads.


• Erickson’s personal foibles. It’s hard to find many prominent Oregon Republicans backing Mike Erickson, who was once viewed as one of the GOP’s promising congressional candidates. But incidents in Erickson’s personal life have all but guaranteed this wealthy businessman will not be coming to Congress.

Erickson’s troubles began when The Oregonian reported that he paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion. He denied the allegations, even as she reluctantly came out and told the press otherwise. The state’s leading anti-abortion group said it couldn’t endorse him, accusing Erickson of lying to it about the incident.

Then newspapers revealed that the self-described humanitarian trip to Cuba he mentioned on the campaign trail was really a weeklong fiesta, complete with drinking, cigar smoking and cockfighting.

When you alienate social conservatives and foreign policy conservatives — two key elements of the Republican Party base — it’s near impossible to win.

• Mahoney’s sex scandal. First sign a member of Congress won’t be getting much help from his own party: when the people ratting him out to the press are his own former staffers.

Tim Mahoney couldn’t count on much Democratic goodwill after ABC News revealed that he paid $121,000 to cover up an affair he had with a former mistress and campaign staffer. Democrats simply have too many pickup opportunities to pour valuable resources on behalf of an ethically troubled incumbent. So Mahoney, whose prospects against Republican Tom Rooney in Florida once looked promising, is now fending for himself.

• Fossella’s DUI, Powers’ death. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. In May, Staten Island voters saw their congressman, Republican Vito Fossella, busted for driving under the influence. That arrest led to the revelation that he had secretly fathered a child, which earned him banner headlines in the New York tabloids, and he chose to retire at the end of his term.

But Republicans’ luck only went downhill from there. The GOP’s favored choice to succeed Fossella, Frank Powers, died suddenly. After a desperate search for a replacement, Republicans nominated a candidate who was openly disliked by members of the party’s leadership.

• Dole’s “rocking chair voters” ad. Who knew two folksy, elderly men in rocking chairs would be the advertising stars of the cycle? The two have been all over the North Carolina airwaves as part of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s campaign against Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole. The ads have criticized her lack of clout in Congress, accused her of not spending enough time in the state and blasted her for supporting free trade agreements that send local jobs to China.

The ad campaign against Dole quickly changed voter perception of her from a personally popular figure into an ineffective senator. She now is trailing Democrat Kay Hagan and has spent her own money in a last-ditch attempt to save the seat.

• Murtha’s racist/redneck comments. Note to members of Congress: It’s never a good idea to demean your constituents as racists. But that’s precisely what longtime Pennsylvania Democrat John P. Murtha did in explaining why Barack Obama was struggling in his rural, blue-collar southwestern Pennsylvania district. Murtha later dug himself in a deeper hole in trying to defend himself by saying that most of the area used to be really redneck.

Murtha, who isn’t a household name outside Pennsylvania or Washington, saw himself parodied on “Saturday Night Live” less than two weeks before the election — hardly the kind of publicity he wanted. He now faces a tougher-than-expected challenge in a year when very few Democrats are at risk.

• Stevens’ conviction. Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens was convicted Monday on all seven counts of falsifying financial disclosure forms, making his reelection very unlikely. Against the odds, Stevens handily won the Republican nomination, and he had a good chance of defeating Democrat Mark Begich had he been acquitted.

At press time, Stevens had given no indication whether he would step down or continue his reelection bid. But with one week left, it’s hard to see how he could return to the Senate.

© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC