WALL STREET JOURNAL: FEENEY APOLOGIZES FOR ACCEPTING ABRAMOFF JUNKET, CALLS IT "A ROOKIE MISTAKE"

September 23, 2008, 4:46 pm
Florida Rep. Apologizes for Abramoff-Funded Trip in New Ad
Easha Anand reports on congressional races.

A television ad linking Florida Republican Rep. Tom Feeney to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff is airing in his Orlando area district and it’s funded by an unusual source: Feeney’s own campaign.

Feeney’s ad apologizes for a 2003 golfing trip to Scotland that the disgraced lobbyist paid for calling it “a rookie mistake.”


In January 2007, the House ethics committee said the trip violated House rules and Feeney re-paid the $5,643 cost of the trip to the U.S. Treasury. In the ad, he tells voters that he’s learned from his mistake and “did everything he could to make it right.”

The most recent poll in Feeney’s district–an internal poll conducted by his Democratic opponent Suzanne Kosmas–shows Feeney trailing by one percent.

Kosmas’s campaign questioned Feeney’s characterization of the trip as a “rookie mistake” by pointing out that before being elected to the House of Representatives, Feeney was the speaker of Florida’s state house and worked as a lobbyist. In an e-mail, Kosmas’s campaign wrote that Feeney’s new ad “is long on excuses and lies, and short on the facts.”

“Obviously, the ‘mea culpa’ ad is not a huge genre in American politics,” said Ken Goldstein, director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, a University of Wisconsin project that collects and codes political ads. “If someone has done something bad enough that they think they need to apologize for it with a television ad, they’ve usually decided not to run.”

Feeney’s not the first embattled pol to take to the airwaves to apologize to constituents. In 2006, embattled Republican Rep. Don Sherwood of Pennsylvania cut an ad apologizing for his indiscretions, which included a five-year affair with a woman who eventually sued him for $5.5 million on an assault charge. The suit was settled out of court, and Sherwood apologized in a television ad for making a mistake that “nearly cost [him] the love of his wife and daughters.” He was defeated on Election Day.

Shortly before withdrawing from a competitive race for New Jersey’s Senate seat in 2002, Democrat Robert Torricelli released his own ad of contrition, a 60-second spot where he acknowledged his ties to David Chang, a businessman with North Korean ties who illegally donated to the New Jersey Democrat. “A United States senator should hold himself to a higher standard,” Torricelli said.

Republican Rep. Tom Reynolds of New York apologized in a 2006 television ad for not doing more to investigate charges that Rep. Mark Foley, a Republican Florida congressman, exchanged inappropriate e-mails and instant messages with teenaged congressional pages. That year, he eked out a win against millionaire Democrat Jack Davis. Reynolds announced in March that he would not seek re-election this November.