Leveraging the Lobbyist Scandal

By Massimo Calabresi

For a congressional candidate, a presidential visit during campaign season is a sought-after opportunity reserved for those who really need it. So midterm watchers were surprised to hear that President George W. Bush would travel to northeastern California this week to raise an estimated $500,000 for Republican incumbent Representative John Doolittle. Doolittle hasn't won less than 60% of the vote since 1992, and Republicans outnumber Democrats 48% to 30% in his district. So why spend valuable time and fund-raising muscle on a man who should be a sure thing? One simple answer: Jack Abramoff.

Conventional wisdom holds that the Abramoff lobbying scandal that engulfed Washington a year ago has fizzled. Nothing like the 60 court cases some predicted have materialized. Democrats, beset by their own ethics scandals in West Virginia and Louisiana, have all but abandoned attempts to nationalize corruption as an issue. Even last week's revelation that Abramoff had 82 contacts with Bush adviser Karl Rove registered barely a blip on the capital's political seismograph.

But the scandal did knock two powerful Republicans out of Congress over the past year, putting both their seats in play. At the same time, Democrats are finding that in a handful of districts like Doolittle's, their opponents' ties to Abramoff are helping them raise money and close poll numbers, forcing expensive countermeasures like the Bush visit. And with races tightening across the country, a handful of districts may be enough. The Abramoff factor has put up to five seats in play for Democrats in a contest in which 15 would give them control of the House.

One of the seats most likely to flip is that of former House majority leader Tom DeLay, who stepped down a year ago amid revelations of his ties to Abramoff. Although DeLay dropped out of his House race after the primary last April, it was too late to get his name off the ballot. Now the Democratic candidate Nick Lampson is the favorite of most oddsmakers to beat the late-starting G.O.P. write-in candidate Shelley Sekula-Gibbs. In southeastern Ohio, former House Administration Committee chairman Bob Ney is retiring after pleading guilty last month to trading favors for campaign contributions from Abramoff. But his handpicked replacement, Joy Padgett, can't shake the taint of scandal. Ney's solidly Republican district favored Bush by 14 percentage points in 2004 but is now polling anywhere from 2% to 14% in favor of Democrat Zack Space.

G.O.P. incumbents are safer, but some are still worried. In Arizona, Representative J.D. Hayworth is up against a popular local official, Harry Mitchell, whose first TV ad last week led with charges that Hayworth took $100,000 from Abramoff and his clients. "This guy's going to be all Abramoff all the time," says Hayworth. "But it's just not going to work." Or maybe it will. The Democrats claim Mitchell leads Hayworth by 3%, but the Republicans have Hayworth ahead by 14%.

As for Doolittle, his opponent Charlie Brown is a retired 26-year Air Force veteran whose campaign consists largely of charges that Doolittle and his wife, who worked for Abramoff, are lining their pockets at constituents' expense. Doolittle's spokesman Richard Robinson admits he faces a "tough challenge." All the same, Democrats in Washington at first paid Brown no attention. "They told me, 'We're only going to believe it if you can raise money in the district and if you do a poll that shows you're in the running,'" Brown says. He says he promptly raised $600,000 and commissioned a poll that showed him closing to within 2 points of Doolittle. Now Brown says the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has agreed to send him a check. He's still a long shot. But says Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report: "If it weren't for the Abramoff scandal, we wouldn't even be talking about these races."