Go Denny Go

Larry Kudlow's right on the money:

If I were Denny Hastert I would try to be as invisible as possible right about now. Instead, Hastert is holding news conferences in front of graveyard tombstones. Message to Mr. Hastert: The polls are calling for your head. The more you try to explain your way out of the Foley mess the more you crowd out important Republican messages on low-tax economic growth, falling gas prices, the record Dow stock market, and a strong national-security stance against terrorism. These are the messages the GOP must emphasize if it is to stay competitive in the final sprint to the November 7 elections.

Hastert should have stepped aside as speaker more than a week ago, telling voters that he will roll up his sleeves and get to the bottom of the Foley sex scandal in the months ahead. Instead he is making the political problem worse. Every time he appears in public he not only reminds voters of GOP corruption, but of the fact he has done nothing about it.

Jim Colby, the openly gay Republican congressman from Arizona, says Foley’s predatory sexual harassment started in 2001. Kirk Fordham, former staffer to Republican Rep. Tom Reynolds of New York, traces it back to 2003. Republican House member John Shimkus says it began a year ago, although he didn’t bother to tell anybody on the Page Board. And Reynolds himself says the problem was fingered last spring. That’s more than an enough anecdotal evidence for voters who have concluded that Hastert knew there was a problem and stood idly by. At the very least, common sense says Hastert should have removed Foley from his leadership positions on the Page Board and the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.

Republicans will get their comeuppance this fall. But the trick for the GOP is to turn this short-run political setback into a long-run positive strategy. The starting point must be a change in the House leadership and a retooling of a tired old message.

In fact, to a good extent it has been a message of failure.

Republicans will never get the gauzy Baba Wawa propaganda treatment Democrats regularly receive from the Left-Wing Media. We need leaders with communication skills and political sense who can get their message to the people despite the filters of the Hair Helmet Hamas.

Absent that, we need leaders who are bare-knuckled brawlers capable of lining up votes to get real accomplishments on the scoreboard.

Denny Hastert is neither of these.

Bill Frist isn't any better.

And George W. Bush isn't head-and-shoulders above them at this point.

If you wonder why we're about to get our collective rear ends handed back to us by voters, just consider how weak and ineffectual our top GOP leaders are. Bush is at least swinging, Frist and Hastert are heads down in the dugout.

It's time for new Republican leadership.