It dawned on me this afternoon that my 77-year-old mother may have delivered us the House.
For years, Eleanor was in the Florida Senate. Though her politics were as far to the left as anyone's in Tallahassee, somehow she kept getting reelected - until 1992, when Mark Foley challenged her. Foley ran a pretty dirty campaign, and a month before the general election, she started losing her lead.
Around that time, Eleanor began hearing rumors about Foley's sexuality. My feeling was that she should out the bastard. As far as I was concerned, hypocrites had no privacy rights. But Eleanor wouldn't hear of it.
A week before the election - a dead heat now - I tried one last time to change her mind. Nope, she said. She'd rather lose. And lose she did.
I don't want to toot the family horn, but is it so unfair to suggest that if the Democrats take back the House in November, it will have been Eleanor's doing?
Think about it: if she hadn't been so principled, she'd have outed Foley back in 1992. If she'd outed him, he never would have made it to the Florida Senate, much less Congress. And if he'd never made it to Congress, then he and Reynolds and Boehner and Hastert and all the other moralists in the Republican Party wouldn't be scurrying to save their seats. Good going, Eleanor.
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