Few Republicans were weeping yesterday when California Rep. John Doolittle announced that he won’t seek a tenth House term.
Mr. Doolittle is widely seen as departing ahead of the posse. Last year, the FBI raided his Virginia home and issued subpoenas to the congressman and five staff members in a probe of his wife’s fundraising business. The case involves Mr. Doolittle’s ties to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. While Mr. Doolittle has denied any wrongdoing, the reports kept alive the aura of GOP corruption that helped Democrats retake the House and Senate in 2006.
Retiring may be Mr. Doolittle’s last, best favor to the GOP. By taking his name off the ballot, he’s given Republicans a shot to hold a strong GOP House district that nonetheless only re-elected the embattled congressman by three percentage points last time around.
As Republicans learned in 2006, voters don’t take kindly to behavior that has so far sent two Representatives to jail and made it harder for the GOP to campaign as a party that would clean up a status quo in Washington that voters clearly dislike. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last year, former White House aide Karl Rove acknowledged that a key mistake during the 2006 campaign was not acting more vigorously to remove candidates tainted by corruption. House Minority Leader John Boehner has learned a lesson from that error — he was a behind-the-scenes factor in convincing Mr. Doolittle that his seat was lost and that retirement was the only viable option.
— John Fund