Senator Larry Craig: Stay or Go?
Posted: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 8:42 AM by Dan Fleschner
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Live from Studio 1A
We've now heard from Larry Craig himself in this ongoing scandal surrounding the Idaho senator.
WATCH VIDEO
This morning, we got perspectives from the legal angle with Dan Abrams (WATCH VIDEO) and the political angle with Tim Russert (WATCH VIDEO).
If nothing else, Senator Craig seems like a guy who has a hard time making up his mind.
He was arrested on June 11. On August 1, he mailed in his guilty plea for disorderly conduct. But he later changed his mind to say that he's innocent and always has been, that he pled guilty to make the whole thing go away. He says his embarrassment is what kept him from telling anyone about his arrest until the news was about to hit the media.
Now, he says trying to just make it go away was an attempt at an easy way out, that he was raised to be a fighter and will continue to fight his own guilty plea.
He also initially said it was his "intent to resign" on September 30, then he decided not to resign.
Meanwhile, in Washington, several prominent Republicans have turned their backs on him, calling into question whether he can be an effective lawmaker.
So this of course leads to a series of questions, beyond whether any of us think that he's a homosexual:
Is he doing the people of Idaho any good by remaining in office?
How much damage is he doing to the Republican Party by staying in the public eye, especially now that we're almost a year away from the 2008 elections?
Is he crazy to think that he'll have his guilty plea overturned -- even though one judge has already offered a strongly-worded rejection of his appeal, and despite the fact that he had almost two months to think about how to plea before ultimately deciding to say he was guilty?
And if he is such a fighter who wasn't raised to take the easy way out, why did he first do exactly that by pleading guilty, especially since he had almost two months to decide whether to fight or give in?
