The Hotline: Dems Losing the Edge on Ethics

Not much new here, just an observation from one of DC's leading policy/political journals that Democrats' mounting ethics problems are costing them the issue.

Mercurio does raise one scandal that I neglected to mention earlier:

Moving on to Montana, where the Billings Gazette reported last week that state Auditor John Morrison, the presumptive front-runner in the Democratic primary to challenge vulnerable GOP Sen. Conrad Burns, had an extramarital affair in the late 1990s.

Harmless enough, perhaps, in the post-Lewinsky era. Except that, more specifically, Morrison was forced to hire an outside attorney to handle an '03 securities fraud investigation, in part because his two-month extramarital affair in 1998 was with a woman who later married a businessman whose companies Morrison's office investigated, according to the Gazette. Morrison's office reached a settlement with businessman David Tacke, which ordered him to offer refunds to investors.

The issue so far has gained little traction. Morrison's primary rival, state Senate President Jon Tester, doesn't have enough money to run TV ads on such a risky topic, and Burns has demurred when asked about it. "I don't know anything about that, so it's a non-question," he said April 10.

But again, just as they were with Mollohan, Democrats were relying heavily on Morrison to lead the ethics charge against Burns, who replaced DeLay as the poster-child of the Abramoff scandal after the Texan stepped down. No longer. "It's good news for Tester, and it's good news for Burns. It's hard to believe Democrats would nominate him now. He's blown it," the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato told the AP this week. "The Clinton disease has spread to Big Sky Democrats."