Foley flap hurts GOP image, poll finds

Americans say that Republican congressional leaders put their political interests ahead of protecting the safety of teenage pages, and that House leaders knew of Mark Foley's sexually charged messages to pages well before he was forced to quit Congress, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The poll, completed before North Korea announced that it detonated a nuclear test device, also found that the war in Iraq was continuing to take a toll on President Bush and the Republican Party, and that the White House was having difficulty retaining its edge in handling terrorism.

The number of Americans who approve of Bush's handling of the campaign against terrorism dropped to 46 percent from 54 percent over the past two weeks, suggesting that he failed to gain any political lift from an orchestrated set of ceremonies marking the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. In addition, the poll shows that Americans are now evenly divided over which party they think can better handle terrorism, despite a concerted White House effort to seize the advantage on the issue this month.

With four weeks left before Election Day, the poll indicates that the scandal involving Foley, a former congressman from Florida, is alienating Americans from Congress, and weakening a Republican Party that was already struggling to keep control of the House and Senate. By overwhelming numbers, including majorities of Republicans, Americans said that most members of Congress did not follow the same rules of behavior as average Americans and that most members of Congress considered themselves above the law.

"Politics goes to people's heads and they see themselves as their own little entity," said Donna Mummert, 68, a Republican from Marsing, Idaho, in a follow-up interview after participating in the poll. "They forget why they're there to represent us."

Seventy-nine percent of respondents said House Republican leaders were more concerned about their political standing than about the safety of teenage congressional pages. About half of respondents said that the House Republican leadership had improperly handled the Foley case, compared with 27 percent who said they approved of how it was handled; 46 percent of respondents said Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois should step down. And Americans, including women , are more likely to say that Democrats, and not Republicans, share their moral values.

The nationwide telephone poll was conducted Thursday through Sunday with 983 adults, including 891 registered voters. The margin of sampling error for the entire sample is plus or minus three percentage points and it is the same for the registered voters.