GOP Chair: 'I Certainly Haven't Seen a Free Fall'
Second difference from '94 is the people who are in the toughest races; people like [Connecticut Rep.] Nancy Johnson and [New Mexico Rep.] Heather Wilson and others are very battle tested. In '94, the 34 incumbents that lost, 26 of them had won by 10 percent or more in the previous election.
Important difference No. 3 that I think is going to be relevant this year is that Republicans had a positive agenda they could be for and voters in '94 embraced many of the concepts behind that positive agenda. You don't see that at all this year.
Fourth, they never saw it coming. We have seen it coming. Fifth, they ran an election that was very much a referendum on Clinton. ... In 2006, what you find is a lot more Republicans running as a choice election between themselves and the other candidate on the ballot. ... Another example, and obviously how much you can extrapolate from this is debatable, but there were 39 Democratic primaries this year. In 36 of the 39 primaries, turnout this year was lower than the average turnout in the same state in primaries over the last 20 years. That doesn't indicate a surge for the Democrats.
On North Korea
It seems to me people who have consistently been on the record against missile defense and whose secretary of state tried to ply the North Korean dictator with a signed basketball by Michael Jordan are not necessarily the best people to be critical of what's happening in North Korea. I think one thing we know was the attempt to appeal to the better side of Kim Jong Il did not work, and so it seems to me that the party ... that said there is an axis of evil, that said we need missile defense, and that said we need to be tough in dealing with this threat is the one that is likely, if you're looking at the issues and looking at the facts, to benefit in terms of the public's focus on this.
On the Mark Foley scandal
First of all, obviously what you had was someone who did things that were very inappropriate and outrageous. The moment that the congressional leadership learned about it, they gave him the political death penalty. They said, "You're out of here, or we're going to throw you out." That's the most aggressive posture they could have taken. They also, the moment they heard about it, took the most aggressive posture from an investigative perspective, calling in [the Department of Justice] and the FBI. And they're trying to take ... the most aggressive posture they possibly can to make sure these kids are protected in the future.
On calls for Speaker Dennis Hastert to resign
I think [it's] frankly playing politics, because the same people did not suggest in past scandals that speakers ought to be held accountable for the activities of the individual, even when the individual did worse things and the speaker provided less punishment.
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