How Can We Miss You If You Won't Go Away?

Sen. Larry Craig is said to be reconsidering his resignation from the Senate.

Sen. Larry Craig says he may still fight for his Senate seat, a spokesman says — if the lawmaker can clear his name with the Senate Ethics Committee and a Minnesota court where he pleaded guilty after his arrest in an airport men's room sex sting.

Since announcing Saturday he intended to resign on Sept. 30, the Republican lawmaker who has represented Idaho for 27 years has hired a prominent lawyer to investigate the possibility of reversing his guilty plea.

"It's not such a foregone conclusion anymore that the only thing he could do was resign," Sidney Smith, Craig's spokesman in Idaho's capital, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

"We're still preparing as if Senator Craig will resign Sept. 30, but the outcome of the legal case in Minnesota and the ethics investigation will have an impact on whether we're able to stay in the fight — and stay in the Senate," Smith said.

I'll bet that's that's not going over too well with the GOP and the folks back in Idaho.

Craig’s move stunned even supporters. Most political insiders believed Craig had finally gotten the message from national Republican leaders, who saw his guilty plea to a humiliating sex-related charge as a blemish on the party’s reputation and its prospects for the 2008 election.

"We didn't know anything about this," said a spokesman for Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, who stood with Craig during the resignation announcement. Otter, a congressman until his election as governor last fall, will pick Craig’s successor.

Craig’s hedging may play poorly even among Idaho supporters who believe Craig was railroaded, observers said.

"I'm not sure how Idahoans will take it if they feel like they were misled by his statement on Saturday," said Jim Weatherby, a retired political scientist at Boise State University. "He was playing a word game, apparently, with us."

Albertson College of Idaho political science professor Jasper LiCalzi said Craig could put national Republicans, Otter and whoever was going to be the next senator in tough spots.

"I think that's going to get people even more upset," LiCalzi said.

Except the instigator behind Mr. Craig's flip-flop is a prominent GOP leader: Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who has been urging Mr. Craig to fight and who encouraged him to change his statement to say it was his "intention" to resign from the Senate while at the same time hiring Billy Martin, Michael Vick's attorney.

Apparently the new reasoning behind Mr. Craig's withdrawal is that he felt he was railroaded into pleading guilty to the charges in Minnesota and that he didn't have a lawyer to advise him. Okay, he was arrested on June 11 and filed the guilty plea with the court on August 1. If that's being "railroaded," that's the slowest moving train in the world. And why would he go along for almost two months without consulting a lawyer? Either he was too thick to perceive that he might need legal counsel, which calls into question his fitness to serve in the United States Senate, or he was trying to conceal the bust from everybody, including his family. Again, that calls into question his judgment.

In a larger sense, it tells you a lot about the right-wing mindset when it's more important to Sen. Craig that he fend off the speculation that he might be gay rather than think of the damage he might be doing to an already battered and bruised Republican party.