Keep Your Eye On the Outfielders

When I was a kid growing up outside of Philadelphia, my family went to a lot of Phillies games in the summer. My dad always would remind me that when a batter hit a fly ball to the outfield, the best way to tell if it was going to be a homerun or not was not to watch the ball, but to watch the outfielders movement. If they start backtracking to the wall, it's going out; If they stand still or trot in, it 's going to be caught. In the Karl Rove/leak scandal, we have the same kind of accurate telltales.

In the game playing out in Washington, the outfielders are the Republicans on Capitol Hill. You can watch them to know just how politically dangerous this all is, and whether the candal will be the homerun for Democrats that it could be.

Most of the past controversies surrounding the Bush administration, have ended up like shallow pop outs. They came off the bat with a crack, but died in the air and nothing came of them. Republicans were quick to trot in and counterattack hard.

But as Americablog shows, the Rove/leak scandal looks different. Many of the most high-profile Republicans are keeping very quiet, figuratively sprinting back to the wall as this fly ball heads deeper and deeper into the outfield.

In the next few weeks, we'll see if this is just another fly out (albeit to the warning track), or whether it goes into the stands and Karl Rove gets pulled. Remember, though: keep your eye on the congressional Republicans because they are the best indicators of whether this thing is going to really break wide open.

P.S. Apologies for the bad metaphor, but sometimes its fun to excercise the creative part of the brain, even if it comes up with fairly cheesy comparisons.

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