The Crossed Pond

BOISE, Idaho – Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig will announce Saturday he will resign from the Senate amid a furor over his arrest and guilty plea in a police sex sting in an airport men’s room, Republican officials said Friday.

Craig will hold a news conference at 10:30 a.m. MT and say that he will resign effective Sept. 30, three state GOP officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The announcement follows by just five days the disclosure that he had pleaded guilty Aug. 1 to a reduced misdemeanor charge arising out of his arrest June 11 at the Minneapolis airport.

Because Craig’s resignation will be effective September 30th, Governor Butch Otter (no I am not making that up) gets to appoint somebody to fill his seat until the election. mcjoan at dailykos gives a quick rundown of the likeliest candidates. If it doesn’t turn out to be Lt. Gov. Jim Risch, apparently a very ambitious and not particularly well-liked man. Most people say even the Governor doesn’t like him much, and may appoint him half just to get rid of him. Risch’s statewide approval ratings are 26%, and he not only doesn’t have any campaign money, he’s actually a quarter million in debt. But the rest of the designated hitters in Idaho don’t look much better.

No surprise in Craig’s announcement, but in two days two safe Republican incumbents bail, both with seats up for reelection in 2008. Idaho may seem dead red, but given the nature of the sudden opening, given the weakness of the Republican candidates, given that the Democrats have already in place a perfectly respectable candidate in Larry LaRocco (and you can bet that money is already pouring in to his campaign), and given that fact that Idaho fielded a surprisingly strong and invigorated Democratic campaign for Governor and for one of Idaho’s two congressional seats in 2006, a race that they lost 50-45 (in a district that went Bush in 2004 by 68-30) but which, in the last weeks before the election, even I was writing about as a race that had the potential to be another KS-2 (a retrospective comparison, of course), this Senate seat will be competitive. Lean Republican, but when was the last time you heard of a Senate seat in Idaho being in the “lean” category? And if it’s a good Democratic year and a depressed Republican party from the top of the ticket to the bottom….

I’ve written a lot about Craig in the last few days, which you can catch up on here, here, here (don’t forget the dominatrix hooker!), and of course, I still don’t think he did anything wrong, except having had a significant, personal hand in making the laws and political/criminal atmosphere that eventually took him down. Like I said, he has no one to blame but himself, in more ways than one.