W. House bigs say: No Moore
Child-‘sex’ pol losing support
White House officials on Sunday joined a growing number of Republicans distancing themselves from Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore over accusations of sexual misconduct with a minor.
“I said very early in this process that the conduct as described should disqualify anyone from serving in public office and I’ll stand by that,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told ABC’s “This Week.” “The president and others in the Republican Party have made clear that if the allegations are true, this man should step aside.”
White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short pulled no punches. “There’s a special place in hell for those who actually perpetrate these crimes, and I think Roy Moore has to do more explaining than he has done so far,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.
“There’s no Senate seat more important than the notion of child pedophilia . . . but having said that, he has not been proven guilty. We have to afford him the chance to defend himself.”
The Washington Post revealed last week that four women said Moore (inset) showed a romantic interest in them decades ago when he was in his 30s and they were in their teens. One woman said she was 14 when Moore drove her to his house for a sexual encounter.
Moore, 70, an outspoken Christian conservative who once erected a monument of the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court and then refused to remove it despite federal court rulings affirming the separation of church and state, has vehemently denied the allegations as “fake news” and questioned why they arose just weeks before the Dec. 12 election.
But new polls since the claims were made seem to be taking a toll on Moore’s support in the deeply red state. Several show Democrat Doug Jones narrowing the gap, and one — a JMC Analytics survey — had him leading Moore by 4 percentage points, 46 to 42 percent. The same survey in October had Moore up by 8 percentage points — 48 to 40 percent.
A flurry of Republicans have condemned the behavior but have qualified their calls for him to step down only “if ” the claims are proven true.
But others have said more strongly that they believe the detailed accounts of the women.