Gary(mandering) Condit

California Democrats are taking an intriguing, though troubling, approach to ridding themselves of that blow-dried embarrassment known as Rep. Gary Condit. A preliminary redistricting plan drawn up by state party leaders won’t make the evasive congressman come clean, but it might, they hope, make him go away.

Rep. Condit, long thought unbeatable in his Central Valley district, now is almost certainly the most beatable politician anywhere. It is a vulnerability he richly deserves. The self-serving self-victimization act he continues to perform might – only might – be tolerable if the only matter at hand was whether or not he had an extramarital affair. Since the matter at hand is the whereabouts of a young woman, Chandra Levy, now missing for four months, it is despicable.

What the party leaders propose, as their state goes through a substantial redistricting as the result of Census 2000, is to reconfigure the Central Valley to bring thousands of new residents, mostly Democrats of Hispanic descent, into Rep. Condit’s district, a conservative agricultural region that has sent the conservative Democrat to Congress for six terms. The thinking is that all these new voters, unfamiliar with Rep. Condit’s record and unused to voting for him, might embolden a Democratic challenger to the incumbent in the 2002 primary. Even better, the mere prospect of a challenger could convince Rep. Condit not to run for re-election at all.

No Democrat of stature in California has yet to call for Rep. Condit’s resignation – that would lead to a special election that everyone knows, in the current poisonous climate, would be won easily by any of several politically established and well-known Republicans in the district. With the GOP margin the in the House so close, a special election is a chance California’s Democratic-controlled legislature is unwilling to take.

So instead, the answer may be to gerrymander Mr. Condit out of office. Gerrymandering, the drawing of convoluted and irrational congressional boundaries for partisan advantage, has a long and ugly history – in the South it was often used to blunt the clout of black voters by divvying them up among many white-majority districts. It is an odious practice, but in this case California lawmakers just may need to hold their noses. The stench of gerrymandering can’t be as bad as what they have now.