I'm going to come right out and admit that I have no idea why Tom DeLay's enemies are determined to bring him down. Is it genuine outrage that he seems to have illegally pocketed gifts from corporate allies? One hopes not. It's trivial compared with the more widespread (and perfectly legal) Republican practice of selling off policy areas in exchange for campaign funds and cushy jobs. Despair at the way the DeLay-led GOP has abandoned ideological conservatism and small-government principle in favor of shilling for K Street? That may be what's gotten David Brooks so upset, but it hardly seems to be the sort of thing liberals would be mad about.
Pure partisan opportunism? Maybe. But then the “get DeLay” crowd is misplaying its hand. DeLay, a k a the Bugman, is hardly an appealing figure. This is something he's recognized in the past. Rather than putting himself front and center the way Newt Gingrich did, DeLay has preferred to lurk in the shadows, letting the benign-seeming Dennis Hastert operate as puppet speaker and allowing the president and the Senate Republican leadership to do almost all of the high-profile work. Democrats tried last fall to use DeLay as a campaign issue against vulnerable Republicans, and it didn't work very well -- largely because people didn't know who he was. Now his name is recognized. Folks hoping to pick up House seats in 2006 should hope he stays right where he is. The worst thing that could happen to the Democratic Party would be for the Republicans to ditch him as leader, make a grand show of their ethical probity, and then keep on governing the same way while gaining credit for changing their stripes (see also Lott, Trent).
So I don't get it. By the same token, I'm baffled by conservative eagerness to leap to DeLay's defense. National Review Editor Rich Lowry, in a typical offering, managed to go on about the subject without confronting the substance of the charges. After an article about a trip DeLay took to Moscow that was illegally financed by a Russian corporation appeared in The Washington Post, Lowry retorted that "this might have been news if that trip hadn't taken place in 1997." In fact, news of the financing behind DeLay's trip was reported in August 2004 in an English-language Russian business paper in a manner that suggests the illegal arrangement was already known in Russia. So, yes, it is weird that the Post was behind the curve. But crime is crime and ethics are ethics; the date that a story appears on the subject does not change that reality.
An even stranger offering comes from the usually astute Jeffrey Bell, writing in The Weekly Standard. Bell, like Lowry, doesn't bother to defend DeLay on his merits. Instead, he refers vaguely to "overseas trips and/or fundraising practices that have never caused the slightest political problem for anyone else" and speculates on motives: "The truth is that Tom DeLay is a special target because he is the first legislative power broker to be an authentic Red State conservative."
Really? George W. Bush of Texas? Trent Lott of Mississippi? Bill Frist of Tennessee? Don Nickles of Oklahoma? All frauds? Jesse Helms, it seems, must not count as a power broker. The evidence for this is unclear, but apparently the history of personal animosity between Gingrich and DeLay suffices to prove that the former was not "an authentic Red State conservative." Yet DeLay "is an unhyphenated Reaganite: militantly pro-life and pro-values on social issues, a pro-growth tax cutter on economic issues, and an unapologetic, spread-American-values interventionist abroad."
This is nonsense. If DeLay is a pure Reaganite, how can he be the first of anything? If Reagan was militantly anti-abortion, how did all these pro-choice Supreme Court justices get on the bench? How does a commitment to tax cutting distinguish DeLay from anyone else in his caucus? His role as the leading opponent of the Kosovo war has been described as many things -- partisan opportunism, principled isolationism, the corrupt upshot of his financial ties to the Russian military -- but “unapologetic spread-American-values interventionism abroad” is a novel take. "When Ronald Reagan saw that he had made a mistake putting our soldiers in Lebanon … he admitted the mistake, and he withdrew from Lebanon," said DeLay, who seems to be saying the U.S. should both offer an apology and follow a policy of non-interventionism.
If liberals criticize someone, conservatives will speak up on his behalf. And if those investigating DeLay turn out to have the goods, they will eventually discredit a wide circle of people on the right. Even if the investigators don't have the goods, conservatives will have to spend plenty of time floundering about and embarrassing themselves in their defense of DeLay. Maybe the liberals campaigning against DeLay are smarter than I thought.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
