This weekend DeLay lost his job, but this week, he's going to lose his dignity:
When legal and ethical questions began spinning around House majority leader Tom DeLay last year, President George W. Bush was publicly supportive. Privately, though, he questioned his fellow Texan's mojo. Bush had scored 10 points higher than DeLay in the Representative's district in 2004, and that was only after Bush had recorded a telephone message to help rally local Republicans. "I can't believe I had to do robocalls for him," the President said bitingly to an Oval Office visitor.
To people who know Bush well, the remark said it all about the longtime chill between the two pols—a distance that is only sure to grow with former lobbyist Jack Abramoff's guilty plea. Both camps describe the two conservative Texan's relationship as professional—an alliance, not a friendship. "DeLay admires Bush's leadership but still thinks of himself as the strongest conservative on the block," a DeLay friend says. "They perceive DeLay as a bull in a china shop. They appreciate him as their protector and retriever." Like many of his colleagues on Capitol Hill, DeLay suffers under what officials call this Administration's general lack of respect for Congress. But he is also in the unique position of being the most prominent modern Republican politician in Texas to rise without the help of White House senior adviser Karl Rove, and the two have never been close. "Karl thinks of him as someone a little bit too opinionated for his own good," says an official close to both men. "And DeLay thinks of Karl as a former mail vendor, not some great guru."
Even before DeLay's announcement that he would abdicate his leadership post, top Bush advisers tell TIME, the President's inner circle always treated DeLay as a necessary burden. He may have had an unmatched grip on the House and Washington lobbyists, but DeLay is not the kind of guy—in background and temperament—the President feels comfortable with. Of the former exterminator, a Republican close to the President's inner circle says, "They have always seen him as beneath them, more blue collar. He's seen as a useful servant, not someone you would want to vacation with."
I just love that. George W. Bush, with his hitched shirtsleeves and obsessive-compulsive brush clearing, doesn't think the blue collar exterminator from Sugarland, Texas is the sort of guy he'd want to vacation with. And that's when you know someone is rich -- when "vacation" becomes a verb. Normal folks go on vacation, rich folks go vacationing. And Tom DeLay, it seems, isn't the sort of guy you "vacation" with.
This article, coming at it does at DeLay's nadir, is very fitting, very Shakespearian. Nothing could be a more painful coda for the defenestrated majority leader. DeLay is a very Nixonian figure, coming from a hardscrabble background that infused him with a reflexive distrust of rich, educated, easy-living elitists. Like Nixon, he beat the hell out of them. Like Nixon, he lived in fear of them. And like Nixon, his fall is freeing them to publicly unleash the disparagement and condescension he always knew they privately felt.
