DeLay Fills a Need for the Left
March 15, 2005

The left has come up with a target, and his name is Tom DeLay. He isn’t their first and won’t be their last, but for now he’s the Republican they hope to take down.

They’ve tried in the past to do the same thing to others. Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and White House adviser Karl Rove have all been portrayed as ethically challenged and sleazy by the same folks who are now going after the House Republican leader from Texas. Trumped-up charges of illegality, paid ads and reports from ethics groups that are little more than fronts for partisan and ideological assaults on their opponents are all part of the now familiar pattern.

If the attacks on those who have come before are any guide, this will go on for some time and then subside as they find new targets on whom to vent their bile.

DeLay is far from perfect, but he’s no criminal and one doubts if any of his colleagues really believes he’s motivated by anything other than his strongly held principles and a desire to win. In fact, the argument that he’s essentially a venal inside-the-Beltway operator is probably the weakest part of the left wing’s case against him because, while one can picture him crossing the line to achieve his ideological objectives, it is impossible to visualize him doing so to make a buck.

He is, however, both tough and an in-your-face conservative who isn’t in the habit of taking prisoners and knows that his opponents aren’t going to pull their punches as they try to take him out. His problem is that the very qualities that make him an effective leader and a hero to his partisans also make him an inviting target. He no doubt considers that part of the price of leadership, and to a remarkable degree in today’s Washington he’s right.

The situation in which the left finds itself these days gives the boys and girls at MoveOn.org and the like little choice. They don’t seem very adept at winning elections, but remain convinced that the problem is not their message but that the opposition cheats or at least won’t play fair with them. Thus, the Bush forces must have somehow cheated in Ohio and elsewhere or, as Teresa Heinz Kerry apparently believes, rigged the newfangled voting machines across the country to steal the election from her sainted husband.

In their minds, no Republican or conservative could win anything on the merits, so we must all be dishonest manipulators and mean-spirited crooks of one kind or another.

The fact is that activist, ideologically driven organizations need enemies to raise money and to fuel the passions of the grassroots activists that give them their strength. We on the right have Hillary Clinton now that Bill is passé and Teddy Kennedy is too long in the tooth to pose much of a realistic threat to anybody. George Soros and his friends have their devils as well, with DeLay being chief among them.

Indeed, if he didn’t already exist they would have to invent him or move on to someone else. But he does, and their attacks on him resonate well among the committed who hope against hope that even though they couldn’t defeat Bush they might at least be able to get one of their enemies. The charges themselves matter little. At one level at least it doesn’t even matter if they do get him because the fight itself will pay dividends if they can keep it up, raise money and whip up their troops in the process.

If they actually manage to shut DeLay up or persuade his colleagues to abandon him, that would be a bonus, but one doubts if they really expect that to happen. Nor is it realistic to expect that he will actually become an electoral liability to those of his colleagues who follow his lead or who have turned to him for help. Some will remember that Republicans tried this with then-Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill (D-Mass.) a couple of decades back. It didn’t work then, and it isn’t likely to work now.

DeLay himself strikes me as a prototypical example of an inner-directed politician. He doesn’t take positions based on polls or wind direction and seems not to care a whit if his opponents don’t like him. In that sense he’s much like former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who during his decades here simply ignored the panting of his opponents and did the job as he saw it.

Moreover, self-interest trumps all. His colleagues know that DeLay is widely admired among conservative and Republican activists for precisely the same reasons the left despises him and that abandoning him in the face of ideological and partisan assault would not go well with the people they will need to maintain a Republican majority in the House.

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental-affairs firm (www.carmengrouplobbying.com