Without DeLay

The political landscape changes in an instant, and when it does, careers can come to an end. So it happened with tom delay, whose lack of self-restraint and self-awareness made him the architect of his own undoing.

by Paul Burka

May 2006

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IT WAS EARLY IN January when Eric Thode got the phone call from a member of Tom DeLay’s staff. Thode was a little surprised to hear from DeLay. As the chairman of the Fort Bend County Republican party, Thode was responsible for running the March 7 primary election, but that was two months away, and he expected DeLay to win easily against three opponents. Surely DeLay wasn’t concerned about it. So what could the eleven-term congressman from Sugar Land, the majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, want to know?  

As Thode remembers the conversation, the staffer said DeLay was “contemplating his possibilities.” What if he were to win the primary with a less-than-solid showing? What if Ronnie Earle, the Travis County district attorney who had secured two felony indictments against DeLay involving the misuse of corporate funds to help Republican state legislative candidates in the 2002 election cycle, was able to win a conviction before the 2006 election? What if something happened in the federal corruption investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whom DeLay had once described as one of his closest friends? If any of these circumstances came to pass, the Democrats could win the seat. His seat.

Where was this leading? The answer wasn’t long in revealing itself. At what date, asked the staffer, could DeLay withdraw as a candidate? Was there a way for the GOP to replace him on the ballot after the primary? Thode explained the complicated procedure that allows the Republican county chairmen from the four counties in DeLay’s district (Fort Bend, Harris, Brazoria, and Galveston) to pick a replacement for a seat that becomes vacant due to death, resignation, or ineligibility. When he hung up, Thode knew what no one else in America would know for three months: The end of Tom DeLay’s political career was at hand.

DELAY UNDERSTOOD ALMOST everything about power in Washington except the insidious power of scandal. He had plenty of precedents to learn from; in his career, he had seen two Speakers brought down by ethics violations, Democrat Jim Wright, of Texas, and Republican Newt Gingrich, of Georgia, as well as his own handpicked successor to Gingrich, Bob Livingston, of Louisiana, who confessed to an extramarital affair and quit the House. Three lessons were to be drawn from the dethroning of Wright and Gingrich. The most obvious was that they were intense partisans whose political style—Wright’s stretching of parliamentary rules to run roughshod over the opposition, Gingrich’s (and the entire Republican leadership’s, including DeLay’s) loathing of Bill Clinton—made the minority party hate them and look for ways to bring them down. The second lesson was that if you’re going to make yourself a target, you’d better not give the opposition a reason to shoot—and in today’s Washington, that reason is usually ethical transgressions. The third was that scandal, once contracted, is a virus with no known cure. The only safe course is to stay within the rules, but DeLay lived on the edge. He painted the target on his own back.

With the possible exception of John McCain, no member of Congress had been so much in the news over the past three years. The difference, of course, was that the media’s treatment of the senior U.S. senator from Arizona (and presidential aspirant) had been almost universally favorable, while the opposite was true of the 59-year-old DeLay. Nicknamed the Hammer for his mastery of the dark arts of persuasion, the man who had arguably been the most powerful figure in Congress for a decade had taken so many hits from Democrats and the media, and faced so many perils for so long, that what’s amazing is not that he fell but that he survived as long as he did. Indeed, at the end, every political reporter in Washington seemed to be on the DeLay obituary beat. Under attack in his district, under indictment in Austin for money laundering of campaign funds by a political action committee he created, under scrutiny in Washington in connection with the Abramoff scandal, under an ethical cloud that earned him repeated admonishments from peers charged with enforcing the rules that he flouted, and unseated (voluntarily, though with much prodding) as a high-ranking member of the House leadership, DeLay nevertheless retained influence, as he demonstrated when he said in February that Congress would overturn the Dubai ports deal, ruining the White House’s efforts to salvage it.

This is the point in the eulogy where we say of the dearly departed scoundrel, “No one really knew him.” And outside the Beltway, it’s true. A feeding frenzy engulfed DeLay with such intensity that the public came to regard him as a cartoon character: a one-dimensional caricature of the corrupt, devil-may-care pol. They saw him as a crook. A cheat. A right-wing fanatic whose motivation never changed. Like Elmer Fudd, he wanted only to kill the wascally wabbit (who pwesumably was a Democrat). An entire industry sprang up—manned not just by leftist operatives but also bloggers, investigative reporters, and watchdog groups—for the purpose of shining a light on his and his associates’ every move. The one-dimensional DeLay so completely obscured the 3-D version that few could see, through the facade, one of the ablest politicians of our time and an essential benefactor to his region and his state.

But DeLay’s fall is not a tragedy, for he was not a victim of fate. He has no one to blame but himself. The fatal wounds were entirely self-inflicted. Even as he faced the likelihood of a trial in Austin that could send him to prison and the strongest electoral challenge of his life in November from former Democratic congressman Nick Lampson, he could not restrain himself from reinforcing his own caricature: He assailed Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and retired justice Sandra Day O’Connor for airing their concerns about the independence of the judiciary in the face of attacks by DeLay and other politicians, and he lashed out at society for treating Christianity “like some second-rate superstition.” The cartoon was building toward its climax—would he be vindicated? would he be ruined?—when three words abruptly appeared on-screen: “That’s all, folks.”

THREE DAYS BEFORE the Republican primary, I drove into Fort Bend County to survey the political landscape. I expected to find evidence that DeLay was fighting for his political life. But as I drove around, there was no sign that he was running for reelection—literally. Dozens of candidates for local offices had posted their campaign placards at major intersections, but as I navigated through the county on U.S. 90A, and then onto Texas Highway 6, DeLay’s name was nowhere to be found. Nor did I come across a billboard displaying his likeness. No rallies were scheduled. No public appearances. I turned into the sprawling Sugar Creek subdivision and headed down a major artery. Aha! A DeLay yard sign. And another. After half an hour of driving, my count reached 21. It occurred to me that perhaps DeLay did not want to remind the people of his home county that he was on the ballot, lest they be reminded to vote against him.

In retrospect, the invisibility of DeLay—he even left town on primary day to cast votes in the House and hobnob with lobbyists at a Washington fundraiser—reflected the attitude of a dispirited candidate who was only going through the motions of his last campaign and didn’t have enough respect for his constituents to quit in time to let them, instead of some backroom politicians, pick his successor. Michael Stanley, who was the campaign chairman for Tom Campbell, the most serious of the three challengers for the Republican nomination—and who is also a law partner of Chris Bell, the Democratic nominee for governor, who, as a lame-duck congressman in 2004, successfully pursued ethics complaints against DeLay—likewise found DeLay’s absence inexplicable. “The incumbent is hiding from the press,” Stanley told me as I headed for a meeting with Campbell. “He would not appear at any forum where he did not control the venue entirely—two-minute speeches and no Q&A allowed. The League of Women Voters ended up having to cancel their debate.” I wasn’t having much luck finding DeLay either. I had tried repeatedly to get an audience with him, sending e-mails to his lawyer, visiting his Capitol Hill office, going to his District 22 office in Stafford only to find the door locked, and pleading with his press assistant. Not a chance. DeLay wasn’t talking to reporters, period, not even to one from the Weekly Standard, a conservative journal.

Campbell was. I caught up with him at a restaurant after he had spent a morning block walking in a new subdivision. Thode had told me that Campbell was a credible candidate but didn’t have good Republican credentials: He wasn’t a regular primary voter, for one thing. When I asked Campbell about this, he bristled. “I was general counsel for NOAA”—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—“under George Herbert Walker Bush,” he said. “The Exxon Valdez oil spill happened on my watch. I brought the CEO of Exxon and the governor of Alaska together and facilitated a settlement. I’ve been involved with the Republican party since I was nineteen. I debated on college campuses as a surrogate speaker for Nixon in 1972. I was national rapid response director for the 1988 Bush campaign.”

Why had he been willing to give up a successful law practice to take on DeLay? “It started in the voting booth last time around,” he said. “I looked at the ballot and I didn’t like my choices.” He threw in a few well-chosen phrases, as even nascent politicians will: “Win-at-any-cost, slash-and-burn politics”; “When you cut corners to achieve victories, victories fall apart”; “He has bartered our party’s principles on K Street [the generic name for the lobby in Washington] for campaign contributions.” Then he stopped for a moment. “I did it because somebody had to,” he said.

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