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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What a great answer. Campbell knew, as I did, that it is almost impossible to beat an entrenched officeholder in a congressional race. “You don’t beat an incumbent,” he told me. “He falls of his own weight.” But in a less than obvious way, Campbell did beat DeLay. He beat him just by getting in the race, by putting a national spotlight on DeLay’s troubles at home. He beat him by making sure that DeLay’s character would be laid before the voters, by proving that all of DeLay’s power and money couldn’t keep an honest man from running, and by being the standard-bearer for thousands of good, solid Republicans who didn’t want to be represented by Tom DeLay anymore. He beat him by being a person of unimpeachable integrity against whom Tom DeLay could be measured and found wanting. Reporters from around the country, aware of a Houston Chronicle poll showing that DeLay had a 60 percent unfavorable rating against only 28 percent favorable, had swarmed into Sugar Land, DeLay’s hometown. Never mind that the poll was not limited to GOP primary voters: The numbers sounded sufficiently grim that the reporters, no fans of DeLay, could suggest that he was in trouble.

In fact, Campbell never had a chance. DeLay had a 22-year head start in fund-raising, in identifying regular Republican primary voters, in compiling lists of supporters he could reach by mail, both snail and electronic. There were 257,140 registered voters in Fort Bend County—many of whom, no doubt, were distressed that their congressman was ethically challenged. But how could Campbell, on a shoestring budget, identify them, reach them, and motivate them to go to the polls? And if the task was daunting in Fort Bend, where Campbell had some name ID and organization, it was hopeless in the other three counties in the district. He was David without a slingshot.

On election night the end came quickly, though not unexpectedly. DeLay won the early vote, 8,310 to Campbell’s 3,064, and finished with 62 percent of the overall vote to Campbell’s 30 percent in a four-way race. The firestorm of anger at DeLay that had been Campbell’s only hope failed to materialize; the Harris County portion of the district had produced a three-to-one margin for DeLay despite the Chronicle’s endorsement of Campbell. Still, one feature of the vote was significant: Campbell, with a little help from the two other challengers, had held DeLay to 55 percent in Fort Bend. In the general election, with Democrats voting, DeLay was in jeopardy of losing his home county and the election. I had been asked to talk about the returns on Fox News the next morning, and I would have mentioned the Fort Bend results, but a predawn phone call from a producer informed me that they had moved on. “DeLay won,” she explained. “It’s not news.”

IF ONE OF DELAY’S colleagues in the Texas House had been told in 1983 that on the floor sat a future majority leader of the U.S. House, DeLay would not have been among the first hundred choices. His well-remembered nickname (Hot Tub Tom) and that of the residence he shared with other lawmakers (Macho Manor) attested to his priorities. Nothing in his behavior suggested that he had a genius for politics, as DeLay has been the first to admit.

“When I was elected to Congress, I was a self-centered jerk,” DeLay told Time in the April 3 interview in which he revealed his intention to give up his seat. He went on to relate the tale of his religious conversion, of how a Republican colleague went door-to-door to visit each freshman, invite him to Bible study, and show a James Dobson video called Where’s Daddy? “And every bad thing he was talking about was me,” DeLay said. “That’s when I came back to Christ.” Perhaps his newfound seriousness of purpose kindled his ambition as well, because following his election in 1984, DeLay was elected the freshman representative on the panel of House insiders who handle committee assignments. His job was to make sure that his fellow freshmen got the slots they coveted; only after theirs had been secured did he get to pick from the dregs that remained. But his sacrifice paid off: Two years later, when committee assignments were handed out again, he was first in line for a plum vacancy on the House Appropriations Committee.

He had acquired a taste for power and position, and his timing was perfect. He had arrived in Congress at the midpoint of the Reagan presidency, at precisely the moment when the Main Street Republicans, who had been bred in the Taft and Eisenhower years, were retiring, to be replaced by suburbanites like DeLay, to whom government was not a tool but a nuisance. (An exterminator by trade, he hated the burdens imposed by federal regulations.) The newcomers were impatient with the traditionalist Republican leadership in the House, which they saw as doing little to loosen the Democrats’ grip on power. “We have a small faction, and they are a minority, who believe they are there to govern,” he explained to the Chronicle several years later. “Then there is the majority of us who believe that … we are there to be an opposition to the Democratic philosophy, and the only way to do that is through confrontation.”

His course was set. When the time came for the Republicans to take over, he intended to be part of the leadership. And so he sought and won whatever position was attainable: president of the Republican Study Committee, a group of conservatives who worried that President George H. W. Bush was too moderate, followed by secretary of the House Republican Conference, making him the fifth-ranking Republican in the House. He announced his candidacy for minority whip in late 1993, but when the Republicans took control of the House in the 1994 midterm elections, the prize then became majority whip, the right position at the right time to undo the effects of forty unbroken years of Democratic rule. To win his post, DeLay had to defeat Pennsylvanian Bob Walker, the choice of the new Speaker, Newt Gingrich, which he did by forming his own political action committee, Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC), and raising $2 million, which he doled out to dozens of GOP House candidates. He went into their districts to campaign for them, visiting 25 states. Walker made one $1,000 contribution. Money, DeLay learned—if he had ever had any doubt—made all the difference. “We keep a very close eye on the money,” DeLay told me back in 1996, when I went to Washington to write about the Republican revolution. DeLay’s job as whip was to get the votes to pass the Republican agenda and to get money from lobbyists and their corporate clients to keep his party in the majority, and he was very open about how he intended to dispose of those who weren’t willing to go along. “We don’t like to deal with people who are trying to kill the revolution,” he had told the Washington Post a year earlier. “We know who they are. The word is out.”

His record was still clean at that point—no ethics problems, no criminal prosecutions—but he had begun to draw attention with his aggressive attitude toward the lobbyists of K Street. He had forged an alliance with Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, whose goal of shrinking the size of government until you could “drown it in a bathtub” DeLay shared. The two conceived the now-notorious K Street Project, which was designed to pressure lobbying firms and trade associations to fire their Democratic lobbyists and replace them with Republicans, who would direct their clients’ contributions toward the GOP. (“There can be no lasting revolution in policy without a revolution in fund-raising,” DeLay told me during our interview.) To this day the K Street Project’s Web site tracks lobbyists’ comings and goings with names highlighted in red and blue to represent their partisan affiliations.

But the K Street Project was not just about Republicans; it was also about Tom DeLay, who ended up controlling a sizable chunk of the contributions. A recent news report indicated that he donated $3.5 million to GOP congressional candidates over a ten-year period. These contributions enhanced DeLay’s power in two ways: They bought loyalty, of course, but they also bought fear, the realization that the hand that giveth can also taketh away. When DeLay asked for a vote in a tight situation, the member knew that more than public policy might be riding on the answer.

DeLay didn’t invent the idea of a high-pressure campaign to align the lobby with the majority party. That had been the brainchild of Democratic congressman Tony Coelho, of California, who had taken charge of his party’s fund-raising efforts in the early eighties and recognized that the explosion of corporate political action committees, which preferred supporting free-market Republican candidates, posed a serious threat to the long-standing Democratic control of the House. Without PAC money, Democratic candidates would not remain competitive in elections, which were becoming increasingly expensive. So he brought powerful Democratic congressmen with the ability to dispense—or withhold—favors to meetings with the PACs, pointed out that the Democrats held a solid majority in the House and were likely to continue to do so, asked for their contributions to Democratic candidates, and left it to the PACs to deduce the thinly veiled but unspoken threat: Access to decision makers depended on financial support. On the strength of his fund-raising skills, Coelho rose to be whip and had his sights set on majority leader, but in 1989, amid questions about his personal finances, he resigned suddenly to take a job on Wall Street. (There is a cautionary tale here about how a leader’s hardball fund-raising tactics can succeed so well that he makes himself a target of the opposition. Evidently DeLay did not see the parallel.)

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