Political Pendulums - DeLay was a unifying force for the GOP. What his indictment says about fissures in the party — and its prospects in 2006.

Political Pendulums

By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek

Publicly Republicans are putting on a happy face, but they’ve moved on. They’re going to take care of themselves. Tom DeLay is yesterday. Forced to step down as House majority leader, he’s a symbol now, a symbol of the same cronyism and corruption that unseated the Democrats in ’94. The only difference is it took the Republicans a single decade to achieve the level of arrogance that it took four decades of Democratic rule to reach.

On a practical level, the DeLay indictment is far more damaging for the Republicans than anything else that’s happened recently. Politics is arithmetic, and DeLay was a unifying force. Within an hour after the indictment was handed down, conservatives muscled aside California Republican David Dreier, a nonthreatening moderate who had agreed to sit in for DeLay. Drier supports stem-cell research and opposes a gay marriage ban. The mini coup exposed fissures in the Republican Party that are only going to get worse.

Faced with the revolt, Speaker Hastert installed Missouri Republican Roy Blunt, the current GOP whip and a blander but equally driven version of DeLay. “He may not be a hammer, but he’s at least a mallet,” says Marshall Wittmann, who formerly advised John McCain and is now with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Wittmann was on the Republican side in ’94 when the GOP captured 54 seats to catapult the party into the majority for the first time in 40 years. “I feel like I’m reliving those glory days,” he says, recalling the House banking scandal and the ouster of Speaker Jim Wright, events that set the stage for the climactic ’94 election. With DeLay’s indictment, the investigation of Senate Republican leader Bill Frist over a stock sale and the White House reeling from charges of cronyism, Wittmann says, “It smells like ’94 did for the Democrats.”

The wave of anger that tossed Democrats out of office a decade ago was not apparent until much closer to the election. Wittmann suggests half-jokingly that the Democrats ought to hire former speaker Newt Gingrich as a consultant. He more than anybody was responsible for putting the GOP on a war footing to take down the majority party and identify the issues voters could rally round. The Contract with America that unified Republicans was not unveiled until late September, six weeks before the election. Gingrich understood it wasn’t enough to simply oppose Democratic ideas. A quirky Texan by the name of Ross Perot had made the deficit a sexy political issue in ’92, and Gingrich went after the Perot vote, galvanizing independents for the Republican revolution with a balanced-budget amendment.

Now Gingrich is running for president as a moderate. That’s how far the pendulum has swung. He hasn’t declared yet, of course, but he’s busy creating himself for the opening that’s there for a reform candidate. He proved he has the skills for a revolutionary, but he had a tin ear when it came to governance. After toppling the Democrats as greedy insiders, the first thing Gingrich did after masterminding the Republican takeover was sign a multimillion-dollar book deal. Though he led them to the promised land, Republicans said privately had Gingrich been Moses, he would have penned something like, “How to Be an Effective Biblical Leader.” House Republicans chafed under Gingrich’s massive ego and grandiose style, eventually forcing him to step down as speaker.

DeLay was among those who plotted the coup that led to Gingrich’s resignation. The two men were never allies, and Gingrich must feel a measure of satisfaction at DeLay’s apparent downfall. Even though Gingrich is responsible as much as anyone for the nasty partisanship that characterizes politics at present, he has a different persona today. He’s magnanimous and bipartisan, a refreshing contrast to his former self and probably an accurate reading of where the country will be in ’08. We are a political lifetime away from the tactical opportunities that launched the Gingrich revolution in ’94, but the GOP’s woes will boost candidate recruitment and money for the Democrats. Within two hours of the announcement of the DeLay indictment, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a fund-raising letter.

It’s impossible to predict whether Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle will be able to convict DeLay on the charges of conspiracy to evade state campaign finance laws. DeLay says he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day operations of TRMPAC (Texans for a Republican Majority), and Earle needs a piece of evidence, an e-mail or a witness, that ties illegal contributions to DeLay. “If this thing goes beyond January 1, he’s toast,” says a Republican lobbyist. “Nobody will care if he wins or loses a trial in August.” As if having leaders of the House and Senate under investigation weren’t enough, Republican fears that a “third shoe” could fall are looking more likely. The disclosure that Lewis Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, was a source for jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller could yet lead to his indictment in the Plame CIA leak investigation. “Then every single body controlled by Republicans would have fallen to corruption,” says the GOP lobbyist, “and the Democrats would have a very strong argument.”