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A HAMMER BLOW
Sep 29th 2005  

The indictment of Tom DeLay may not be the start of a conservative
crack-up; but it could mark a realignment 

 TOM DELAY is no stranger to excitement. He claims nearly to have been
killed during a bout of revolutionary violence in Venezuela, where he
lived in his teens. He was asked to leave the first university he
attended, and he made a living exterminating bugs before he entered
politics. But "the Hammer" has not been able to swat away the swarm of
investigators buzzing around him. 

On September 28th, Mr DeLay was indicted by a grand jury in Texas for
alleged breaches of campaign-finance law, and forced to resign, at
least temporarily, his position as Republican majority leader in the
House of Representatives. There was much whooping among Democrats, for
whom Mr DeLay was a hate figure even before he played a crucial part in
the impeachment of Bill Clinton. "I hope his cell is full of
cockroaches," was one of the gentler postings on one leftish blogsite. 

Washington, DC, is now engulfed in two debates. The first revolves
around how bad a mess Mr DeLay is in; the second is about the extent of
the fissures within the conservative movement that currently dominates
American politics.

The case against Mr DeLay is less easy to understand than the
perjury-about-fellatio charge against Mr Clinton. Along with two
political associates, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, he is accused of
conspiracy to violate the election code in his home state of Texas. Mr
DeLay has a political action committee called Texans for a Republican
Majority (TRMPAC). Prosecutors allege that it accepted $155,000 from
various companies, and then wrote a cheque for $190,000 to an arm of
the Republican National Committee, with instructions to distribute
chunks of the stash to individual candidates in Texas. In effect, the
indictment argues, TRMPAC enabled the party to get around the ban on
corporate donations to individual candidates. 

If convicted, Mr DeLay faces up to two years in jail and a fine of up
to $10,000. But that is far from certain. He has denounced the charges
as "one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history",
adding that the district attorney behind the case, Ronnie Earle, was
"an unabashed partisan zealot with a well-documented history of
launching baseless investigations and indictments against his political
enemies". 

Mr Earle is a liberal Democrat who, in 1993, indicted Kay Bailey
Hutchison, now the state's senior Republican senator, on what "The
Almanac of American Politics" called "flimsy charges he was forced to
drop the first day the case came to court". Against that, Mr Earle has
prosecuted four times as many Democrats as Republicans. 

Mr DeLay said that his defence "will not be technical or legalistic; it
will be categorical and absolute. I am innocent. Mr Earle and his staff
know it. And I will prove it." He then promised that Republicans would
not be deflected from their "bold and aggressive agenda" to do
something about petrol prices, state pensions, illegal immigration and
fiscal responsibility--issues he vowed would all be tackled in the next
few weeks. 

That may be a bit optimistic. For one thing, the Republicans will miss
Mr DeLay's vote-whipping skills. He has a startling record of
assembling hair-thin majorities for ticklish pieces of legislation,
such as on Medicare prescription-drug benefit in 2003. In other words,
he is adept at offering the necessary inducements to just enough
waverers, but no more. 

His case will probably not come to trial for several months, and in the
meantime he remains a member of the House of Representatives. His
duties as majority leader are to be assumed, for now, by Roy Blunt of
Missouri, the House Republican whip, with assistance from David Dreier,
a representative from California, and Eric Cantor of Virginia. None is
likely to be as forceful as the Hammer.

 Mr DeLay's indictment is not the only ethical problem hampering the
Republicans. Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, is being
investigated about a stock sale he insists involved no inside
information. Karl Rove, Mr Bush's chief strategist, is fighting
accusations that he leaked the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA
agent. And Mr DeLay's problems are not limited to Texas: a lobbyist
chum of his, Jack Abramoff, has been accused of a variety of dodgy
doings involving Indian casinos and influence-peddling. 

This accumulation of sleaze has made it harder for the Republicans to
push through their agenda, reckons Thomas Mann of the Brookings
Institution, a liberal think tank. Other pundits are not so sure.
Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative
think tank, says Mr DeLay's indictment will "not have a huge impact" on
the Republican legislative programme, "mostly because it was in tatters
before".

That might sound odd. After all, only last November conservatives were
preening themselves like peacocks, having won their seventh
presidential election in ten contests. Mr Bush ran for his second term
on a conservative platform of tax cuts, family values and American
power. Marshalled by Mr Rove, millions of activists--anti-tax people,
gun people, social conservatives, neo-conservatives and many
more--comprehensively outfought their liberal equivalents. Mr Bush won
more votes than any candidate in history.

Today the conservative movement is in turmoil. Different types of
conservatives are at each other's throats. Everybody is hurling
opprobrium at the president. David Brooks, a conservative columnist on
the NEW YORK TIMES recently declared that he sometimes wonders whether
Bush is a Manchurian candidate--sent to discredit conservatism. 

The loudest howls are coming from small-government conservatives who
are furious with Mr Bush's loose spending (see article[1]). But
business conservatives are furious about his love-affair with the
religious right and traditional conservatives are furious about his
commitment of blood and treasure to the Iraq war. 

These rows are particularly dangerous because they reflect
long-standing tensions within the conservative movement. 

SMALL-GOVERNMENT CONSERVATIVES V BIG-GOVERNMENT CONSERVATIVES.
Mr Bush has embraced all sorts of big-government programmes (from
super-charging the Department of Education to creating the huge new
Medicare drug entitlement) while trying to keep small-government
conservatives on side with tax cuts. But this was a formula for fiscal
disaster. It also failed to placate purists who believe that the
federal government has no business running schools or pushing pills to
pensioners.

CONSERVATIVES OF FAITH V CONSERVATIVES OF DOUBT. Doubters don't
think that the federal government should interfere in people's private
lives. They don't want Washington, DC, meddling in states' rights to
legalise euthanasia or medical marijuana. Conservatives of faith
believe that the federal government should encourage civic virtue.
Under Mr Bush they have had the upper hand. The Justice Department has
been aggressive in imposing its views on the states. The poster child
of the conservative movement on Capitol Hill at the moment is Senator
Rick Santorum, a staunch advocate of family values.

INSURGENT CONSERVATIVES V ESTABLISHMENT CONSERVATIVES. The
conservative movement, rooted in the South and west, has been deeply
hostile to Washington, DC. But electoral success has created a
Washington-based Republican establishment, which spends its time doling
out goodies to its buddies and expanding federal power. Mr Bush has
managed this relationship by presenting himself as an anti-Washington
Washingtonian: the son of a president who prefers to spend his time in
Texas. The insurgent wing seems increasingly unconvinced.

BUSINESS CONSERVATIVES V RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVES. The latter are
waiting keenly to see whom Mr Bush appoints next to the Supreme Court.
Business conservatives are worried that religious people have already
got too much. Mr Bush's stance on stem-cell research will cost America
its competitive edge in biotechnology. Add to this their concerns about
Mr Bush's reckless fiscal policy and you have the making of a business
revolt. Robert Novak, a conservative pundit, recently described a
cacophony of Bush-bashing at a plutocratic get-together in Aspen.

NEO-CONSERVATIVES V TRADITIONAL CONSERVATIVES. The former have
an expansive vision of America's role in the world--a vision that has
come to include not just nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq but
also the transformation of the Middle East. But traditionalists balk at
the hubris of this vision. How can conservatives who believe that
government power is fallible rally to the idea of transforming an
entire region?

This sort of criticism was once limited to mavericks such as Pat
Buchanan. But it is now mainstream. William Buckley, one of the
movement's founders, has declared that the Iraq war was probably a
mistake. Before the election, one senior White House figure confided
that his biggest worry was not the anti-war left (which always sings
the same song) but the possibility that the conservative intellectual
elite would turn against the war. The RIVE DROITE seems to be turning.

How bad is this? All successful political parties contain tensions.
Look at Britain's Labour Party--a party of pacifist trade unionists led
by a hawkish fan of capitalism. The bigger a political party gets, the
bigger the tensions. Politics is the art of managing these
tensions--something Mr Bush's team did brilliantly until this year.

The loss of touch began before Hurricane Katrina. Bungling in Iraq
provoked a drumbeat of discontent, with neo-conservatives calling for
more troops and traditional conservatives calling for an exit strategy.
And the Valerie Plame affair demoralised the White House. It not only
threatened Mr Rove's political career; it also demonstrated how far Mr
Bush's pursuit of the war had alienated much of the Washington
establishment (including the CIA and the State Department).

Katrina has been a disaster. Mr Bush's slow response to the hurricane
(it did not help that Mr Rove was in hospital) spoiled his claim to be
a can-do president and it unleashed a previously quiescent press.

 The Bush machine's ruthless media management infuriates journalists,
but while he was on top they played the game on his terms. Now they are
out for revenge. Earlier this year, NEWSWEEK fawned about the "hands-on
and detail oriented" president who wants to hear the bad news first.
After Katrina it presented a picture of a man who surrounds himself
with toadies who are too terrified to warn him of brewing disaster. Mr
Bush cannot even rely on the conservative press to leap to his defence;
they are too busy berating him for spending like a Democrat.

SURVIVING WATERGATE AND BILL CLINTON
Predictions of the demise of American conservatism are almost as old as
the movement. It survived both Watergate and Bill Clinton. Emmett
Tyrell, the editor of the AMERICAN SPECTATOR, published "The
Conservative Crack-up" in 1992. David Frum published "Dead Right" on
the eve of the Republican takeover of Congress. So much of the right's
power lies outside the administration and Congress--in its domination
of the intellectual agenda for instance--that it is seldom down for
long.

The Democrats show few signs that they have the wind in their sails.
Their handling of John Roberts's nomination to the Supreme Court has
been dismal. Neither Harry Reid, the minority leader in the Senate, nor
Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the House, are likely to set the
world on fire. Moveon.org[2] types want to drag the party to the left;
Clintonistas want to pull it to the centre. America has two
dysfunctional parties.

But Mr Bush's recent problems do raise one important possibility: that
of a realignment on the right. The fact that the Bush machine is
running out of steam makes it much less likely that he will be able to
determine his successor. This creates opportunities for very different
sorts of conservatives who are waiting in the wings.

 One possibility is Rudy Giuliani, who combines managerial toughness
with social liberalism. But an even more likely one is John McCain. Up
until now Mr McCain has been popular in the country at large (he wins
all head-to-head competitions with Hillary Clinton) but unpopular with
the conservative movement. But the right is beginning to warm to him.
He has spent his career campaigning against the sort of pork-barrel
spending that conservatives are now railing against. And he is soundly
conservative on both foreign and fiscal policy. A conservative crack-up
may be going too far; but a conservative realignment is definitely in
the works. 

-----
[1] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=4466010
[2] http://www.moveon.org/

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