DeLay'd Reaction

I have said both here and over at Running Scared that I thought the Terri Schiavlo weekend media show was going to end up hurting the Republicans. Over at The Stakeholder jesselee thinks the real looser may be Tom DeLay.

DeLay took front and center on this to revive his image. But it has also had a related effect: it has put him in the national spotlight and raised the public's awareness exponentially. Some believe it has benefited him, although polling on the issue generally might give reason to be skeptical. But more importantly perhaps, for all of the criticism leveled at DeLay's ethics (and the rest of the GOP's complicity) by watchdog groups and Democrats, the single biggest obstacle both last cycle and recently was simply that nobody knew who he was. To us political junkies, it is difficult to fathom perhaps, but a sizable majority of Americans had no idea who the man who controlled Congress was.

So much for that.

While DeLay has always been a grenade thrower, it was also always his intention (or at least since Clinton's impeachment) to avoid Newt Gingrich's fate by keeping himself just out of the limelight. Many will recall his conspicuous absence from the GOP Convention, for example. And it's worked.
[.....]
He may now think that he has given himself a good head start in the world of the household names, but his ethics problems are far from over, and every time his ethics get in the news they will have a whole new audience.

To complicate issues for DeLay, David Brooks rips into the ethics of some DeLay's associates. DeLay is a major Republican power broker and what is bad for Tom DeLay is bad for the Republicans. Apparently that political hack John McCain realizes this because jesselee also reports that McCain Protects DeLay.