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Thursday 16 October 2008

Tom DeLay bites back

A thoughtful man at the eye of the storm

Plain speaking from the former US Republican majority leader

Though this rhetoric might seem loud to a UK audience, it is barely audible for anyone who has heard DeLay in his heyday, or read his bullish new book. No Retreat, No Surrender: One American’s Fight has forewords by blow-hard US radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. They set the pace for a relentlessly high-pitched example of the current US debate on the war and the Congress, reaching a kind of apogee in DeLay’s attack on ‘liberals’ for being ‘like Hitler’. It is not hard to see how a man’s genuine thoughtfulness can get lost here.

But DeLay, 60, is a thoughtful man, his small frame containing a classic example of an American ‘smallest-state-possible’ conservative. His political philosophy centres on calls for 10 per cent taxation, lifting of campaign-finance restrictions and assertions that ‘government can’t solve problems — it is the problem’. Perhaps his slight air of defeatedness comes down to the simple, undeniable fact that such are not the mantras of our time. With George W. Bush not even a conservative by DeLay’s definition, it isn’t hard to see why the former whip might feel beleaguered.

If DeLay’s fiscal policy is hardly reflective of the moment, however, his personal political experience sadly is. It doesn’t take long to see the scars of DeLay’s time in office — an era which at DeLay’s height bridged the messy ten-year period spanning the twin troughs of Monica Lewinsky and the Iraq recriminations.

Despite ruling Congress during the trials of William Jefferson Clinton, DeLay remains unrepentant on the pursuit of the former President. ‘The truth is that Bill Clinton was slimy,’ he says in No Retreat. Though he won’t concede the point easily, I suggest to DeLay that what he has gone through might have been inevitable blow-back for what the Republicans had put a Democratic president through.

He admits: ‘One thing that we taught the Clintonistas is that you don’t take it any more, you fight back — you fight back to the extent that they have organisations that do it for them.’

But don’t the charges brought against him follow directly from that particularly personalised tone which Republicans set during the Clinton years?

‘I was the original target, I guess you would say. [But] it is a different level now. It used to be that the politics of personal destruction was the way you described it. Now it is the criminalisation. It has gone to a different level. It is no longer just good enough to ruin your reputation. They want to bankrupt you and ruin your family and everything else — put you in jail.’

More articles from: Douglas Murray | this section

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