GEORGE W. Bush looks to be heading for anywhere but a “place in history” as a further blow to his administration is landed with the resignation as majority leader in the House of Representatives, albeit temporarily, of key ally and Capitol Hill presidential enforcer, Tom DeLay.
The tough-talking DeLay, known in Washington as “The Hammer”, has, to the surprise and satisfaction of his many political enemies, bent under the impact of conspiracy charges relating to alleged illegal campaign financing. DeLay says that he has only stepped down to leave himself free to fight to clear his name. He also says the inquiry, initiated by the Democrats, is purely political. However, it seems that DeLay may be the latest leading Republican and Bush ally to have some very difficult questions to answer. The lukewarm endorsement of DeLay by the White House suggests he may have been pressured to quit as majority leader because the administration wants to distance itself from scandal.
In any event, DeLay now looks like damaged political goods. His troubles mirror those of another leading Republican, Senate Majority leader Bill Frist who is being investigated for insider dealing. In addition, the president’s policy supremo Karl Rove is under investigation as the source of a leak identifying the CIA spy wife of the US diplomat who blew the whistle on the fiction that Iraq had been buying uranium from Africa.
Add all these allegations to the proven chaos of the White House’s response to Hurricane Katrina and fast-collapsing public faith in the president’s Iraq occupation policy and Bush looks to be in a sea of troubles. Even with his Congressional majorities he is having trouble pushing through his neoconservative reform agenda. Meanwhile, the budget deficit is ballooning out of control toward a massive $400 billion in 2006, driven by emergency post-hurricane spending and the huge cost of the Iraq entanglement. Yet the president is still sticking by his tax cutting policies.
All this looks bad for the mid-term elections next year when, on present showing, the Republicans are set to take a drubbing. Unless Bush can score some serious wins in the next 12 months, he could be doomed to limp through his last two years in office. The trouble could however come even earlier, as Republicans, sensing defeat at the polls, start to distance themselves from the administration. Worse, they could start turning on each other. The issue of Washington lobbyists and the now disproportionate effect their hundreds of millions of dollars have over what is supposed to be the political process of the world’s largest democracy is now a hot one. Many other Bush allies among the Republican political grandees could be snared in scandal and junior congressmen in the party could seek to secure their own political futures by turning on the party establishment.
What is so striking about this turn of events is how inexorably, the “straight-talking” neoconservative message of the Bush White House is being exposed as anything but straight and the “no-nonsense” policy on terror anything but sense.
