Loss of leader, taint of scandal is a double hit for Bush
WASHINGTON -- President Bush was never personally close to Tom DeLay, but he always knew that he needed him badly.
When DeLay was under siege over ethics complaints in April, Bush showed his support by squiring his fellow Texan around an airport tarmac before boarding Air Force One together, like two pals headed for a golf weekend.
Now, with the administration struggling to overcome complaints about its response to Hurricane Katrina and the declining support for the war in Iraq, Bush needs DeLay more than ever. But DeLay, waylaid by yesterday's indictment, won't be there.
Instead, there will be the taint of another ethics investigation in the Republican Party at the same time that Senate majority leader Bill Frist answers questions from the Securities and Exchange Commission about his sale of stock in a company that family members founded; as Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, faces grand jury scrutiny over whether he leaked the identity of a CIA officer; and as a Senate committee looks at the relationships between scandal-ridden lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a host of Republican leaders.
The combined loss of DeLay's leadership in the House, where he was the main enforcer of the Republican agenda, and the shift of political focus to another alleged ethics misstep, is a double blow to the president at a time when he cannot easily bounce back from it, political observers said yesterday.
''I think all that voters will hear is 'Republican scandal,' " said Daron Shaw, a University of Texas political scientist who worked on Bush's 2000 campaign.
DeLay's foibles could take an immediate toll on the Republican agenda, which during the Bush years has tended to originate in the House with DeLay-enforced party-line votes.
When DeLay is on top of his game, fresh pieces of conservative legislation get voted out of the House at a steady clip.
This week, for instance, the House has been preparing to carve out new exceptions to the Endangered Species Act, and to provide new tax incentives for the drilling of oil.
The cobbled-together leadership team that is replacing DeLay as House majority leader may yet succeed in keeping the legislative pipeline moving. If not, the leadership void could seriously impede Bush's efforts to eliminate the inheritance tax, change the Social Security system, expand federal aid to the energy industry, and ensure that Republican domestic policies are marbled into the Hurricane Katrina relief package.
For most of Bush's time in office, he could have made up for DeLay's absence by spending his own political capital. But these days, there's not much left. With approval ratings in the low 40s in most polls, Bush's standing with the public is not strong enough to carry through his agenda on his own, Shaw and other analysts reported yesterday.
Meanwhile, DeLay's ethics troubles could weaken the president's party even more by undercutting its political base.
To some conservatives, the Republican Congress is taking on characteristics of the Democratic Congress it replaced in 1994. It's too addicted to spending programs and tinged by the kind of corruption that comes with entrenched power.
Democrats, for their part, are pushing the idea that Republicans are out of control. Representative Charles Rangel, Democrat of New York, called DeLay's indictment the ''tip of the iceberg."
''People should be taking another look at the Republican Party," Rangel added.
But unlike the Republicans when they used ethics issues to overturn the majority, the current Democrats do not yet have an alternative to offer, in the mold of the ''Contract With America" that House Republicans embraced for the 1994 campaign.
Even Rangel has his doubts about whether the disgust with DeLay can propel the Democrats to victory in 2006 elections.
''I'm not certain," Rangel said, ''that voters are sophisticated enough to look at this as Republican wrongdoing, rather than as a corrupt Congress."
Susan Milligan of the Globe staff contributed to this report. 