Following on a theme addressed in this earlier post from last fall, this timely OpinionJournal op-ed points out that the real problem to the Republican Party represented by Tom DeLay is not his dubious ethics, but that he is devoid of ideas other than self-preservation:
The real danger for Republicans now isn’t ethics; it is that, like those 1994 Democrats, they seem to have grown more comfortable presiding over the government than changing it. No one typified this more than Mr. DeLay, who has always been more fiercely partisan than he is conservative. . .
. . . [T]he GOP Congress has become mostly about its money and muscle–and the incumbency it helps to sustain. The policy and intellectual fervor, such as it was, has all but vanished. Nothing typified that more than Mr. DeLay’s comments on September 13, when he declared post-Katrina that there was nothing left in the federal budget to cut. They had already trimmed all the fat. . .
Read the entire piece. As OpinionJournal points out, if voters come to the conclusion that the GOP’s primary ambition is simply to remain in power, then “no amount of money or muscle will save Republicans at the polls.”
