New Statesman: America: strident, crass and sanctimonious, the scandal-ridden Tom DeLay, Republican

A cardinal rule of US politics is that if you are a president who wins re-election, your second term will be dogged by scandal: apparatchiks and advisers, if not the man himself, become drunk and careless with power. Sherman Adams, who served as Dwight Eisenhower's chief of staff, improperly accepted gifts. After Watergate, Nixon became the first president to resign. For Ronald Reagan, it was Iran-Contra; Bill Clinton disastrously invited Monica Lewinsky into his office.

And Bush? History, I suspect, will look back on this spring as the time when personal corruption began to taint George W Bush's White House. It involves the most senior House Republican, Tom DeLay--a man I have always referred to here, quite accurately, as a former insect exterminator. I prefer that epithet rather than his nickname in Washington, "The Hammer"--which, I suppose, also conveys the ruthless modus operandi he has employed in his career as a Republican power merchant for more than two decades.

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You know something is up when the White House frantically begins to distance itself from somebody: DeLay and Bush came up through Texas oil and politics, and have known each other for a quarter of a century. I have heard Bush greet him as "Tommy!"--rather like the backslapping way he used to greet Ken Lay, the former Enron boss, now under indictment on fraud charges, as "our Kenny boy!". Now, Bush's chief spokesman concedes that DeLay is a friend of Bush, but adds that "there are different levels of friendship".

Quite. The point is that if it's shady, DeLay will be there: Enron, Westar, gambling casinos, junkets to places such as North Korea, Moscow and Scotland, paying hundreds of thousands in "salaries" to his wife and daughter, and so on. He has been censured by the House ethics committee three times. He has had dealings with every murky right-wing group on the planet. You name it, and our Tommy is up to his neck in it--always maintaining the pious cloak of a leader of the "Christian" right.

But now the knives are sliding into DeLay thick and fast, not just from Democrats, but from senior Republicans, too. I have pointed out before that when people are dumped by the Bush administration, it is not because of what they have done; it is because of what they are seen to have done. Few Republicans can have ever been deceived by DeLay's smarmy ways, but now the dirt on him has come out--and it is simply too bad to be swept under the carpet. Therefore, DeLay will have to go.

The turning point, however, came not so much with the exposure of financial improprieties, but with his political excursion into the Terri Schiavo case. Like most of the Republican leadership, including Bush himself, DeLay seized on it as an issue to ignite bedrock support. He told the Family Research Council--one of the myriad Republican front organisations, posing as a wholesome, "Christian" group--that Schiavo was "lucid", which was a blatant falsehood.

But polls then showed that Americans were not as sympathetic as he and colleagues had expected, and other senior Republicans (again, including Bush) dropped the issue like a hot potato. DeLay piggishly miscalculated--here we come again to that fatal arrogance of power--and persisted, even after Schiavo died. Speaking of the judges who ruled that her feeding tube should be removed, after she had spent 15 years in a persistent vegetative state, DeLay said in typically sinister fashion that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behaviour".

Even for the rest of the Republican leadership, that sounded a little too much like the loony right. "Liberal" judges who devilishly thwart the right-wing agenda are one of the right's favourite targets, but Americans are rightly proud of the separation of their judiciary from the executive and legislature, and by now DeLay was being portrayed as un-American. His "apology" on 13 April, conceding that he had been "inartful", was a sure sign that he had belatedly twigged the danger he was in.

DeLay may survive a while, but those insouciant earlier remarks marked the beginning of his end. He somehow defines so much of the era, speaking with peculiar malice and Messianic self-delusion (he recently said he wants to "redesign" government); always strident, crass and sanctimonious. I've no doubt that, despite the financial and other scandals, he sees himself as a providential saviour who will, one day, be vindicated.

But that is part of the deceit of politics and the arrogance of power. Mediocre figures, given a little power and standing in the community, come to believe their own propaganda. They then ruthlessly depict anybody standing in their way as being part of the forces of darkness and evil. In the end, they have no guiding morality and are driven solely by the pursuit of self-furtherance. Will this, I wonder, be the epitaph of the Bush administration itself?