The indictment of Tom DeLay, majority leader of the House of Representatives, may not be the start of a conservative crack-up; but a realignment of the movement that has come to dominate American politics could be in the works

AFP

TOM DELAY is no stranger to excitement. He claims nearly to have been killed during a bout of revolutionary violence in Venezuela, where he lived in his teens. He was asked to leave the first university he attended, and he made a living exterminating bugs before he entered politics. But “the Hammer” has not been able to swat away the swarm of investigators buzzing around him.

On Wednesday September 28th, Mr DeLay was indicted by a grand jury in Texas for alleged breaches of campaign-finance law, and forced to resign, at least temporarily, his position as Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, America's lower parliamentary chamber. There was much whooping among Democrats, for whom Mr DeLay was a hate figure even before he played a crucial part in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. “I hope his cell is full of cockroaches,” was one of the gentler postings on one leftish blogsite.

Washington, DC, is now engulfed in two debates. The first revolves around how bad a mess Mr DeLay is in; the second is about the extent of the fissures within the conservative movement that currently dominates American politics.

The case against Mr DeLay is less easy to understand than the perjury-about-fellatio charge against Mr Clinton. Along with two political associates, John Colyandro and Jim Ellis, he is accused of conspiracy to violate the election code in his home state of Texas. Mr DeLay has a political action committee called Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC). Prosecutors allege that it accepted $155,000 from various companies, and then wrote a cheque for $190,000 to an arm of the Republican National Committee, with instructions to distribute chunks of the stash to individual candidates in Texas. In effect, the indictment argues, TRMPAC enabled the party to get around the ban on corporate donations to individual candidates.

If convicted, Mr DeLay faces up to two years in jail and a fine of up to $10,000. But that is far from certain. He has denounced the charges as “one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history”, adding that the district attorney behind the case, Ronnie Earle, was “an unabashed partisan zealot with a well-documented history of launching baseless investigations and indictments against his political enemies”.

Mr Earle is a liberal Democrat who, in 1993, indicted Kay Bailey Hutchison, now the state's senior Republican senator, on what “The Almanac of American Politics” called “flimsy charges he was forced to drop the first day the case came to court”. Against that, Mr Earle has prosecuted four times as many Democrats as Republicans.

Mr DeLay said that his defence “will not be technical or legalistic; it will be categorical and absolute. I am innocent. Mr Earle and his staff know it. And I will prove it.” He then promised that Republicans would not be deflected from their “bold and aggressive agenda” to do something about petrol prices, state pensions, illegal immigration and fiscal responsibility—issues he vowed would all be tackled in the next few weeks.

That may be a bit optimistic. For one thing, the Republicans will miss Mr DeLay's vote-whipping skills. He has a startling record of assembling hair-thin majorities for ticklish pieces of legislation, such as on Medicare prescription-drug benefit in 2003. In other words, he is adept at offering the necessary inducements to just enough waverers, but no more.

His case will probably not come to trial for several months, and in the meantime he remains a member of the House of Representatives. His duties as majority leader are to be assumed, for now, by Roy Blunt of Missouri, the House Republican whip, with assistance from David Dreier, a representative from California, and Eric Cantor of Virginia. None is likely to be as forceful as the Hammer.

Mr DeLay's indictment is not the only ethical problem hampering the Republicans. Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, is being investigated about a stock sale he insists involved no inside information. Karl Rove, President George Bush's chief strategist, is fighting accusations that he leaked the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent (see Rove profile). On Thursday, the vice-president's influential chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was revealed also to have told a reporter that Ms Plame worked for the CIA. And Mr DeLay's problems are not limited to Texas: a lobbyist chum of his, Jack Abramoff, has been accused of a variety of dodgy doings involving Indian casinos and influence-peddling.

This accumulation of sleaze has made it harder for the Republicans to push through their agenda, reckons Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, a liberal think-tank. Other pundits are not so sure. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, says Mr DeLay's indictment will “not have a huge impact” on the Republican legislative programme, “mostly because it was in tatters before”.

That might sound odd. After all, only last November conservatives were preening themselves like peacocks, having won their seventh presidential election in ten contests. Mr Bush ran for his second term on a conservative platform of tax cuts, family values and American power. Marshalled by Mr Rove, millions of activists—anti-tax people, gun people, social conservatives, neo-conservatives and many more—comprehensively outfought their liberal equivalents. Mr Bush won more votes than any candidate in history.

Today the conservative movement is in turmoil. Different types of conservatives are at each other's throats. Everybody is hurling opprobrium at the president. David Brooks, a conservative columnist on the New York Times, recently declared that he sometimes wonders whether Mr Bush is a Manchurian candidate—sent to discredit conservatism.

The loudest howls are coming from small-government conservatives who are furious with Mr Bush's loose spending. But business conservatives are furious about his love-affair with the religious right and traditional conservatives are furious about his commitment of blood and treasure to the Iraq war.

These rows are particularly dangerous because they reflect long-standing tensions within the conservative movement:

• Small-government conservatives v big-government conservatives. Mr Bush has embraced all sorts of big-government programmes (from supercharging the Department of Education to creating the huge new Medicare drug entitlement) while trying to keep small-government conservatives on side with tax cuts. But this was a formula for fiscal disaster. It also failed to placate purists who believe that the federal government has no business running schools or pushing pills to pensioners.

• Conservatives of faith v conservatives of doubt. Doubters don't think that the federal government should interfere in people's private lives. They don't want Washington meddling in states' rights to legalise euthanasia or medical marijuana. Conservatives of faith believe that the federal government should encourage civic virtue. Under Mr Bush they have had the upper hand. The Justice Department has been aggressive in imposing its views on the states. The poster-child of the conservative movement on Capitol Hill at the moment is Senator Rick Santorum, a staunch advocate of family values.

• Insurgent conservatives v establishment conservatives. The conservative movement, rooted in the south and west, has been deeply hostile to Washington. But electoral success has created a Washington-based Republican establishment, which spends its time doling out goodies to its buddies and expanding federal power. Mr Bush has managed this relationship by presenting himself as an anti-Washington Washingtonian: the son of a president who prefers to spend his time in Texas. The insurgent wing seems increasingly unconvinced.

• Business conservatives v religious conservatives. The latter are waiting keenly to see whom Mr Bush appoints next to the Supreme Court. Business conservatives are worried that religious people have already got too much. Mr Bush's stance on stem-cell research will cost America its competitive edge in biotechnology. Add to this their concerns about Mr Bush's reckless fiscal policy and you have the making of a business revolt.

• Neo-conservatives v traditional conservatives. The former have an expansive vision of America's role in the world—a vision that has come to include not just nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq but also the transformation of the Middle East. But traditionalists balk at the hubris of this vision. How can conservatives who believe that government power is fallible rally to the idea of transforming an entire region?

This sort of criticism was once limited to mavericks such as Pat Buchanan. But it is now mainstream. William Buckley, one of the movement's founders, has declared that the Iraq war was probably a mistake. Before the election, one senior White House figure confided that his biggest worry was not the anti-war left (which always sings the same song) but the possibility that the conservative intellectual elite would turn against the war. The rive droite seems to be turning.

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Can Rove turn it around again?

How bad is this? All successful political parties contain tensions. Look at Britain's Labour Party—a party of pacifist trade unionists led by a hawkish fan of capitalism. The bigger a political party gets, the bigger the tensions. Politics is the art of managing these tensions—something Mr Bush's team did brilliantly until this year.

The loss of touch began before Hurricane Katrina. Bungling in Iraq provoked a drumbeat of discontent, with neo-conservatives calling for more troops and traditional conservatives calling for an exit strategy. And the Valerie Plame affair demoralised the White House. It not only threatened Mr Rove's political career, and is now putting Mr Libby in the spotlight; it also demonstrated how far Mr Bush's pursuit of the war had alienated much of the Washington establishment (including the CIA and the State Department).

Katrina has been a disaster. Mr Bush's slow response to the hurricane (it did not help that Mr Rove was in hospital) spoiled his claim to be a can-do president and it unleashed a previously quiescent press.

The Bush machine's ruthless media management infuriates journalists, but while he was on top they played the game on his terms. Now they are out for revenge. Earlier this year, Newsweek fawned about the “hands-on and detail oriented” president who wants to hear the bad news first. After Katrina it presented a picture of a man who surrounds himself with toadies who are too terrified to warn him of brewing disaster.

Surviving Watergate and Bill Clinton

Predictions of the demise of American conservatism are almost as old as the movement. It survived both Watergate and Bill Clinton. Emmett Tyrell, the editor of the American Spectator, published “The Conservative Crack-up” in 1992. So much of the right's power lies outside the administration and Congress—in its domination of the intellectual agenda for instance—that it is seldom down for long.

The Democrats show few signs that they have the wind in their sails. Their handling of John Roberts's nomination to the Supreme Court has been dismal. Neither Harry Reid, the minority leader in the Senate, nor Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the House, is likely to set the world on fire. Moveon.org types want to drag the party to the left; Clintonistas want to pull it to the centre. America has two dysfunctional parties.

But Mr Bush's recent problems do raise one important possibility: that of a realignment on the right. The fact that the Bush machine is running out of steam makes it much less likely that he will be able to determine his successor. This creates opportunities for very different sorts of conservatives who are waiting in the wings.

One possibility is Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York, who combines managerial toughness with social liberalism. But an even more likely one is John McCain. Up until now Mr McCain, a senator, has been popular in the country at large (he wins all head-to-head competitions with Hillary Clinton) but unpopular with the conservative movement. But the right is beginning to warm to him. He has spent his career campaigning against the sort of pork-barrel spending that conservatives are now railing against. And he is soundly conservative on both foreign and fiscal policy. A conservative crack-up may be going too far; but a conservative realignment is definitely in the works.