From the Washington Post look at Republican leadership races past:
When the House speaker’s job opened up in 1998, Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) — a telegenic policy intellectual from the nation’s most populous state — seemed like a logical candidate. Cox certainly thought so. He brooded over his options and mused about a possible run on CNN.
But while Cox was in the studio, J. Dennis Hastert was winning the cloakroom. With powerful backing from Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), Hastert — a decidedly untelegenic, nuts-and-bolts pol from small-town Illinois — was working the phones, cutting deals and forming alliances. Within hours, he locked down the most powerful job in Congress.
Which raises the question — as the House tries to clean house, how come Hastert’s head isn’t on the table? Admittedly, he’s not implicated in criminal activity the way Tom DeLay is, but in theory he’s in charge of the House Republican leadership operation. At a minimum, one wouldn’t say he’s been very proactive ‘lo these past several years in rooting out corruption not just inside his own caucus but inside his own leadership team. The tendency has been for him to get a free pass on all the antics that go down on the Hill because he’s universally regarded as an empty suit. But if he’s so inconsequential that he doesn’t deserve a share of the blame for the dirty deals that have gone down under his purview, then it’s hard to see why he deserves to sit in the Speaker’s chair. If he doesn’t matter because, as is widely assumed, he’s just a DeLay puppet, then how can you justify ditching the Hammer without also dumping his cat’s paw? Certainly, if the GOP was serious about turning over a new leaf, his job security would be pretty seriously imperiled.
But of course nobody in that quarter’s really all that serious about changing things, so this is what you get. The leadership race is all about who can best position themselves as the candidate of superficial change.
