“This smells, and I’m going to ask Andy Card of the White House to get into this this week, to examine any contacts that any federal officials had with federal departments…”
That’s from Joe Lieberman this morning on Fox News Sunday. 
It’s still a tad understated. But at least Lieberman is pushing this issue, which is more than you can say for just about any other politician beside the Democrats in the Texas congressional delegation.
We’ll see if Lieberman follows through.
Let’s get back to why so few in the press or among pols on the Hill are willing to take DeLay on.
With the pols, I think the answer is fairly straightforward. DeLay’s a bully. He threatens and brow-beats people and doesn’t give up. Democrats are sadly cowed by him. For people in his own party, DeLay is also a very important conduit of money. So he’s not someone you want to cross. (One seldom-discussed part of the state redistricting story is how dependent Republicans in the Texas state House were on DeLay’s financial largesse, and how important this was in bringing the crisis to a head.)
Journalists have given DeLay a wide berth for a distinct but related reason. For most of them, the story reeks of what people in the business call dog-bites-man. In other words, it’s just not surprising enough to be news. DeLay is widely-known — even relishes his reputation — for hardball, envelope-pushing tactics. The exploits of his money and access machine are both legendary and notorious. So, in a sense, where’s the story?
This and the Lott debacle are different in many ways. But in this respect they are similar. At least in the first few days, no one gave the Lott situation much attention because pretty much everyone knew that Lott was fairly unreconstructed on racial issues. (After all, only three years before, his close ties to a white-supremacist group had been widely reported in the Washington Post and other papers.) So it really wasn’t such a surprise that he thought this way.
DeLay is reaping a similar advantage because of what people in town already know about him. If it were Tom Daschle, and not Tom DeLay, I guarantee the reaction would be quite different. But it’s not simply a partisan or bias issue. 
It wouldn’t be the same with Bill Frist or Denny Hastert either. Some of this — no doubt — is due to the lack of a Republican mau-mau to stir up interest and push the press to pursue it. But a lot of it is the prism through which journalists themselves are seeing it.
The key here is that DeLay is benefitting greatly from his long-established reputation as someone who hugs the letter of the law while breaking its spirit, it not more, again and again.
How else do you explain the following situation: the House Majority Leader was directly and intimately involved in activities that are now the subject of investigations by two cabinet departments and grand jury proceedings in Texas. Yet Washington is still barely paying the matter any attention. How do you explain that?
