This morning I was sharing my surprise at DeLay’s resignation with Texas Monthly‘s Jan Reid, author of The Hammer: The Nasty, Brutish, and Shortened Political Life of Tom Delay. But Reid was more circumspect than I. “I think there’s a precedent for this,” he told me. “If you remember when [Newt] Gingrich went down, all of a sudden he was no longer speaker, he looked back and said, ‘what’s the point in being one of 435?'”
I mention this because in an online chat this afternoon, The Post‘s Bob Kaiser made a similar observation:
How did [DeLay] decide [to quit]? I just don’t know. I suspect part of it was the realization, since he was replaced as majority leader and completely displaced from any influential role in the House, that now matter what else happens, his new life was going to be a pale comparison of his old one. He would, I suspect, simply hate the idea of being a marginal player. And that’s where he was headed.
In retrospect, is it surprising more of us didn’t see this coming?
