{"id":6282,"date":"2006-01-09T09:44:37","date_gmt":"2006-01-09T14:44:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6282"},"modified":"2006-01-09T09:44:37","modified_gmt":"2006-01-09T14:44:37","slug":"bush-saw-tom-delay-as-the-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bush-saw-tom-delay-as-the-help\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush saw Tom DeLay as ‘the help’"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a guy who treasures loyalty as a person’s most important trait, Bush has no qualms about throwing friends overboard when they face an unspinnable problem. Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay was Bush’s close pal, until the president no longer knew who he was. Katherine Harris was the nice lady who helped him steal a presidential election, until she ran for the Senate and he stopped taking her c<\/a>alls. Trent Lott was in tight with Bush, right up until he wasn’t.<\/p>\n

As for Tom DeLay, last month Bush “liked<\/a>” him and his “remarkable<\/a>” record. Now, the Bush gang has leaked word<\/a> that the president never saw DeLay as anything more than “the help.”<\/p>\n

When legal and ethical questions began spinning around House majority leader Tom DeLay last year, President George W. Bush was publicly supportive. Privately, though, he questioned his fellow Texan’s mojo. Bush had scored 10 points higher than DeLay in the Representative’s district in 2004, and that was only after Bush had recorded a telephone message to help rally local Republicans. “I can’t believe I had to do robocalls for him,” the President said bitingly to an Oval Office visitor. […]<\/p>\n

Even before DeLay’s announcement that he would abdicate his leadership post, top Bush advisers tell TIME, the President’s inner circle always treated DeLay as a necessary burden. He may have had an unmatched grip on the House and Washington lobbyists, but DeLay is not the kind of guy — in background and temperament — the President feels comfortable with. Of the former exterminator, a Republican close to the President’s inner circle says, “They have always seen him as beneath them, more blue collar. He’s seen as a useful servant, not someone you would want to vacation with.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a public relations strategy, this strikes me as foolish. DeLay’s in freefall, so it makes sense to create some distance between the president and him. But to leak word that the Bush gang has always perceived DeLay as “beneath them, more blue collar” doesn’t make DeLay look worse; it makes the Bush gang look like arrogant snobs.<\/p>\n

Worse, it shows a twisted sense of values. The Bush White House doesn’t mind DeLay’s corruption, his unethical deals, or his sleazy political attacks; they just didn’t see him as the type of guy the president could bring to Kennebunkport. According to this standard, the measure of a man isn’t his character or conduct, it’s whether he uses “summer” as a verb.<\/p>\n

Right target, wrong spin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a guy who treasures loyalty as a person’s most important trait, Bush has no qualms about throwing friends overboard when they face an unspinnable problem. Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay was Bush’s close pal, until the president no longer knew who he was. Katherine Harris was the nice lady who helped him steal a presidential […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}