All that has helped DeLay obtain astonishing results, firming up conservative control of all levers in the House and getting moderates to back him when it counts. Consequently, he routinely wins by tiny margins on votes he's expected to lose. In June, he won a crucial vote on Medicare by one vote. Then in late July, DeLay ripped a homer to deep right field by winning a vote on Head Start -- kicking some funding responsibility for that early-education program back to state governments -- by a margin of 217-216. Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., missed the vote while traveling. The one-vote margin gave rise to a mini backlash against one presidential candidate who would surely have opposed the bill. DeLay had outfoxed the Democrats again

The extreme positions DeLay stakes out, and his propensity for outlandish rhetoric, make it easy to portray him as an ideological fruitcake. He has, after all, blamed the teaching of evolution for the massacres at Columbine high school, compared the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo, and once allowed a petrochemical lobbyist named Gordon Gooch to actually write legislation. Speaking of liberals on the House floor earlier this year, DeLay said, "Their malignant hold over the intellectual life of this country must be exorcised, and men and women who are willing to speak the truth offer our only hope of reclaiming our culture from the grip of a hedonistic, reckless and destructive descent into nihilism."

DeLay's extremism has made some Democrats hopeful that DeLay might eventually instigate a split in the Republican Party, perhaps pushing a few Jim Jeffordsesque moderates into the Democratic fold or creating a general backlash against the party and President Bush. That hasn't happened yet, and DeLay has only occasionally sparred with the White House. He quashed Bush's request to distribute his gigantic tax cuts slightly more evenly, declaring that "ain't gonna happen" when Bush asked that Congress change the tax bill to include a bigger credit to low-income families. He also took a trip to Israel in July and delivered an extraordinarily inflammatory speech the day after Bush met with Ariel Sharon. Addressing Israel's parliament, DeLay declared his opposition to a Palestinian state and said, "You've got to change a generation before you can have a peaceful state that can live side by side with Israel."

Still, Bush and DeLay have yet to really clash, and neither has given hints that they will. In fact, if DeLay has done anything to Bush, it has been to make the president appear more moderate than he really is, a potentially calculated service as Bush tries to tack back to the center in time for the 2004 elections.

Some liberals also hold out hope that DeLay will fracture the Republicans' Christian base with his often-unbecoming fundraising, particularly from quarters that religious conservatives scorn. DeLay and his close confidantes, for example, have raised lots of money from gambling interests -- a lobby at odds with the religious right. But still, his fundraising seems to have caused few rifts. "I appreciate the difficulty of good people in difficult positions," says Tom Minnery, vice president of public policy of Focus on the Family. Says Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum, "His job is to get conservative bills through the legislature, and he is very good at what he does."

The Democrats' other, perhaps wistful, hope is that DeLay will ultimately step on one of his own land mines, like the Republican House leader he once served under, Newt Gingrich. The two do share a propensity for saying the outlandish. But Gingrich seemed much more self-serving: worrying as much about getting airtime as managing his revolution, managing an affair with a Hill staffer (now his wife) during the Clinton impeachment mess, and trying to cash in on his power with a book deal. DeLay seems simply concerned about accumulating as much power as possible for himself and the conservative wing of his party, and he's done a much better job than Gingrich at making sure that his bills become law. "The ethical attacks on DeLay have been about money that he has raised for his cause," says Barney Frank, the Massachusetts representative. "Gingrich's ethical problems had to do with the enrichment of Gingrich."

"Gingrich swung for the bleachers every time," says Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. Most famously, in 1996, Gingrich grumbled to reporters that Clinton ignored him on Air Force One during flights to and from Israel for the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, even forcing him to exit the plane from the back. Gingrich went so far as to suggest that Clinton's rudeness kept House Republicans from compromising on a budget resolution -- which caused a government shutdown and idled 800,000 workers. "Cry baby!" cried the front page of the New York Daily News, complete with an illustration of Gingrich in diapers. It was a P.R. disaster. A similar snafu from DeLay seems far more unlikely. Instead of pouting to the press about exiting Air Force One from the rear, DeLay probably would have just quietly removed the plane's engine.

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