By now, we all know way too much about the minutae of Tom DeLay's legal troubles. I know I do, and I'm getting tired of the excessive bloviating whenever the country's third most-powerful elected official takes a half-second-deeper-than-normal breath these days.
Yet this survey caught my eye. Literally. I sat there juggling the numbers in my head for at least 15 minutes before coming to a firm conclusion: DeLay is in serious trouble.
Even if his political carreer survives the trial itself (not necessarily a foregone conclusion) he has to survive an electorate that is increasingly tired of him. His pos/neg numbers, when divided by party affiliation, tell the tale. No incumbent, not even in a district that is so heavily aligned to their own party, can survive the alienation of 36% of his own party, not to mention well over half the independents out there. For this analysis, just forget the Democrat column. They were going to go 90% against DeLay anyways.
The only thing that could save the Hammer's career is that a) he makes it through the trial with either the charges being dropped or a not-guilty verdict and b) he then pulls together the top shelf of the GOP spin machine to run his campaign. Anything less and he goes from holding almost absolute power (which is actually kinda neat, according to one quote) to either jailbird or all washed up.
And I really don't care which. He's been a pimple on the assets of the GOP since 2001, and only the amount of power he had a death-grip on has kept him in the driver's seat. (And anyone that doesn't think that Blunt is purely DeLay's creature yet... Well, I've got a mountain in Florida to sell you. Cheap.)
[Turn signal: Sam Rosenfeld]
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