NYT
DeLay Quietly Steps Out of the Schiavo Spotlight
Early this week, Tom DeLay assumed an uncharacteristically visible role in the Terri Schiavo case, pressing Congress to intervene, invoking God and attacking Ms. Schiavo's husband before television cameras and on the House floor. Now, with the prospect that she will be kept alive essentially dashed in the courts, he has slipped out of the spotlight....
Still, for Mr. DeLay in particular, the decision to step forward in the first place - after weeks in which he had methodically avoided television cameras as he fended off questions about his ethics - may prove to be crucial in what could turn out to be his most difficult year in Congress.
While the Schiavo case may have energized his conservative supporters, Democrats and some independent analysts say, it may also have thrust him into the national consciousness at the very moment his opponents are trying to make him a symbol of Republican excess and force another ethics investigation.
"Tom is doing everything backwards from the way I'd be inclined to do it," said one Democrat, Jim Wright, a fellow Texan who himself was forced out as speaker of the House in 1989 after failing to surmount challenges to his ethics. "He seems to want to keep hostility at an agitated level."...
It is not just Democrats who share that view. In a regular e-mail commentary he distributes, former Senator Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota, wrote, "If I were a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota in 2006, I would make DeLay the issue in the campaign right now."
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