Jeff Gannon attended the Delay Gala last night

Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official who cut his teeth working under Richard Perle when the “prince of darkness” was an adviser to Sen. “Scoop” Jackson in the 1970s, is one of the key heavy-lifters of the neoconservative-hawk policy institute world. From his perch at the Center for Security Policy (CSP), Gaffney routinely excoriates any and all arms control agreements, stridently defends U.S. intervention in places such as Iraq, and defends the hardline policies of Israel’s Likud Party.

WASHINGTON The event was designed as a high-profile show of Republican support for the embattled House majority leader - reporters were encouraged to attend to see for themselves...
"The only way DeLay would be damaged is if his friends walked away from him," Grover Norquist, head of the Americans for Tax Reform and a prominent supporter of DeLay, said earlier Thursday.

Norquist said that liberals were "making the same mistake the right made on Clinton in 1998 thinking you can win an election based on 'we don't like the other team's leader."' In that election, Republicans tried to defeat Democrats in Congress by invoking President Bill Clinton's impeachment scandals. Democrats would like to link DeLay, of Texas, to other Republican lawmakers as part of the 2006 campaign.

But Norquist said: "Very few Americans in Ohio or Florida are going to vote for the Democrats because some Texan plays golf." His reference was to the overseas golfing vacations that DeLay and his aides took with Jack Abramoff, a Republican lobbyist now under criminal investigation for his work with American Indian tribes. News articles have reported that Abramoff paid for DeLay and other lawmakers to travel, in violation of House ethics rules, setting off reverberations on Capitol Hill.

The tribute dinner at the Capital Hilton Hotel, chiefly sponsored by the American Conservative Union, was specifically described not as a fund-raiser but as a public relations boost for DeLay "as he faces constant attacks by liberal Democrats and continuous media scrutiny," the invitation said.

The $2,000-a-table event was expected to draw prominent conservatives, including Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee; Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation; and Gary Bauer, once a presidential candidate and now head of the group American Values.

But many Republican House members had headed back to their home districts for the weekend before the dinner even began.

Rather than quieting Democrats' outcry about DeLay's actions, the dinner fed into it as liberals seized on the event to promote their causes.