NYTimes :: DeLay Quietly Steps Out of the Schiavo Spotlight

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/26/politics/26delay.html?


WASHINGTON, March 25 - 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.

Mr. DeLay, the House majority leader, is not alone. Republican responses, including those of President Bush and Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, have become muted in the face of the legal setbacks and of polls that show overwhelming disapproval of Congressional intervention, as well as a perception among the public that lawmakers trying it were motivated by politics. A CBS News poll released Thursday found that 82 percent of respondents believed that the president and Congress should stay out of the case, while 13 percent thought they should intervene.

Republican Congressional officials say the lower profile is partly just a reflection of the fact that Congress, having already returned once to enact a law that fought Ms. Schiavo's death, has again departed Washington for the Easter recess. It is also, they say, a gesture of respect to a dying woman and her family, rather than an accommodation to politics.

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.

Now it's going to be - "Oh that guy, what an asshole".

smart enough to read poll numbers and realize he screwed up....its damage control and spin time folks.....

Boy, did those cynical hypocrites misjudge thier political instincts on where the American public would go on this issue. I hope this issue indicates something greater is occurring - that a saturation point has been reached with the voter and their disgust for Republican politics.