Commentary - Eve Fairbanks: Delay’s ‘conspiracy’ equals ‘we lost’

Now here comes ex-Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who says Republicans lost because of a vast left-wing conspiracy, designed to program minds through media onslaughts and steal away voters via sneaky, just-this-side-of-legal voter-recruitment bonanzas.

I caught DeLay last week at a luncheon to flog his new memoir, “No Retreat, No Surrender,” where he — looking vastly older than he did a year ago, but spiffed up in his black suit and burnt-orange tie — promoted the new conspiracy theory. The shellacking definitely wasn’t thanks to anything he did, he said.

Instead, it worked like this, he explained: “Bill and Hillary decided they needed a get-out-the-vote program, so they created America Coming Together. They decided they needed a think tank, so they created the Center for American Progress. They needed an opposition research group, so they created the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. They needed a consulting group …” It all came together into an evil, expansive, and brilliantly-engineered machine, and it’s no surprise Republicans fell by the wayside.

Sounds plausible enough, right? But it ought to make you laugh — laugh at the sudden feeling of déjà vu. Here’s Hillary Clinton, architect of the conspiracy DeLay identifies: “It’s not just one person, it’s an entire operation,” she said in 1998 regarding Ken Starr’s investigation into Bill’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

“This vast right-wing conspiracy,” she continued, “has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

When Republicans surged into power in 1994, everyone whined about their giant interlocking network of media and grassroots, culminating in Hillary’s outburst. The message machine: They had it, and commonly we thought Republicans were just better than Democrats at getting their ideas out and destroying their enemies.

Case in point: Prior to the ’94 election, Newt Gingrich distributed a list to his Republican colleagues of words they should use to describe their Democratic foes, including “sick,” “corrupt,” and “bizarre.” All the left wanted was to copy the right’s machine.

Now, all DeLay wants is to copy the left’s machine that’s a copy of the right’s machine. He has incredibly ambitious plans in the works to make his own version of almost every piece of the liberal machinery:

America Coming Together will be matched by DeLay’s fledgling Coalition for a Conservative Majority. Daily Kos will be matched by DeLay’s new blog, TomDeLay.com. MoveOn will be matched by DeLay’s activist e-mail list, the Grassroots Action/Information Network.

The idea that one man could recreate Kos, MoveOn, and all the liberal 527s tests our credulity in and of itself. But stand back a minute and consider the dangerous and misleading silliness of his conspiracy theory: It’s like looking down a hall of mirrors, where every defeat has the same explanation, repeated again and by different sides.

First off, it’s not demonstrably true. Republicans who believe the liberal media’s harping on Foley caused their November defeat have forgotten how miserably Republicans were doing in the polls before Foley came along.

And throwing around the word “conspiracy” denigrates real conspiracy theories: Remember the ’90s, when some of us thought Bill Clinton personally pulled the trigger on Vince Foster or downed TWA Flight 800? Now that’s a conspiracy!

Finally, DeLay thinks liberal conspiracy got so many voters to swing Democratic; I think voters were attracted to the conspiratorial organizations like MoveOn because they were upset about legitimate problems in governance, like Iraq or ethics.

He can believe the former if he likes, but it’s not very democratic — are we that sheep-like that an attractive mailing-list drive can swing 30 seats in Congress?

Let’s see DeLay’s left-wing-conspiracy talk for what it is: Just code for “we lost.”

Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.