DeLay hopes to emerge as grass-roots leader

WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, vowed Tuesday that although he will quit Congress, he has no plans to leave national politics. Instead, he plans to fashion a role for himself as a grass-roots leader of social conservatives.

But the former House majority leader’s plans met with mixed reaction from other Republicans, including some social conservatives.

Some said that DeLay, a formidable fundraiser and self-described born-again Christian who still enjoys broad support within the religious right, could quickly become a force to be reckoned with.

Others predicted that DeLay will find it hard to shape a new role as long as he remains under the legal and ethical cloud created by his indictment last year by a Texas grand jury on money-laundering charges.

“I look forward to traveling the country and listening to conservatives, helping grass-roots leaders to develop a unifying agenda and a strategy to enact it, to learn from past setbacks and build on our successes,” DeLay said in Texas, where he announced in a videotaped message to supporters that he intends to leave Congress by mid-June.

He sounded upbeat about his future in an earlier interview with Fox News. Far from feeling defeated, he said, “I feel kind of excited, frankly. I’m looking forward to being liberated outside the House, doing whatever I can to unify the conservative cause.”

Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., was skeptical of DeLay’s chances of remaking himself. “In this town, out of sight is out of mind. People fade very quickly once they’re out of power. I think he’ll fade,” LaHood said.

Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, a grass-roots conservative organization, scoffed at the notion that DeLay will become a leader of social conservatives. “As an elected official, when he called conservatives together, he was in a position to do so,” Weyrich said. “On what basis does he operate from the outside?”

Current leaders of the movement may well be nervous about DeLay’s plans, said a political analyst who is close to DeLay, “because there is a new big guy on the block who knows how to do this better than anybody. They might be thinking about their own existence. … I think the way Jack Kemp tapped into the Libertarian side of Republicans, he can do the same with evangelicals and fundamental conservatives.”

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