In all of my various political incarnations (Democrat-sympathizer, independent, libertarian, Republican-sympathizer, and finally Republican), I've never cared much for Tom DeLay. I have voted against him in every election save one and, should I find myself voting where he is running, I expect to continue that streak. I recognize that things DeLay has done for the Republican Party and that as a whole he may be a benefit to it, but there are some lines I cannot cross and Republicans I cannot vote for.

Several years back, I worked for a Democrat that was seeking his seat. I wasn't a Republican yet, but I was getting closer and closer to becoming one. My view on DeLay at the time was more negative than it is now and I was anxious to work against him. On Politics1.com I saw that someone had filed to run against him as a Democrat. I would have preferred a Republican simply because I felt a Republican would have a greater chance of winning, but none had declared (one would later). I wrote the would-be politician and offered my services. We met at the Fudrucker's off US59 and I became the first member of her campaign.

It was a quixotic quest from the outset and I realized it even then. Regardless, I felt that we ought to run the best campaign possible. We made a list of all of the Democratic group meetings in DeLay's district and I took the stump for her on a couple of occasions that she couldn't make it. Trying to rally up support for a Democrat trying to unseat DeLay wasn't particularly hard. I also set up her first web site. I'd never worked for a campaign before, but it seemed to me that there were obvious things that the campaign needed to do if it intended to unseat DeLay. The first thing I told her was that she needed to come up with ten reasons why a Republican should vote for her.

She never heeded my advice.

As the primary election drew closer, it became more apparent that of the two filed candidates, she was the only one with a chance of winning. If Tom DeLay had been caught in bed with a dead underage boy, he still probably would have defeated the other candidate from prison. The Chronicle quickly endorsed my candidate, which was when more volunteers started pouring in and a campaign manager was hired. The campaign manager was a nice woman, but she was a harbinger to my exit from the campaign. When I told her about my idea for "ten reasons a Republican should support our candidate" her big response was "Why? We aren't running as a Republican." Indeed, the mere mention that anyone unseating DeLay would need more than just Democratic and independent support brought forth nothing but scratched heads from a group of well-intentioned liberals that thought it was pretty obvious that Bush (leading in the polls by 15 points at the time) was toast.

I was ultimately asked to step away from the campaign by a conservative organization I was working for that feared a connection might be drawn. Given my increasingly miniscule role in the campaign, it was unlikely, but I nonetheless understood. I still supported the candidate privately and intended to vote for her in the election. She lost in the primaries to the other candidate that hadn't campaigned and whose only noticeable advantage was appearing on the ballot before my candidate's.

After leaving the campaign and before the primary loss, I was trying to sell the candidate to my conservative mother. I talked about DeLay a lot, but it didn't particularly matter because Mom thinks all politicians are crooks. She asked me one good reason that she should vote for the candidate I had worked for, I couldn't come up with one. She'd never made that list.

The heat on Tom DeLay has intensified considerably over the last couple of years. I'm not sure that DeLay will ever be unseated, but if he ever will it'll be either this election or next. His present opponent is an environmental lawyer by the name of Richard Morrison. As I looked over his site, the same mentality thrives. He's not merely running against Tom DeLay, but against the GOP as a whole. The one issue in which he might garner some Republican support - the deficit - he couches in the term "GOP deficits", which negates the positives he might derive by deficit-hawk Republicans on an anti-deficit position by making it a partisan issue. The deficit cannot be blamed or credited on anyone but the Republicans, but is it more important to be right or to win over potential converts? I find nothing on his site to suggest that he is all that concerned with the latter.

Morrison has done a better job with the media than I have seen anyone running against DeLay do. I understand that fundraising has been good. Since all of this comes at a time when DeLay's numbers are lower than they've ever been, he should be in a position to at least pose a challenge. But either Morrison's team is letting the numbers get to their collective heads or they have no idea what they're doing. DeLay has a number of weaknesses in the eyes of otherwise conservative independents and open-minded Republicans, but I see absolutely no effort to exploit those weaknesses. Sharing the NIMBY attitude of suburbanites will only get him so far.

I will probably register to vote in Idaho in the upcoming election, but reading over what he has to say makes me inclined to say that I would probably vote for vote-spintering ex-Republican Michael Fjetland and helping DeLay keep his seat. Instead of just ignoring potentially-converted Republicans, he's downright contemptuous:

Well, first let me tell you why I’ve got to get it out. If I just have the label, “Richard Morrison, Democrat,” all right, then everyone out there that kind of thinks the Rush Limbaugh way, which is “If this guy’s a Democrat, then we’re electing Ted Kennedy.” Ted Kennedy’s not going to get anything out of there, and so I have to be able to get the message out that, “Yeah, I’m a Democrat, but I’m really your neighbor, and I’m just like you.” Those people are Democrats; they just don’t know it.

I went to this deal the other day with the teachers, when they were protesting at DeLay. There were all these ladies coming up there, these three really nice ladies, the Fort Bend County Democratic Women, they’re like a hundred years old, three of them. They were, like, “Oh, we’d like for you to come and speak.” And I said, “I’d love to speak.” And these three or four soccer moms walked up, and they said, “We’re registered Republicans, but can we come to your meeting?” And so they all think they’re Republicans, because that’s the hip thing to be, you know, and that’s where all the rich guys are and all that, but really they’re just Democrats and they don’t know it, ’cause their rights are getting trampled on, they just don’t realize it. And they think, “Oh, the Republicans are going to take care of us.” Well, I’m not sure that’s true.

This is about as close as Morrison comes to giving a reason to potentially sympathetic Republicans to vote for him: They're sheep that are only Republicans cause everyone else is doing it and they don't really know what they believe.

I'm not saying Morrison should run away from his politican affiliation, but he's not going to convince the necessary number of people that everything they know about what Republicans and Democrats stand for is wrong in the course of six months. That's just not going to happen. Selling the Democratic Party in the 22nd District is nigh impossible compared to convincing them that this is an election that they need to vote for the Democrat.

There is also talk of Morrison inviting (or accepting an offer from) Howard Dean for fundraising purposes. I'll just pass that off to Greg:

I suspect that doing a late campaign event with Howard Dean is not a great way to convince people that you're just "one of them" as opposed to Ted Kennedy.

Free, Cheap, & Easy Advice: Run your own campaign, be your own candidate, avoid detracting from your own message. Send Howard a note thanking him for the generous offer, but informing him that you've got the situation under control just fine.

... of course, if "running your own campaign" means informing the "unknown Democrats" of the 22nd that you're in league with Dean, then let's not kid anyone into thinking we want to win this race.

Other than telling Republicans that they're not really Republicans and that he stands with Howard Dean and the opposing party on roughly every issue under contention, what exactly is his message?