My Chat With The Washington Times

DeLay warns GOP faces long rebuilding process Aims to get conservative groups to collaborate
Stephen Dinan
Monday, June 9, 2008

Two years after he resigned from the House, former Republican leader Tom DeLay says conservatives haven't bottomed out from their 2006 election losses, Democrats are "cleaning their clock," and it will take years before the Republican Party can compete with the operation Democrats have built.

The conservatives refuse to accept that the left is cleaning their clock, and until you hit some bottom, wherever that is, to where it says, 'Well, maybe we ought to do something different,' little or nothing's going to change," Mr. DeLay told editors and reporters at The Washington Times last week.

"I think it's going to take years to rebuild the party," he said. "It is a party that will try to find itself as to what kind of party it is, and it will depend on what kind of leadership emerges from this rebuilding, as to what it ultimately is."

The Texas Republican resigned from the House effective two years ago Monday, months after he gave up his position as House majority leader - a move he was forced to make after he was indicted in Texas on various campaign-finance and money-laundering charges. Some of those charges were thrown out in pre-trial appeals, and Mr. DeLay still has not gone to trial on the remaining ones.

He has spent the time since his resignation studying the way the liberal movement operates, and says it is far more adept under the new campaign-finance rules enacted in 2002, and championed by Sen. John McCain, the Republican's presumptive presidential candidate.

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