Washington, DC — The Inside the Beltway GOP infighting and backbiting hasn’t been this bad since President George H.W. Bush opted to forego his ‘read my lips’ campaign promise and raise taxes in 1990, but it might even be on the cusp of getting worse.
Today’s ABC News Note sums up both the paranoia and the stakes:
Today’s Miers stories push towards trouble; today’s Fitzgerald stories push towards high drama, higher tension, and deep, dark foreboding.
Both are unpredictable mysteries wrapped in riddles surrounded by confusion. And both have American politics on hold and in the balance.
The pair of condundra may well determine whether Bush continues to live under the golden fluffy cloud that has followed him all his political career, or whether his luck has finally run out.
And with Tom DeLay under a cloud at least for the time being, the K Street lobbying scene is also scrambled, with a number of former DeLay staffers-turned-lobbyists looking over their backs for the knives of GOP colleagues (mostly those close to new “temporary” Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-MO)eager to move up the ladder.
Despite the fact the DeLay crowd — “DeLay Inc.” — is putting up a brave front publicly, they know instinctively that others are already measuting the drapes of their corner offices. What a town.