From the WSJ Opinion Archives
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In today's Political Diary:
- GOP Has Much to Lose, Little to Gain in 2008 Senate Races
- My Dinner with The Hammer
- The Legacy of a Blowhard (Quote of the Day)
- Can't Get Enough Backdating?
Republicans will be defending 21 Senate seats next year while Democrats have
only 12 seats to protect. That makes it vital for the GOP to field its strongest
possible candidate for every Democratic seat where Republicans have a chance of
winning.
The No. 1 target for Republicans is Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, who has won two successive races with less than 51% of the vote. The state is likely to have become more Republican since Hurricane Katrina dramatically reduced the population of liberal New Orleans. In 1996, in a close election, Ms. Landrieu won solely on the basis of her 100,000-vote margin in New Orleans. She lost the rest of the state by 95,000 votes. In that same election, Bill Clinton carried Louisiana over Bob Dole by a full 12 percentage points.
Now it appears that Woody Jenkins, the man who came so close to defeating Ms. Landrieu in 1996, is planning a comeback. Mr. Jenkins, a former state legislator, has just sold one of the television stations he owns and at age 60 may well be interested in picking up his political career. In a sign that Mr. Jenkins may be planning a comeback, Rep. Charles Boustany, a Republican now serving his second term in Congress, has just announced he won't be running for Ms. Landrieu's Senate seat.
The other prominent Republican still mentioned for the seat is recently elected state Secretary of State Jay Dardenne. A Southern Research Media and Opinion poll in January showed Mr. Dardenne polling 38% against Ms. Landrieu's 53% in a hypothetical matchup. Allies of Mr. Jenkins believe polls would show him faring even better against Ms. Landrieu and that their man knows her vulnerabilities best.
He's a Hammer and the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy Is a Nail
I had dinner in New York Monday night with Tom DeLay, the former House Majority
Leader who resigned last year after his indictment on dubious campaign finance
charges in Texas became too great of a political burden.
Mr. DeLay, known as "The Hammer" for his ability to bring wavering members into line, is still smarting over criticism from the Wall Street Journal and others that he abandoned conservative principles while he was Majority Leader, but he was otherwise chipper and upbeat. He acknowledges that he "let [his] eye off the ball" and allowed some big-spending turkeys to pass the House. "The No Child Left Behind bill that gave the feds a bigger role in education, the last Farm Bill and the earmarks that got out of control even though they represent only a small part of the federal budget were all failings on my part," he told me. But he also staunchly defended the Medicare prescription drug bill he helped pass in a controversial late-night vote in 2003, saying it's saving money and improving the health of seniors by encouraging spending on drugs rather than hospital stays.
Now Mr. DeLay is preparing to answer his liberal critics whom he says have distorted his record. This month, his memoir "No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight" will be published by Sentinel. Mr. DeLay says the book will tell behind-the-scenes stories of how he and others planned the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress as well as about his relationships with Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Though Mr. DeLay insists on honoring the media embargo, he did offer one cryptic comment about the book's contents: "I'm afraid that Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey will not be completely happy with my book." Mr. DeLay famously feuded with both of his fellow GOP House leaders during much of the time they served together in the 1990s.
On other fronts, Mr. DeLay noted that the Democratic prosecutor who indicted him on campaign finance charges in Texas appears completely uninterested in bringing the case to trial. "I think they just want to have it hang over me as long as possible and have me spend money on lawyers," he told me.
But Mr. DeLay isn't letting the indictment block him from political involvement. This month, he started the Coalition for a Conservative Majority, which he sees as an information clearinghouse on what he calls the "great threat posed to our nation by the organized forces of the radicalized left." Mr. DeLay believes the Democratic victory last November came about because "the Left now has more money, more interlocking organizations and more coordinated media supporters than we can possibly imagine." He hopes to shine a light on these activities and encourage conservatives to work more closely together. "Nothing frustrated me more that I couldn't get groups such as mining companies to see the need to work for a good energy bill. Most people in the business community are parochial and won't work together for the common good. I hope to change that."
Despite his antipathy toward liberals, Mr. DeLay joked that he's happy to work with them. He told me he is about to sign on with CNN as a commentator. "I may be their only conservative on air, but someone has to do it."
"A bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these claims [by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV] were false -- and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife... The [Libby] trial has provided convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame's identity -- and no evidence that she was, in fact, covert... The former ambassador will be remembered as a blowhard. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were overbearing in their zeal to rebut Mr. Wilson and careless in their handling of classified information. Mr. Libby's subsequent false statements were reprehensible. And Mr. Fitzgerald has shown again why handing a Washington political case to a federal special prosecutor is a prescription for excess. Mr. Fitzgerald was, at least, right about one thing: The Wilson-Plame case, and Mr. Libby's conviction, tell us nothing about the war in Iraq" -- Washington Post editorial.
A Child Is Molested, and Somewhere There Was Backdating
Not for the first time our colleagues at the WSJ repackage their basic
backdating story under a 9/11 headline. What does 9/11 have to do with it?
Nothing, really.
Hundreds of companies apparently engaged in backdating. They made a habit over many years of picking the lowest recent price in their stock option dealings with employees, using price as the starting point for setting an option package's value. Why not just take the market price and adjust the number of shares? Apparently because employees strongly prefer "in the money" options.
These companies depended on options as their primary form of compensation; amid rampant headhunting in Silicon Valley, their teams would likely quickly disperse if employees lost hope of being paid for their years of work. So it was a matter of routine for employers to issue new grants from time to time to maintain the target wealth that an employee could expect to earn if he or she stuck around through the vesting period.
The key word is routine. Employers weren't sitting around rubbing the hands as the towers fell, thinking of the backdating windfall they could bestow on their worker bees. Former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt is quoted saying backdating into the 9/11 dip was "offensive." Mr. Pitt left the SEC under a political cloud after barely a year on the job. One way to get back into the media's good graces is by serving up the sought-for quote, but his judgement on this subject (dubious as it is) is utterly unrelated to his presumed expertise in securities law.
