Tom Craddick's No-Good, Very Bad Year

The once-mighty House Speaker has resorted to guilt by association, and in doing so projects his own weakness and his intentions to hang on to the Speakership.

According to Craddick, it wasn't his leadership, but rather his support for tort reform that's driven the Republican ranks to rail against him:

"I'm the one who pushed tort reform and I'm not their favorite person," Craddick was quoted as saying in Thursday's Midland Reporter-Telegram . "I think I'm on their dart board. The group that's really pushing to get a different speaker is the one that wants to reverse the tort laws."

Well, I don't know about that. I think you would be hard pressed to really prove that there's any truth to that assertion. This is just more of Craddick's strategy to embrace an essentially NeoCon idea — if you're not with us, you're against us — and to round himself out as the guy who is for everything good Republicans ought to be for.

Paul Burka thinks the strategy is his go-to mannerism for the foreseeable future because Craddick doesn't have much else to run on, other than being Super Republican.

I can understand why Craddick is playing the trial lawyer card. He doesn't have a lot of good cards to play. He's got the money card. He's got the partisanship card. But he can't play the "treats members fairly" card, and he can't play the "empowers the members" card, and he can't even play the "lets members pass their local bills" card.

Trying to paint anyone that opposes you as a traitor to the Party is a strategy that has worked in the past for Republicans, but the national structure of things tells us that people are tired of this. It might work in Texas for a little while Longer, but I think the 2008 elections are going to decimate the effectiveness of strategies like this for a long time coming.

This is, of course, more or less the way that Craddick has run the boat since 2003, but with one major difference. It used to be he would tell members that if they weren't with him, they were against him, and that meant something. Now he's telling voters and laymen that those who aren't for him are against him, and I'm not sure that carries anything like the weight the other version did.