What Was Tom DeLay Thinking?

So Tom DeLay has started a blog — although if you take note of the footlines, you’ll see that most of the entries are written by other contributors. Still, DeLay seems to agree with Time magazine, which recently gave its person-of-the-year award to “you” — i.e., all of us who are using the Web to shape modern life and discourse — that small is the new big, and that top-down political power is losing out to grass-roots organizers. That belief is apparently what informed his surprising prediction the other day that Hillary Clinton will be elected president in 2008, likely with Barack Obama as her v.p. He attributed this future success to a powerful liberal coalition including grass-roots movements like MoveOn.org and Americans Coming Together. So now he’s taken to the blogosphere himself to try delivering some D.I.Y. spunk to the conservative movement.

My question is this: Does DeLay really believe that Clinton will be elected, or did he just mean to throw a fear bomb at his constituency? If it’s the former, that would make his prediction a stunningly rare statement of political fatalism. If it’s the latter, it would be one of the strangest political pep talks on record — the equivalent of Vince Lombardi marching into the Packers’ locker room before the first Super Bowl and telling his team that the Kansas City Chiefs were going to kick their ass.