Tom DeLay's greatest asset today -- something that has saved him from nationwide backlash to his ethics problems -- is the fact that the American people do not know who he is. As of a February Gallup poll, only 53% of Americans knew enough about the House Majority Leader to form an opinion about him. As Carl Hulse and Adam Nagourney report in today's New York Times, DeLay may have made a tactical error of stupendous proportions in the Terri Schiavo case.

Still, for Mr. DeLay in particular, the decision to step forward in the first place - after weeks in which he had methodically avoided television cameras as he fended off questions about his ethics - may prove to be crucial in what could turn out to be his most difficult year in Congress. While the Schiavo case may have energized his conservative supporters, Democrats and some independent analysts say, it may also have thrust him into the national consciousness at the very moment his opponents are trying to make him a symbol of Republican excess and force another ethics investigation.

"Tom is doing everything backwards from the way I'd be inclined to do it," said one Democrat, Jim Wright, a fellow Texan who himself was forced out as speaker of the House in 1989 after failing to surmount challenges to his ethics. "He seems to want to keep hostility at an agitated level."

Some Democrats have begun drawing parallels between Mr. DeLay and another Republican who eventually became a weight on his party, former Speaker Newt Gingrich.

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It is not just Democrats who share that view. In a regular e-mail commentary he distributes, former Senator Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota, wrote, "If I were a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota in 2006, I would make DeLay the issue in the campaign right now."

Hulse and Nagourney are entirely correct with their assesment of the Tom DeLay situation. Why a man would want to raise his national profile exactly at the time when he is under fire and faces a possible indictment is beyond me.

It is a testament to DeLay's cynicism about the American people and hubris that he would even try to attempt such a move. As has been the case in the past, though, such a move could prove the Majority Leader's undoing.