Rarely has the adage “be careful what you wish for” seemed more apt than it does in respect of the Democratic Party’s glee over the fall of Thos. DeLay. Leaders of the minority party, not to mention their supporters on the coasts and their cheerleaders in the blogosphere, have certainly gotten what they claim they wanted. Mr. DeLay will be resigning his House seat before the yellow roses start blooming in Texas later this spring. Which means Democrats will have to find something else to talk about.

Even in respect of lobbying scandals, the Democrats have been more successful at obscuring the issue than Republicans. The real scandal lay with Jack Abramoff and the legislative aides with whom he and his corrupt lobbyists conspired. Mr. DeLay was at the center of a different “scandal” – congressional Republicans’ abandonment of many of their party’s animating small-government principles once they gained a majority, a trend documented in these pages by Jack Newfield, among others. But you won’t be hearing Democrats saying much about that.

In other corruption cases that have surfaced of late, such as the Randy “Duke” Cunningham military appropriations scandal, the Republican party didn’t exactly circle the wagons around its dishonest members. Contrast that with the Democrats, who last month hosted a fundraiser for Rep. William J. Jefferson, the Louisiana Democrat whose former chief of staff has pleaded guilty to facilitating bribes that allegedly bought the support of an unnamed congressman, understood to be Mr. Jefferson, for African telecommunications deals.

What the Republicans need to worry about is not only the integrity of their leadership but the integrity of the agenda they rode into power in 1994. But Democrats aren’t likely to campaign as the party of smaller government. Rather, Democrats appear to have been counting on their ability to create a general impression, however detached from reality, that Mr. DeLay had single-handedly criminally corrupted what had been, before his arrival, a pristine institution. Their chief weapon was a questionable campaign finance charge brought by a district attorney in Texas. Mr. DeLay has now disarmed them.

Democrats will now be racing the clock in hopes of finding some kind of positive agenda before the public tunes out story after story about low-level aides and no-name representatives. Given the lackluster national security agenda they just released, their chances don’t look good. They might take a page from Mr. DeLay’s playbook. He was, after all, part of a leadership team that unseated a four-decade Democratic majority not only by highlighting corruption but also by offering a real policy agenda. And despite his shortcomings, he achieved some notable successes, like passage of President Bush’s tax cuts and tough votes on bills like the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Now that he has stepped aside, the public will have ample time to ponder whether a Democratic leadership would have done even that well.