You Think You Had a Bad Year? These Guys Really Take the Prize

Perhaps, like millions of other Americans, you woke up this morning to find your holiday spirit a bit dimmed by a week of wrapping, unwrapping, day-before-Christmas sales, day-after-Christmas sales, turkey leftovers, eggnog hangovers and sustained exposure to the three most frightening words in the English language: “some assembly required.”

Perhaps you have reached the point where no gift would be more welcome than an opportunity to bellow, “Bah, humbug.” If so, you have come to the right place: Our dyspeptic end-of-the-season awards for the year’s most disastrous miscalculations in American politics. Here we celebrate not the glittering triumph and the cool display of grace under pressure, but the tin ear, the bad bet and the self-inflicted wound.

Faithful readers of this column will recall that we have christened this dubious honor as the Jacques Chirac award. That’s in recognition of the French president who set a global standard for political miscalculation when he called parliamentary elections 10 months early and then watched his ruling coalition swept from power. If Chirac was a real estate speculator, he probably would have spent this past spring stockpiling office space in Bangkok and Jakarta.

The year’s first half produced a spirited competition for Chirac’s mantle. Our early contenders included Vice President Al Gore (for the March press conference when he robotically insisted that no “controlling legal authority” prevented him from dialing for contributions in his office during the 1996 campaign), congressional Republican leaders Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott (for their waterlogged idea that withholding aid to flood victims was a good way to pressure President Clinton) and Hollywood lobbyist Jack Valenti (who thought he could force through a television ratings system whose only demerit was widespread opposition from the parents who were supposed to use it).

The pace remained brisk over the past six months. The scandals hanging over Clinton, which enveloped Washington like a fog bank, provided a steady flow of prospects. Early in 1997, it was primarily Clintonites who wilted under the pressure: Gore with his surrealistic press conference, and Clinton lawyer Robert S. Bennett with his impolitic threat to put Paula Corbin Jones’ sex life on trial if she took her harassment claim against the president to court.

As the year wore on and the proliferating accusations failed to dent Clinton’s approval rating, frustrated campaign-finance investigators began to misstep. Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) served up the hanging curveball of the year when he implied, at a tense hearing last fall, that Atty. Gen. Janet Reno should target a special prosecutor at Clinton because polls showed that most Americans wanted one. Reno promptly pinned back his ears.

Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) sealed the fate of his own Senate committee investigating the scandal when he declared, on Day One, that he would reveal a “high-level” Chinese plot “to subvert our election process.” History may prove such a thing, but Thompson never came close. Though Thompson showed himself a generally able and fair-minded gumshoe, his search for distant conspiracies distracted attention from the scandal in front of his face--the White House’s consuming obsession with fund-raising--and set in motion a cycle of expectation and disappointment that he could never outrun.

Both parties stumbled on the rocky terrain of race this year. Rep. Charles T. Canady (R-Fla.) spent two years hectoring House GOP leaders to schedule floor time for his bill to repeal federal affirmative action programs; then, when they finally agreed last fall, he couldn’t produce enough votes to move the legislation out of committee. Ouch.

Clinton miscalculated even more badly by stacking his racial advisory commission with conventionally liberal thinkers apparently allergic to nuance, dissent or fresh approaches. Though a distinguished historian, John Hope Franklin has proven a maladroit chairman: When he barred affirmative action critics from speaking at a session on diversity, he engraved the image of a panel conducting a monologue, not a dialogue. Once Clinton saw his racial initiative as a key to his legacy; now it looks more like a museum piece--and a missed opportunity to set a new direction.

New directions have been the last thing on the mind of House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.). With an eye on 2000, Gephardt aimed for leadership of the left this year by repeatedly resisting Clinton’s centrist ideas. But Gephardt may have tagged himself as a prisoner of the past by voting against the balanced-budget deal--which even liberal icons such as Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) supported. What Gephardt needs is a way to give his populism a forward spin--which his call for radical tax reform may offer him in 1998.

Another putative tax-reformer who had a rough year was House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas). Armey stumbled when he seemed to encourage a coup against House Speaker Gingrich last summer and then switched sides to warn the speaker at the last minute. Armey says conscience prompted the reversal; the plotters say it was the realization that Rep. Bill Paxon (R-N.Y.) was more likely to inherit Gingrich’s big gavel. Either way, the affair probably ended Armey’s hopes of ever winning the top job.

Clinton made the list again for mishandling his push for “fast-track” trade authority. Clinton doesn’t deserve all the blame for the unprecedented collapse of the free-trade legislation in the House last November. But he did his share: He delayed too long, meekly allowed congressional Republicans to tilt the legislation too far to the right and failed to generate public support once the bill faltered. Now Clinton’s agenda for opening foreign markets is on the rocks--even as the Asian financial crisis promises to swell the U.S. trade deficit.

So who takes the Chirac? In the bipartisan spirit of the season, let’s give two: one to Thompson for subverting his own hearings, and one to Gore for sustained awkwardness in answering questions about his 1996 campaign fund-raising. For a year dominated by a fund-raising scandal that neither crystallized nor dissipated, that’s the perfect parting image: the hound and the fox, both lost in the swamp.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.