Just Another Humdrum Week in Washington By Richard Craig November 7, 1998

I'm sorry -- I've been out of town for a week or so. Anything important happen while I was gone?

One week ago, President Clinton looked desperate. He was facing the election that would likely provide the roster for his impeachment jury. After all, the sitting president's party always loses seats in midterm elections, and Clinton couldn't afford to lose even one congressional ally. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich was licking his chops in anticipation of Republicans picking up 30 or 40 seats in the House.

One week later, the GOP is in disarray after losing seats in the election, Gingrich has resigned, and the Democrats are on top of the world.

Huh??

Yes, as of right now, everything is topsy-turvy, upside down, inside out and just plain bass-ackwards. The verdict is in, and judging from the early analysis, the American people apparently hate Gingrich's self-righteousness and merely dislike Clinton's skirt-chasing.

Actually, this is far too simple to explain Tuesday's political earthquake (and Friday's significant aftershock). What happened here was a fairly complex mixture of the Republicans misreading the tea leaves and the voters making up their own minds.

Gingrich and his friends appear to have grossly miscalculated public sentiment. By attempting to make this election a referendum on Clinton's dalliances rather than about their own plans for the country, they jumped to a couple of conclusions. They naïvely assumed that people would take out their distaste for the whole Clinton mess on the nearest Democrat, regardless of that official's own ideas and plans. They also assumed that Clinton had become a universal pariah -- a whipping boy for all seasons.

They must not have looked at the same poll numbers as the rest of us. The simple truth is that Americans appreciate Clinton's accomplishments more than they deplore his affair. On Tuesday, voters showed an unprecedented willingness to separate the man from the job -- they simply refused to create an impeachment-hungry GOP lynchmob in Congress. They also showed the ability to distinguish between an individual candidate and the most visible member of his party. Clearly, the Republicans did not anticipate this.

By allowing his party to be blindsided at a time when the opposition was perceived as vulnerable, Gingrich immediately became the new man on the hot seat. With all that was at stake in Tuesday's elections, Gingrich could not afford a debacle such as this one. While there were a lot of close races nationwide, this was a time for the GOP to strike hard at Clinton, not to stumble at the last minute.

Hardly the most popular member of the House even in his heyday, Gingrich recognized immediately that these results spelled trouble. He spent the next few days making dozens of phone calls to gauge his support. What he found was not encouraging. You can get away with arrogance and hypocrisy when you're the leader of a new wave taking over Congress, but not when your party has lost big in the last two elections.

Rather than idly awaiting his own political execution, Gingrich decided to cut his losses and head for greener pastures. He'll undoubtedly surface on CNN, on some high-profile new political show alongside one or two other deposed big wheels. In the interim, Gingrich's home state will get to pay for a special election to fill his three-day-old seat in the new Congress. Gingrich the legislator would have been appalled at such a waste of public money.

The simple truth is that in this campaign, the Republicans were so lost in the euphoric haze surrounding the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that they forgot that America doesn't really care. They proudly adorned their cars with bumper stickers proclaiming "Don't Blame Me -- I Voted for Dole." But America's response has been, "Blame you for what? The booming economy? The balanced budget? The plummeting unemployment figures?" The simple truth is that for most Americans, the good outweighs the bad right now.

In the wake of this complete restructuring of the political landscape, one question absolutely begs to be asked. What would have happened in this election if Bill Clinton hadn't become a national laughingstock?

If you have a good answer for that, you're smarter than I am.

©1998 Richard Craig. All rights reserved.

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