FOR A POLITICIAN WHOSE POPULARITY stems from the perception that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, Bill Weld has sounded a lot like Joan of Arc lately. At a press conference in Boston last month, the now-former governor of Massachusetts explained that the fight over his nomination to be ambassador to Mexico is much more than a spat over diplomatic qualifications. Instead, he said grandly, it is the latest skirmish in the age-old war between opposing ideologies in the GOP, between tolerant, freedom-loving socially progressive pro-choicers (such as himself) and bigoted anti-abortion troglodytes who have yet to enter the 20th century (such as Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Jesse Helms). It is a battle, said Weld, whose stakes come down to nothing less than “the future of the Republican party.” And nothing — not even a president willing to “give in to ideological extortion” — is going to keep him from fighting it. “If my long-held advocacy for a Republican party that is open and inclusive imperils my prospects to go to Mexico City,” he declared, “so be it.”
Imperils my prospects? As a Helms spokesman pointed out later, Weld’s outburst ensured that he’ll never go to Mexico City, except as a tourist. What was Weld thinking? Even some of his closest advisers aren’t sure, though virtually no one takes the fighting-for-the-soul-of-the-Republican-party stuff seriously. Weld is a canny politician; he must have had some strategy in mind.
Many who witnessed the press conference detected the odor of Dick Morris. Morris has advised Weld over the years (as well as both Bill Clinton and Jesse Helms). Moreover, the position Weld has now assumed — that of a man of principle caught between Helms’s fanaticism and Clinton’s faithlessness — smacks of Morris-like triangulation. Morris himself won’t comment on his involvement in the matter. “My policy is that I never talk about what I do or don’t do with former clients,” says the consultant whose book about former client Bill Clinton is now on sale. But he does allow that Weld’s strategy is nothing short of brilliant. By airing the dispute publicly, Morris says, Weld has forced Republican senators to decide between confirming him and receiving a “gigantic black eye” from pro-choice voters.
There’s only one problem with this prediction: The Senate isn’t going to confirm Weld as ambassador to Mexico, black eye or not. Only a handful of Republican senators have been willing to take stands on Weld’s behalf. Even minority leader Tom Daschle has said that Helms’s stonewalling is not a burning cause among Democrats in the Senate. Weld must know his chances of confirmation are slim to non-existent.
Enter the Weld for President scenario. By taking such a bold stand against Helms, this theory goes, Weld positions himself as the leader of the liberal wing of the Republican party, the much-extolled “moderates,” and solidifies his constituency for the primaries in 2000. It’s an appealing scenario for partisan Democrats, who naturally take pleasure in the thought of Republicans eating one another alive shortly before an election. But this theory, too, has holes. For one thing, social liberals make up no more than 20 percent, perhaps 25 percent, of the Republican party, probably not enough to give Weld a victory in the primaries. For another, Weld is not as strong a candidate as his overwhelming popularity in Massachusetts might suggest.
Despite his well-known charm, Weld came close to losing his first run for governor in 1990. Weld trailed Democrat John Silber in the polls that year until the very end of the campaign. Then, days before the election, Silber self-destructed. Asked by a local television personality to defend his comments on the dangers of day care, Silber flew into a rage. “To hell with this damn program,” he snarled as the female reporter recoiled in surprise. ” I don’t need that. I thought we were having a fairly complex objective discussion.”
Weld’s campaign had been working to portray Silber as an extremist with a dangerous temper problem. It shouldn’t have been a very difficult task, but until Silber blew up on television, it hadn’t been working. Dick Morris made certain that ads with footage of Silber losing control reached every television set in the state. Within a week, Weld was governor.
Weld leaves the statehouse six and a half years later as the most popular Massachusetts governor in a century. He won reelection in 1994 with 71 percent of the vote on a platform tough on crime, welfare, and taxes. And he kept at least some of his promises. During Weld’s tenure, taxes in Massachusetts didn’t just stop growing, they went down. The state’s economy and unemployment rate improved accordingly.
On economic issues, Weld can plausibly lay claim to a Massachusetts Miracle. Still, it’s not clear that, in a presidential race, Weld’s successes would compensate for his liabilities. There are, for instance, lingering questions about the ethical conduct of his administration. An extensive investigation conducted by the Boston Globe in late-1993 found that the Weld administration had taken very large contributions from employees of companies that conducted business with the state, and offered in return “virtually unlimited access to state regulatory officials for such corporations and their lobbyists.” The paper slammed the “corruption-breeding climate that has grown up around the Weld administration,” as well as the governor’s own ” casual views toward political ethics.” Stinging as these charges were, the scandal soon died. A presidential run would be certain to revive it.
Weld might also have an image problem. It’s unlikely that his self-created persona — the patrician eccentric — would play as well in the rest of the country. Weld is widely considered something of a dilettante. While being rich and unserious might help him in Massachusetts — “At least you never had to worry about Weld stealing anything,” says Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr — it’s hard to imagine voters outside of New England electing a president who freely admits being kind of lazy.
If Bill Weld isn’t going to be president, why did he resign as governor and destroy his own chances of being ambassador to Mexico? Virtually everyone agrees that Weld had grown restless in his job. “He was bored with the minutiae of statehouse life,” says Carr. “What really appeals to the average politician — appointing judges, having a state-police driver, cutting a deal by giving a job to some legislative chairman’s nephew — those little day-to- day pleasures wore out pretty quickly for Weld. I think it amused him for a while, but he was always slumming.”
Weld’s ticket out of the tedium of state politics was John Kerry’s Senate seat. Weld had convinced himself that he was going to beat Kerry, even told others that he looked forward to serving on the Foreign Relations Committee. Friends say he was stunned when his campaign fell apart late in the fall and he lost.
If so, Weld collected himself quickly. Within hours of defeat he was referring publicly to his “long and warm relationship with Bill Clinton” and hinting that he might like a cabinet post. By the spring, when it seemed likely he would be appointed ambassador to Mexico, at least one of Weld’s closest advisers warned him that taking a diplomatic post in a Third World country would have no longterm political benefits. Weld ignored the counsel. ” He was doing it because he really wanted to,” says the adviser.
But he wasn’t doing it well. Although Weld had plenty of experience in Washington, he appeared naive about how federal politics works. John Ellis, a Boston political consultant, says he and Weld were playing golf together earlier this year when he asked the governor which well-connected Washington veterans he had asked to shepherd his nomination along. “And he said ‘I’m just putting everything in the hands of the State Department.’ So I said ‘Governor, Jesse Helms hates the State Department.’ He was sort of clueless about it.”
When word filtered back to Boston that Helms planned to oppose his nomination, there was nowhere left for Weld to go. His career at a dead end, the governor seemed to snap. “Weld had no detailed master plan,” says Ellis, who is a leading proponent of the psychic-break theory now popular among Weld watchers. According to Ellis, Weld’s grandiose statements at his July press conference were nothing more than damage control: “It’s much better to go down fighting for the future of the Republican party, or whatever the nonsense is, than it is to be a loser two times in eight months.” Plus, says Ellis, “there’s a little bit of a mid-life crisis going on. He’s behaving, I think, weirdly.”
Or perhaps not so weirdly. There is one last theory to explain Weld’s odd behavior. What if Weld were smart enough (and by all accounts he’s smart enough) to realize that he will never be the ambassador to Mexico or, for that matter, the Republican presidential nominee? What if Weld had decided instead to initiate a break with the Republican party over social policy, keep himself in the headlines for a few months, then suddenly, dramatically, switch parties? (“I’m not leaving the Republican party,” the speech would inevitably begin, “it’s leaving me.”) What then would prevent Clinton from welcoming Weld into the fold with a cabinet post? And wouldn’t at that point Al Gore come to realize that Bill Weld might make a pretty good running mate in 2000, if only for the charm he would bring to the ticket?
Some Republicans are already talking the scenario through. Maybe America would be better off if Helms let Weld have Mexico City after all.
Tucker Carlson is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
