In Boston they love their losers. If you lose selfishly — but do it with a certain blase style — they love you all the more. And if you claim virtue while you’re at it . . . well, then you’re William Weld, bucking for Beantown sainthood.
The saga begins in November 1994, when Weld gets himself reelected governor of Massachusetts. He immediately leaks word that the office bores him silly. Maybe he’ll run for president! It doesn’t work out. Instead, he spends part of 1995 working for Pete Wilson’s campaign. That doesn’t work out. So Weld announces that his gubernatorial work is done, less than a year after reelection, and that he is now needed in Washington as a U.S. senator. That doesn’t work out; John Kerry beats him handily on November 5, 1996.
On November 6, 1996, Weld tells the Boston Globe that he is delighted to be back on Beacon Hill. He will be a “high-performance governor” for “the next two years.” And, no — with total nonchalance — “I don’t feel disappointed.” Red Sox fans go wild. Weld’s poll numbers soar.
But within a week, like Ted Williams hocking a loogie at the Fenway box seats, Weld is on the phone to the Clinton White House, begging for a new excuse to quit his job. “Sources close to the governor” start reporting that he might replace Janet Reno as attorney general, or might become secretary of commerce, or undersecretary of state. These sources remind everyone that Weld would be a good fit for the Clinton administration because he has “never dipped into the vitriol that came out of the Republican right wing.”
Of course, signing up with Bill and Hillary would further restrict Weld’s already limited influence over the national Republican party. But the ideological character of the GOP is no longer a serious concern for him, ” well-placed sources” insist. Weld, after all, is already badly “alienated” from his party and “not optimistic” about his role in it. Let some other Brahmin dirty himself herding the right-wing untouchables back to their primitive villages. Bill Weld has an urgent career move to make.
He doesn’t get the Janet Reno or Commerce or State Department gig. So he threatens to break a termlimits promise and run for governor again in 1998. The Kennedy family is alarmed. They want a clear gubernatorial field for Congressman Joe. And that does it. The White House is suddenly eager to rescue Weld from Boston. In April it offers him the ambassadorship to Mexico.
This kind of scheming happens all the time in politics. What has happened since is rare, indeed.
As the world now knows, Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate committee that must approve such nominations, has quietly but firmly made clear that he thinks Bill Weld’s views on illegal drugs are incompatible with U.S. diplomatic goals in Mexico City. Helms refuses to hold a confirmation hearing. The impasse has official Washington flummoxed.
There is the problem of protocol. Weld has behaved like a boor. Last month, Weld convened a freelance press conference during which he essentially called Jesse Helms a liar. At the same event, Weld issued an even more spectacular provocation, questioning the president’s courage in the face of Republican ” extortion.”
Under ordinary circumstances, an ambassadorial nominee would be dropped like a rock for such an outburst. But the White House is worried over President Clinton’s reputation for the quick, dishonorable cutand-run. They have reluctantly decided to go with Weld “to the mat,” in spokesman Mike McCurry’s words. Only they don’t want to mess up their working relationship with the Foreign Relations Committee, so McCurry is quick to add that the administration will not actively support “anything that circumvents the authority of Chairman Helms.”
No, circumventing the authority of Chairman Helms is something Republicans will have to do. They should not.
William Weld has resigned his governorship, he says, to fight his battle for confirmation full-time. That’s bunk. Mexico was his fourth-choice parachute, and resigning the governorship was always the bottom line. The rest is pure gravy. But the gravy is very rich. Weld has turned his nomination into a vote of confidence by the Republican party on its own ideological soul. “I am not Senator Helms’s kind of Republican,” Weld thunders, because “I do not pass his litmus test on social policy.” Weld must be confirmed to his ambassadorship, he warns. Otherwise, the GOP will have proved itself, once and for all, a philosophically closed and exclusive shop.
Bunk again. Congressional Republicans are seething about the empty symbolism of the entire affair. Bill Weld is pro-choice and whatnot, sure. It doesn’t matter much. He is not now being “excluded” from anything by Jesse Helms. Helms has privately offered to confirm Weld to another ambassadorship – – India, for example. Weld has rebuffed the offer. Come to think of it, conservative Republicans have never excluded Weld from the party’s ranks in any meaningful sense. They have campaigned for him, as a fellow Republican, in his races for governor and senator. They have raised money for him. Their only sin, so far as Weld is concerned, is that they refuse to be ashamed of what they think. That is what he’s demanding they do now: roll Jesse, knuckle under, acknowledge their own vulgarity, apologize.
At least since its Houston convention in 1992, the Republican party has feared the disdain of the world’s Welds. It’s no fun being called a troglodyte. Over in the House, Newt Gingrich has spent most of the past two years fleeing that label. He now lusts for an opportunity to provide ” bipartisan leadership across the planet,” whatever that means. Behind the scenes, and increasingly in public, an alarming number of Senate Republicans are trying to figure out a way to do Gingrich one better. They are searching for a way to give Bill Weld his prize.
Symbolism matters. In American politics right now, it’s all too often all there is. Weld has provoked a purely symbolic battle. It’s a battle Republican conservatives can’t afford to lose. Some people think Jesse Helms and his GOP colleagues are cavemen. They will think that anyway, no matter what happens. But Republican voters who admire Jesse Helms and his colleagues — for their ideas — will smell weakness and defeat should Weld find his way to Mexico. And their noses will be right.
It’s time for the Senate majority leader to make his presence felt. Trent Lott should make it unambiguously clear that he’ll stand by Helms. He should enforce a little party discipline. He should act to prevent Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee from end-running the chairman. Then Sen. Lott should let President Clinton know that if he wants bipartisan cooperation in a whole host of areas, he should withdraw Weld’s nomination sooner rather than later. Bill Weld’s had his fun. It’s time for Trent Lott to squash him like a bug.
David Tell, for the Editors
