No winners in the WeldHelms fiasco

By Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, 09/16/97

WASHINGTON

It was with a mixture of whimsy and sarcasm that former
Massachusetts governor William Weld stood in the White House briefing room
yesterday
and commented on his withdrawal as President Clinton's nominee to be US
ambassador to Mexico.

''Since it's backtoschool time around the country, or
at least everywhere except Washington, D.C.,'' Republican moderate Weld
said with a straight
face, ''I thought I might take just a minute to tell you how I spent my
summer vacation. I sure had a funny summer.''

He proceeded to recount how Clinton had ''reached across
the aisle in the interest of bipartisanship'' and asked him to take the job
and then how ''I
saw this man on television saying Governor Weld is not ambassadorial
quality'' and would not permit him to have a confirmation hearing.

''This man,'' obviously, was Senate Foreign Relations
Committee chairman Jesse Helms, the dictatorial embodiment of rightwing
Republicanism and
senatorial prerogative. Weld went on to recount how he had tried in vain
to meet personally with Helms, believing his own record on drug enforcement
as a high official in the Ronald Reagan administration would satisfy
Helms's stated doubts about him on that issue.

Going on in the exaggeratedly simplistic manner of a kid
giving a
backtoschool report to his classmates, Weld recounted how he was told in
Washington that to get a confirmation hearing, ''you have to go on bended
knee and you have to kiss a lot of rings. Well,'' he went on, ''my mother
and father taught me that I'm no better than anybody else, but also I'm no
worse. So I said I wouldn't go on bended knee and I wouldn't kiss anything.''

Weld continued in that vein, reciting that he learned
that ''in Washington the rule is, all the senators don't have to advise and
consent, even though
the Constitution says they do. And in Washington you do have to go on
bended knee, even if you only want the government to do what the
Constitution says. Well, I sure learned a lot this summer. Washington sure
is a funny town.''

In other words, Bill Weld was bloodied but unbowed by his
encounter
with entrenched power on Capitol Hill. If his real intention was, as he had
said earlier, to fight a battle ''for the soul of the Republican Party,''
he was
clearly a loser, especially when other GOP senators, urged by softspoken
Republican Senator Dick Lugar to defy Helms, headed for the hills. If
Weld's quixotic quest, for which he had surrendered the Massachusetts
governorship, underscored anything, it was the weakness, almost to the
point of nonexistence, of moderate Republicanism even in so nonpartisan
an objective as achieving a fair hearing for one of its own.

In parodying a kid's report on his summer vacation, Weld
no doubt sought to show how childish the whole handling of his nomination
was. But the
part he left out how in his aggressive challenge and personal comments
on Helms he thumbed his nose at senatorial etiquette probably had as
much to do with the way he was thrown over the side as was Helms's own
cavalier and contemptuous treatment of the nominee.

In the end, the whole exercise produced more than one
loser and no
winners, unless you believe Helms can be considered a winner by
successfully defending the prerogatives of Senate committee chairmen. But
in doing so, Helms demonstrated once again why he is such an
embarrassment to his Republican Party and, in many ways, to the Senate
itself. And in declining to take him on, other Republicans who recognized
the unfairness of his arbitrary decision to block even a hearing didn't do
much for their own reputations, either.

The gallantry displayed by Lugar in trying to rally
Republicans to buck Helms fell helpless before Helms's arrogant
intransigence. As for President Clinton, he not only lost a nominee, his
tardiness in backing Weld didn't cover him with much glory. In sum, the
whole exercise was a farce, worthy of Weld's own contemptuous version of
how he had spent his summer vacation.