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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (23494)	12/21/1998 12:39:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 67261

Livingston Not Prepared for Whirl of Last 32 Days nytimes.com Or, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, though in this matter, that doesn't seem quite right. I think we should all be expecting more, not less. Sort of a reach on Friedan, Les. The tasteless tag team should like that one, anyway. Back to Livingston: There was nothing in his career like the leaving of it. As Livingston recently said at a college graduation ceremony in his home district in Louisiana, his was a relatively undistinguished life. He spent 16 years as a backbencher in the minority in the House, and then was plucked from obscurity by Speaker Newt Gingrich to be chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He loved it. But it didn't pay enough, and earlier this year, Livingston was ready to leave Congress and work as a lobbyist. Always an indication of a real burning faith in truth, justice, and the American Way, he notes dryly. Gingrich convinced him to stay, on the theory that some day Gingrich might vacate the speakership and Livingston could take over. His chance materialized after the Nov. 3 midterm elections, when the Republicans barely held their majority. Livingston announced his candidacy on Nov. 6, and Gingrich quit the same day. Very strange on that one. Was Livingston a figurehead in the palace coup? Was it an et tu, Bob? deal? Who can say? In all of his public pronouncements, there was nothing grandiose in Livingston's view of the speakership. He struggled to give rhetorical altitude to his fairly earthbound view of his task, which was to make the trains run on time. The most memorable phrase from his announcement of his candidacy was his promise to be "a stay-at-home type of speaker." As opposed to in his private live, where apparently a night on the town was no big deal. In his resignation speech on Saturday on the House floor, Livingston lamented the destructiveness of the impeachment process. "The debate has done nothing to bring us together, and I greatly regret that it has become quite literally the opening gambit of the intended Livingston speakership," he said. And in perhaps one of his most revealing sentences, he seemed near despair: "We are all pawns on the chessboard, and we are playing our parts in a drama." Poor Bob, he didn't know that in this little morality play, nobody gets out alive. Another said that Livingston's taste for power was more than satisfied. In recent days, before he was swept up in impeachment, he told audiences that he was a little nervous about becoming speaker, that from the outside it looked like an incredibly difficult job, and he talked about getting hit with a "firehose" of information. But, he said, he was slowly building up the confidence that "a kid from nowhere" was up to the task. He called himself the Little Engine That Could. "I can do this," he said as recently as the weekend before last, sounding as if he still needed some convincing. Sounds like he just wasn't quite up for the job. He could dish it out, but he couldn't take the heat, to mix metaphors. Poor little Bob sure had it tough, compared to the ever popular Clinton hatred industry. But the Clinton hatred industry is run by professional, non-partisan Republicans, so that's different.