““Once Again, Gingrich Is Redefining His Role,’’ you could read in The Washington Post last week, ““After Surviving Latest Crisis, Speaker May Adopt Old-Fashioned Approach to Leadership.’’ The new Gingrich, it turned out, who loves to liken himself, sequentially, to different, exalted business, military and political types in each newly adopted role, was, this time, by conscious design, about to become Tip O’Neill. Better, I suppose, than Pitt the Elder or Kublai Khan, but to my mind no more plausible. Does any other country have leaders who recurrently let it be known that they are about to become someone else, usually Teddy Roosevelt but occasionally also FDR and, as I recall, once even Lord Melbourne? Did this country use to have such leaders? (““George Washington, according to aides who declined to be identified, intends to campaign next year as Socrates. They said the president thinks the Cincinnatus thing isn’t working. “He will be a thinker, not a self-disciplined former doer,’ they said. “It will work better, given the politics’.’')
As everyone over the age of consent well knows, the only people who can transform themselves this way and actually believe in it are 4i-year-old girls named Christie who suddenly will answer only to the name of Sonia and indignantly remain Sonia for however long it takes. In grown, formed, observable politicians, it is preposterous. They can mature, but not self-transform. And, since all the most justly admired leaders are generally admired precisely for a kind of wholeness and unchangeable integrity of their bearing - from an Ike and a Truman to a Nelson Mandela - you would think they would get the point. I see this as just another variation on the flight from responsibility: ““Oh, that. It happened when I was still Pope Leo IX. Doesn’t count.''
Speaking of the flight from responsibility and a decline in the quality of lying, did you follow the straight-faced explanations of the men who planned the coup against Newt Gingrich? Or did you get so embarrassed you just changed stations or turned the page. Try some more historical transposition: ““Brutus denied last night that he actually had intended to participate in the attack on Julius Caesar. He said he wouldn’t have done what he did except that he was unusually tired. In a related development, AP reports that Cassius says that although he attended all the meetings, he never understood what they were planning to do.’’ I’m using here a couple of the ““explanations’’ that participants in the bumbled Newt-purge actually looked us in the eye and said. I could think only of what was to become an incandescent moment in a nearby city a while back when a wealthy merchant, caught in the sack with a girlfriend by his wife and her detective who burst into the room, desperately and inventively cried out the only thing he could think of: ““It’s not me!''
Attempts at deception, especially from politicians, used to be a whole lot better and, frankly, less insulting to the would-be deceptee than that, and the same is true concerning my final example, the Great White Excuse, Jesse Helms. ““Oooooo!’’ the senators squeal, ““brrrrrrrr . . . we’re so afraid of him! He’s so powerful.’’ But except for their unnecessary indulgence, he’s not. It’s a scam. Helms is a small, contained accident of seniority with a big mouth whose consequences could be reversed with a modicum of effort at any time, because he has no purchase on power. Unlike those who famously had it in the past, and a tiny handful who still do, he plugs into no important levers, controls no important network, has relatively scant rewards to offer and penalties to impose on his own. He is in fact only a convenient bogey for others who use his mythical ““power’’ to justify their own cravenness. And most important, such power as he has is strictly a function of their own willingness to let him push them around.
Understand, I’m not talking of a failure of courage on the part of Helms’s innumerable enablers. It doesn’t rise to a question of courage, because something far less than courage is required to take him on: a willingness to just get your hairdo a little mussed up, that’s all. He could probably even be taken down, or brought to heel, by a coup of fools such as the one that tried out for the Sunday-night funniest home video show last week.
I’m not even thinking mainly of the William Weld brouhaha here. For years now, people in Washington who have asked why Helms, in more straightforward cases, was allowed to keep the American government from having diplomatic representation in important capitals around the world for months and months on end, finally only to permit someone he had publicly humiliated and half-wrecked to turn up limping in the designated country, got the same answer: ““Oh, he’s only going to hold it up a few months. Eventually, he will let it pass.’’ Why didn’t the so-called leaders ever challenge him on these gratuitous little cat-tortures-mouse things, on his nonsenatorial, noncollegial, boastful, egomaniacal dictates to them and everyone else? Not because he is powerful, but because they are indifferent and weak. So don’t believe in the Invincible Jesse, either. This country deserves a higher level of mendacity from its leaders. It doesn’t seem a lot to ask.
