What is weld up to?
Carlson, Tucker
What Is Weld Up To? by Tucker Carlson 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....
...Even minority leader Tom Daschle has said that Helms's stonewalling is not a burning cause among Democrats in the Senate...
...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...
...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...
...A presidential run would be certain to revive it...
...What was Weld thinking...
...There's only one problem with this prediction: The Senate isn't going to confirm Weld as ambassador to Mexico, black eye or not...
...Morris himself won't comment on his involvement in the matter...
...If so, Weld collected himself quickly...
...As a Helms spokesman pointed out later, Weld's outburst ensured that he'll never go to Mexico City, except as a tourist...
...But this theory, too, has holes...
...When word filtered back to Boston that Helms planned to oppose his nomination, there was nowhere left for Weld to go...
...Plus, says Ellis, "there's a little bit of a mid-life crisis going on...
...His career at a dead end, the governor seemed to snap...
...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...
...Only a handful of Republican senators have been willing to take stands on Weld's behalf...
...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...
...Dick Morris made certain that ads with footage of Sil-ber losing control reached every television set in the state...
...Still, it's not clear that, in a presidential race, Weld's successes would compensate for his liabilities...
...He won reelection in 1994 with 71 percent of the vote on a platform tough on crime, welfare, and taxes...
...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...
...What if Weld were smart enough (and by all accounts he is smart enough) to realize that he will never be the ambassador to Mexico or, for that matter, the Republican presidential nominee...
...It shouldn't have been a very difficult task, but until Silber blew up on television, it hadn't been working...
...On economic issues, Weld can plausibly lay claim to a Massachusetts Miracle...
...He was doing it because he really wanted to," says the adviser...
...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...
...Although Weld had plenty of experience in Washington, he appeared naive about how federal politics works...
...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...
...But he wasn't doing it well...
...Despite his well-known charm, Weld came close to losing his first run for governor in 1990...
...Or perhaps not so weirdly...
...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...
...It's unlikely that his self-created persona—the patrician eccentric—would play as well in the rest of the country...
...Stinging as these charges were, the scandal soon died...
...He's behaving, I think, weirdly...
...I don't need that...
...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...
...The state's economy and unemployment rate improved accordingly...
...Weld is a canny politician...
...But he does allow that Weld's strategy is nothing short of brilliant...
...Weld is widely considered something of a dilettante...
...I thought we were having a fairly complex objective discussion...
...Weld's ticket out of the tedium of state politics was John Kerry's Senate seat...
...For another, Weld is not as strong a candidate as his overwhelming popularity in Massachusetts might suggest...
...And nothing—not even a president willing to "give in to ideological extortion"—is going to keep him from fighting it...
...Imperils my prospects...
...It is a battle, said Weld, whose stakes come down to nothing less than "the future of the Republican party...
...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 long-term political benefits...
...Within a week, Weld was governor...
...Weld ignored the counsel...
...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...
...Friends say he was stunned when his campaign fell apart late in the fall and he lost...
...Then, days before the election, Silber self-destructed...
...Tucker Carlson is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard...
...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...
...Weld might also have an image problem...
...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...
...Instead, he said grandly, it is the latest skirmish in the age-old war between opposing ideologies in the GOP between tolerant, freedomloving 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...
...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...
...Weld's campaign had been working to portray Sil-ber as an extremist with a dangerous temper problem...
...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...
...Morris has advised Weld over the years (as well as both Bill Clinton and Jesse Helms...
...I think it amused him for a while, but he was always slumming...
...Virtually everyone agrees that Weld had grown restless in his job...
...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...
...There are, for instance, lingering questions about the ethical conduct of his administration...
...Maybe America would be better off if Helms let Weld have Mexico City after all...
...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...
...During Weld's tenure, taxes in Massachusetts didn't just stop growing, they went down...
...And he kept at least some of his promises...
...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...
...I'm not leaving the Republican party," the speech would inevitably begin, "it's leaving me...
...Weld leaves the statehouse six and a half years later as the most popular Massachusetts governor in a century...
...Weld had no detailed master plan," says Ellis, who is a leading proponent of the psychic-break theory now popular among Weld watchers...
...he must have had some strategy in mind...
...He was bored with the minutiae of statehouse life," says Carr...
...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...
...What then would prevent Clinton from welcoming Weld into the fold with a cabinet post...
...Many who witnessed the press conference detected the odor of Dick Morris...
...Enter the Weld for President scenario...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Weld must know his chances of confirmation are slim to non-existent...
...Some Republicans are already talking the scenario through...
...Weld trailed Democrat John Silber in the polls that year until the very end of the campaign...
...There is one last theory to explain Weld's odd behavior...
...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...
Vol. 2 • August 1997 • No. 47
