Bill Paxon's Mysterious Epiphany
Briefly displacing Monica
Lewinsky as Topic A last week was a news flash from Capitol Hill. Bill Paxon, a
well-scrubbed, 43-year-old Republican representative from Buffalo, N.Y., was
retiring. This came as a shock, because Paxon was viewed as an ambitious fellow
with a long career ahead of him. Though he had been displaced from his position
in the House Republican leadership as punishment for his role in the failed
coup against Speaker Newt Gingrich last July, he remained popular with his
colleagues. As recently as a few days before his withdrawal, Paxon had been
busy canvassing support for a challenge to Dick Armey for the post of majority
leader. But instead of announcing his candidacy for a job that would put him in
line to become speaker of the House, Paxon pledged never to run for
anything--not even dogcatcher--again. Like his wife Susan Molinari, who quit
last year to become a news anchor on CBS, he said his move was prompted by a
desire to spend more time with his family.
Despite
the eagerness of the Sunday-morning pundits to embrace it, the official story
does not begin to add up. A purely political creature, Paxon has spent his
entire adult life in two jobs: New York state assemblyman and member of
Congress. Here he was giving up his life's work, with no idea of what he would
do instead, because of an epiphany that seemed totally out of character. His
transformation from someone desperate to spend more time with his colleagues
and less with his family to someone desperate to spend none with his colleagues
and all with his family happened within days. And even if you take his
explanation at face value, why would Paxon rule out seeking elective office
ever again, even after his daughter was in college?
The predictable result has been a plague of rumors, all
nasty and none very plausible. The only remotely convincing interpretation is
that Paxon knew but was not willing to admit publicly that he could not defeat
Armey and that, without a path forward, he lost heart. Beltway outsiders might
wonder why any of this even matters. Paxon is the world's most replaceable
man--a lightweight operator of fungible principles, not especially
conservative, not especially moderate, and with no great or special political
talent. He will be forgotten in months, if not minutes. What is significant
about the episode, and about the haze of innuendo surrounding it, is the way it
epitomizes what the Republican House has become. In the past year, the House
side of the Capitol has become not only an extraordinarily vicious environment
but also an entirely unproductive and unsatisfying one. Paxon's hasty departure
and whatever invisible machinations lie behind it show that the devil makes
work for idle hands. They also show the total intellectual and political
exhaustion of the Republican revolution of 1994.
For over a year, the only
real news coming out of the Republican caucus has been gossip about internecine
warfare, tales about coups and countercoups, ambition, rebellion, and
retribution. The last month has been consumed with especially intense jockeying
and speculation about the leadership hierarchy. Would Paxon challenge Armey for
the majority leader's job (in an election that is nearly a year off)? What
would that mean for the eventual succession to the speakership should Gingrich
quit to run for president? Shortly before Paxon announced his retirement, Rep.
Bob Livingston, R-La., decided that instead of stepping down to become a
fat-cat lobbyist, he would hang around in the hope of winning the speaker's job
after Gingrich leaves. That fueled more kibitzing. Could Armey conciliate the
angry and disappointed class of '94? What would Tom DeLay do? Would there be
another attempt to overthrow Gingrich?
In short,
the Republican House has deteriorated into a sub-Shakespearean Elizabethan
revenge drama. This is hardly surprising. Where there is no strong leader, no
unifying sense of purpose, and no rule of law, political chaos tends to ensue,
as surely in the Longworth Building as in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. But
the fratricidal House is an amazing change from the heady days of early 1995.
Today's policy vacuum makes the gimmicky Contract With America look like
Lenin's What Is to Be Done? Where there was unity and esprit de corps,
there is now factionalism and demoralization. How did the Republican revolution
turn so quickly into a Brooks Bros. version of Lord of the Flies ?
I think there are two important causes. The
first is structural. When he became speaker, Gingrich tossed out the age-old
House rules. He placed a term limit of eight years on himself as speaker and a
limit of six years on committee chairs. In choosing chairs, he suspended
seniority. For example, Gingrich bypassed four more senior members to make
Livingston chairman of House Appropriations. This transformed the political
culture of the House. Advancement no longer had to be slow and steady.
Shake-ups were to be expected. Careers could take off and fizzle suddenly. The
result was a lot of scheming by people such as Paxon who suddenly had an
opportunity to get ahead quickly.
The
second explanation has to do with the political trajectory of the last few
years. The Gingrich Congress has paid a high price for overinterpreting its
1994 mandate. Gingrich almost lost his job, and though the GOP kept control of
Congress in 1996, its leaders have abandoned both the rhetoric and substance of
anti-government radicalism. Lately, they've been hanging back and venturing
little. In 1998, Congress has only 89 scheduled workdays; the annual average
since 1987 is 140. Gingrich now fears controversy the way a convalescent fears
a draft. This means that all the issues that conservatives care most
about--banning affirmative action, cutting taxes, pushing school choice--remain
on indefinite hold. The demagogic gimmicks get ever more desperate and empty.
Their latest is to fix a date for abolition of the tax code--the idea being
that it would force sweeping reform (details to follow).
Gone, perhaps for good, is Gingrich's "visionary" rhetoric.
Replacing it is a litany of Boy Scout-scale good deeds reminiscent of nothing
so much as the pointillist Clinton agenda Republicans mocked so sneeringly
around 1996. In his most recent speech, Gingrich boasted about building F-22s
in his district and improving the water quality of the Chattahoochee River. He
also proposed new ideas: giving cell phones to teachers and--I kid you
not--screening Native Americans for diabetes. The main business in Congress
this week was dividing up $173 billion in transportation goodies.
In a way, the collapse of
conservative principles in Congress only heightens the mystery of why Bill
Paxon quit. The post-revolutionary Republican Congress is an environment in
which he might well have flourished, and where he ought to have felt very much
at home.
