Havre de Grace. -- Some of the threads used to weave today's lurid political tapestry go a long way back.
For example, there's no doubt that the real godfather of the revolution that took place last Tuesday was Ronald Reagan, and that the circumstances which have just brought us a Republican Congress and a White House in confused retreat have their roots in Mr. Reagan's successes -- and in his failures too.
Immediately upon his election in 1980, Mr. Reagan set out to cut federal taxes and spending. He succeeded at the former, failed at the latter. His success contributed almost instantly to a reinvigorated economy. His failure not only contributed to horrendous deficits, it first exposed the entire federal budget process as the ineffectual sham it has become.
If the voters this year gave the Republicans a mandate -- and if they didn't, it's hard to imagine what that might require -- it's in part the legacy of the potent mix of success and failure, both economic and political, that was compounded in the first year of the Reagan presidency.
But there are other threads in the tapestry too.
It's interesting to recall that in the same year that Mr. Reagan was first elected, the voters of Arkansas threw out their young governor, Bill Clinton, when he sought a second term. He was by all accounts devastated by his defeat, and sought to explain it, in apologetic tones, by saying that he had mistakenly tried to do too much too fast.
"I think maybe I gave the appearance of trying to do too many things and not involving the people as I should," he said shortly after the election.
It was an excuse he would pull out again and again as the years went by -- an appealing one, no doubt, because it was a way of saying that his shortcomings were only minor though unfortunate aspects of his considerable virtues.
Two years later, getting ready to win back the Arkansas governorship, he was still explaining his defeat in the same terms. "I made a young man's mistake. I had an agenda a mile long. . . . I was so busy doing what I wanted that I didn't have time to correct mistakes."
Ten years after that, no longer a young man but still finding it hard to accept blame squarely, this excuse had become such a knee-jerk part of his political personality that it was almost comic, like the shifty-eyed Richard Nixon promising to make everything perfectly clear.
"I still sometimes work hard instead of smart," he told Arsenio Hall before the 1992 election. "I'm a workaholic, I'm always churning and doing things, and sometimes I lose the forest for the trees."
While on vacation last summer on Martha's Vineyard, he explained to a friendly New Yorker writer that "from time to time I tried to do too much at one time. . . . If the president or the team is too overworked and exhausted, then they may be working hard, but they're not working smart."
This week, after the roof fell in, he managed to accept blame only obliquely, suggesting again that in his zeal he hadn't worked "smart." It wasn't anything he did, he explained, that had riled the voters. More likely he hadn't done enough, or the people "weren't aware of what we had done." The possibility that the people were entirely aware of what he and his party had tried to do, and didn't like it, eluded him entirely.
President Clinton's evasions of blame, his inability to concentrate on any one issue for very long, his rages at subordinates, his compulsive talking, are all qualities regularly and even affectionately noted by the press. These are commonplace symptoms to psychologists, and in most people certainly wouldn't be considered serious disabilities.
But the journalist Edith Efron, in an extraordinary and not unsympathetic psychological profile of Mr. Clinton published in the November issue of Reason, argues that while he is undeniably a man of great talents, perhaps even brilliance, he has cognitive disabilities that amount, in the crucible of the presidency, to serious mental impairment.
"After two years, Clinton's presidency has degenerated into chronic crisis and, to all intents and purposes, it is now in &L; receivership," wrote Ms. Efron, weeks before the scope of the 1994 election debacle was clear.
And if it is the uncertain psychology of the president that is the administration's fatal flaw, she goes on, and not his politics or his moral standards, then no staff changes or new position papers will be able to correct it.
The president, while erratic, has in the past proved to be adaptable. He may still be able to play the difficult hand he's just been dealt. But if he can't, the Clinton thread in the national tapestry will turn out to be a short, though colorful, piece of string.
Peter A. Jay is a writer and farmer.