Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 1, 1995 TAG: 9501040028
SECTION: EDITORIALS PAGE: F-3 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS ASSOCIATE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Generally accepted punditing procedures allow for two chief methods, Janus-like, of Taking Stock.
One way is to look backward, and rate the most important events and trends of the year just ending - as if the significance of said events and trends can possibly be measured when all but their very earliest consequences are yet unknown.
The other way is to predict the most important events and trends of the year just beginning - as if said predictions from pundits and columnists are any better than those from the usual run of palm readers, crystal-ball gazers, tarot-card turners and professional economists.
To look a few months into the past or a few months into the future is, by today's standards, to take the long view indeed. That's part of what's exciting. So is the hope, springing eternal each New Year despite evidence to the contrary, that the incoming year will be better than the outgoing.
Risk, too, is exciting, and predicting the future is risky.
To paraphrase the late Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean's aphorism about bragging, it ain't hubris if you've done it.
Thus, I shall not allow false modesty to prevent me from noting that on the Friday before Election Day in November, I - alone among my colleagues in this department - predicted that the Republicans would win majorities in both houses of Congress.
On the other hand, it would be hubris not to acknowledge imperfection. My prediction that Florida would elect a Gov. Bush while Texas wouldn't was, embarrassingly, wrong on both counts. Those and other miscalls cost me outright victory in the contest for the office's prognostication prize, lunch at the losers' expense.
Finishing in a tie for first among four, in other words, ain't much to brag about - and serves as a reminder that, in going public with predictions, the psychic rewards for occasional hits aren't worth the humiliation of the more-than-occasional misses.
So instead of predicting, I'll just pose three questions for the New Year.
No. 1: Will Bill Clinton's irrelevance matter?
This Zenlike query assumes that the Nov. 8 election results indeed rendered the president irrelevant to the issues that preoccupy most Americans. But the assumption seems so widely accepted, including by Clinton himself as exhibited in his marginally more responsible mimicry of the GOP's tax-cut voodoo, that I take it as a given.
Even so, a Supreme Court seat or two might open up, and any president has a measure of foreign-policy leeway. In those areas, Clinton might have a chance to matter despite his perceived irrelevance.
OK, one prediction: If Clinton were to lengthen his record of impressive Supreme Court nominations, or score another foreign-policy success like Haiti (so far, anyway), he'd get little credit for it.
Clinton is irrelevant because it's also widely presumed he can't win re-election. He might, though ... if the Republicans run Attila the Hun. But Pat Buchanan won't get the nomination.
Or will he? After all, the Virginia branch of the GOP managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by nominating Oliver North for the U.S. Senate.
Let us leave the subject: It is speculation for not this New Year but the next.
No. 2: When will Newt Gingrich self-destruct?
My guess (but no prediction): not in '95. The incoming speaker of the U.S. House continues to have too much going for him - a talent for accruing power, the respectful support of junior House Republicans, an angry style that matches the electorate's current mood - to flame out so soon.
But he's awfully intense to last for very long in national power. Even in his own white, Republican district in the Atlanta suburbs, he usually fails to reach 60 percent of the vote against Democratic opponents (though he did get 64 percent in '94).
It's the laid-back dudes (or those who appear to be) - the Eisenhowers, the Reagans, the Tip O'Neills - whose popularity endures. Granted, the November elections cost the somnolent Tom Foley not only the speakership but also his own seat in Congress. Still, for a Democrat in a Republican district, Foley's 30 years was a mighty long trip to Capitol Hill.
Caution: Whatever Gingrich's own fate may be, it probably would be a mistake to assume that the fate of congressional Republicanism rides on it.
No. 3: Has George Allen already begun to self-destruct?
Again, my guess (but no prediction): no. Allen is following through on his no-parole campaign pledge, and he is, after all, one of the laid-back dudes.
His budget proposals strike me, and perhaps other Virginians, as a transparent attempt to cash in the commonwealth's fiscal integrity for short-term political gain.
But the one-term limit makes the Virginia governorship a short-term affair as well; after 1997, Allen won't be in the statehouse to take credit or blame for the consequences. Nowadays, responsibility is something for welfare mothers to learn, not anti-tax politicians to observe.
Legislative Democrats, with their nominal General Assembly majorities, might muster the gumption and unity to resist Allen's budget proposals. But I can't tap out that sentence on the ol' computer keyboard without laughing at its improbability. As a prediction, you sure didn't see it here first.
by CNB