President-elect Clinton ran so hard against a government grid-locked between a Republican presidency and a Democratic Congress that he couldn't get himself stopped.
Even after his own victory over the gridlocked President Bush, Clinton went campaigning in Georgia in a runoff election for the Senate, unsuccessfully urging re-election of Democratic Sen. Wyche Fowler so his Republican opponent, Paul Coverdell, wouldn't help gum up the works in Washington with more gridlock.It's early, maybe too early to forecast, but if the returning Democratic Congress - all its old majority leaders back in charge - runs true to form, President-elect Clinton may regret the day he got himself tangled up in gridlock.
To promise Americans, even to imply such a promise, that gridlock would be broken with his election and the re-election of Democratic majorities in Congress might have been more than a slight Clinton campaign exaggeration.
It may prove to have been a whopper, an innocent campaign pledge to which most Democrats in Congress owe nothing except the usual congressional willingness to stand back and watch Clinton trip over his own rhetoric.
The gridlock issue was and remains a legitimate complaint at the infuriating misgovernment in Washington, a state of affairs - worsened in the past 12 years - in which responsibility and blame are passed back and forth from Capitol Hill to the White House.
The tradition of gridlock dictates that everybody's to blame and nobody's to blame. And that tradition helped drag the government into an extraordinary series of scandals and failures, from the savings and loan industry collapse to an untended national health-care crisis to failed reforms of congressional campaign spending and legislative conduct, with scores of other unsettled issues drifting alongside those.
In his run for re-election, President Bush campaigned briefly on the gridlock issue, but his argument was unconvincing. The nub of it was that some mysterious force for good - never explained - would overwhelm majority Democrats in Congress and produce legislation suitable to Republicans in the Bush second term.
Clinton was the easy winner in the debate over gridlock in the presidential campaign. It was obvious - wasn't it? - that a Democratic Congress would work with a Democratic president and, together in harness, they would set the country on the high road to "change."
What may have been not quite so obvious to Clinton was that congressional Democrats weren't talking much about gridlock, not during the campaign season and not afterward when Senate and House Democratic leaders indulged Clinton with polite smiles when he rejoiced in gridlock's broken grip.
The congressional perspective on gridlock, as it's been told by House Speaker Tom Foley, D-Wash., and Sen. George Mitchell, D-Maine, the Senate majority leader, was that gridlock was all President Bush's fault and he'll soon be gone.
Little by little it may dawn on President-elect Clinton and the experts he's assembling, that a Congress whose shared first concern is always incumbency and re-election isn't much inclined to go lockstep behind a newly elected baby boomer president.
It could also occur to Clinton that he's gone out on a limb and he's out there alone.
When - and if - it becomes clear that congressional Democrats will still place national interest a notch behind their personal political interests, the gridlock Clinton campaigned against might become his own slowly tightening noose.