Craig Livingstone, the Humpty Dumpty who sat on the FBI files, was spectacularly unqualified to head White House personnel security - a campaign gofer and sometimes political op.
His appointment is further confirmation of what was apparent at the time: The early Clinton White House was a Three Stooges comedy - bumblers amok.There's a lesson here for voters. Beware of candidates campaigning as outsiders disdainful of Washington. Some really are.
It took Clinton two years to realize he'd better bring in some Beltway pros to save his presidency from the Arkansas overachievers and Renaissance Weekend whizzes who were walking into walls and tripping over footstools.
All that said, the nominees for least-convincing actors in a detracting role this year are the congressional Republicans who have drawn themselves up in maidenly horror at the discovery that Livingstone, in his own selfaggrandizing words, had been a "senior consultant to counter-event operations."
What that apparently meant in practice was that Livingstone was in charge of the guy in the chicken suit who went around mocking incumbent President George Bush for resisting debates with challenger Clinton.
Republicans report themselves in a near-faint at the sight of such, as they put it, "dirty tricks."
Time out.
There's a difference between campaign pranks and dirty tricks. Pranks are funny. Dirty tricks are mean.
All this tit-for-tat goes back to a Democratic jester named Dick Tuck who drove Richard Nixon bananas. (It was a short drive.) Tuck, for instance, hired very pregnant women to show up at Nixon rallies with placards bearing the GOP campaign slogan "Nixon's the One!" Funny, sort of.
The snappy retort of the Nixon creeps was creation of a secret campaign unit, eventually with 28 people and bankrolled from an illegal slush fund. Not funny. It:
- Stole stationery from the primary campaign of Democratic Sen. Edmund Muskie and sent out letters on it accusing nomination rivals Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson of sexual misconduct.
- Faked a Humphrey press release falsely saying Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a would-be nominee too, had been confined in a mental hospital.
- Investigated the personal lives of newspaper columnists the campaign judged unfriendly.
- Sent phony invitations to a Muskie dinner in Washington to African ambassadors and provided limos for them. (Harassing Muskie and humiliating the diplomats. But, hey, to Nixon's "Southern strategy," the Africans were just jumped-up wogs anyway.)
Two members of the dirty-tricks units did prison time. If it ever turns out the FBI files were misused, Livingstone may some day qualify as an ex-con, too, but running Chicken George and hiring folks to wear Pinocchio noses is only juvenile, not felonious.
Barring felony or evidence of evil intent in acquiring the files, the embarrassment the administration is suffering is about the right comeuppance for its early-days failure to grasp the potential for misadventure.
Now, about that walking cigarette that's stalking Bob Dole rallies. . . .