On the chilly morning he unwittingly began to draw the curtain on his public life, Sen. Alan Dixon of Illinois chatted amiably with a reporter outside the Senate chamber.
Dixon was about to stride onto the Senate floor-and into political oblivion-by airing his support for Clarence Thomas, President Bush`s choice for the Supreme Court.
Long viewed as a pol with perfect pitch, Dixon said he had weighed the merits of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill`s testimony against Thomas.
Dixon entertained the doubts of some constituents and staffers, he said, but he was sticking with the president`s nominee.
With that choice, Al the Pal marched into the Senate and told his colleagues-and Illinois voters-of his decision.
As a political miscalculation, Dixon`s was a beaut, and he paid for it in a stunning Democratic primary defeat on St. Patrick`s Day.
But viewed in retrospect, he was in the vanguard of a confused and tentative political class.
These days, you can see the anxiety on the faces of the politicos as they struggle to comprehend the pulsing anger of their constituents.
Given the startling level of public contempt for political insiders, every decision, every roll call and every public utterance is freighted with meaning for incumbents and their challengers.
Every election, it seems, offers a painful and sometimes contradictory lesson for those in public life.
Dixon`s loss, the primary defeats of six incumbent House members and, at this writing, the retirement of 52 more have set political hearts to racing.
Mistakes are likely to prove fatal in this mean season, and incumbency itself is a clear and present danger.
Last week in Pennsylvania, Lynn Yeakel, a first-time office-seeker, throttled the state`s lieutenant governor in the Democratic senatorial primary and set her sights on Republican Sen. Arlen Specter.
Yeakel said her victory signaled a growing public appetite for ”the politics of (life) experience” rather than ”the experience of politics.”
That characterization might well describe the current public infatuation with Texas billionaire Ross Perot.
Elsewhere in the presidential contest, consider the elaborate slow-dance conducted in recent weeks between Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and Democratic members of Congress.
Clinton needed the backing of so-called ”superdelegates” to the Democratic convention, several hundred of whom reside on Capitol Hill.
But Clinton and his advisers agonized over electoral guilt by association, over the inevitable videotape of the candidate posing with congressional leaders now held in minimum regard by the public.
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On the other side of the Democratic equation, platoons of congressional Democrats living in fear of their constituents are convinced the likely nominee of their party cannot be elected in November.
Many of them simply don`t want to run on the ticket with a man viewed by many voters as bearing too many questions about his honesty and credibility.
Clinton and the Democrats did convene last week, after the Pennsylvania primary, and made the best of a dicey bargain. But don`t expect to see the presumptive nominee back on Capitol Hill anytime soon.
Watching President Bush move around on the troublesome issues of the day is a full-time job, but his reaction to the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles and the subsequent rioting reflected his own current level of discomfort.
You could use a lot of terms to describe Bush`s reaction to events in Los Angeles; leadership would not be among them.
Understanding that his party had long ago staked out the law-and-order issue as a ballot-box winner, Bush scrupulously followed his political instincts.
When addressing the mayhem loosed in the streets of South-Central L.A., Bush talked of the ”revulsion and pain” he`d experienced in viewing the mayhem.
When pressed about the verdict itself, however, Bush`s initial reaction was to speak of anger in the abstract, acknowledging ”a deep sense of perceived frustration and anguish,” whatever that means. Eventually he said he was stunned by the verdict.
While Bush spent the better part of two days framing that pose, he was aware of his semiretired critic, Patrick Buchanan.
Campaigning in North Carolina, Buchanan kept Bush tacking to the right as he chided the president for failing to endorse the verdict and condemn the rioters in harsher terms.
It is an uneasy time for the political class, and if you don`t have a quick-and-easy outsider`s answer-Perot style-to the nation`s ills, you`re better off keeping quiet.
In the most volatile election year in a generation, what has often been said of success in Hollywood and baseball might be said of politics: ”Nobody knows nothin` ”