OFF TO THE RACES
House Republicans will elect their leaders for the 106th Congress on Wednesday. Bob Livingston will be elected as the GOP candidate for Speaker (he will then face a formal vote before the entire House in January), and Tom DeLay is unopposed for another term as Majority Whip. Dick Armey looks like a good bet for House Majority Leader versus Rep. Jennifer Dunn (Wash.) and Rep. Steve Largent (Okla.). (Armey has 57 public backers, compared to 22 for Dunn and 33 for Largent, according to the Hotline as of midday 11/17; the winner probably will need about 110 votes.) Armey's staff even says that their boss will win on the first tally. Last-minute machinations, however, keep the race close: There are rumors of Dunn endorsing Largent in exchange for some kind of undefined leadership role, as well as talk of drafting Rep. Dennis Hastert (Ill.) for the job. Armey, however, appears to the be the second choice of many Dunn and Largent partisans, and the nature of leadership races makes it highly unlikely that a candidate who has not personally canvassed for votes can win. (Hastert, for his part, has endorsed Armey, though he seems to have stopped short of disavowing the draft movement.)

The fight for Conference Chair, the fourth-ranking post, looks even closer. Incumbent John Boehner is deadlocked with Rep. J.C. Watts (Okla.). (The Hotline counts 46 public endorsements of Boehner, versus 41 for Watts.) This one could go either way. Although incumbents generally have an edge, Watts appears to have momentum.

SHOWING HIS COLORS
In the current issue of the New Yorker, writer Joe Klein describes "the present era of personal political assault--an era that some observers hope may be coming to an end with Gingrich's departure as the current Speaker, his replacement by Bob Livingston, and Bill Clinton's settlement of the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case." This is quickly becoming Washington's liberal conventional wisdom: Now that Gingrich is gone and Jones is paid off, will the Republicans please grow up?

As the author of Primary Colors, Klein is in no position to bemoan "the present era of personal political assault." The elegiac tone of his article, which mourns the passing of a fabled bipartisan comity, is equally absurd. The anti-war protesters - some of them establishment Democrats who had supported the war until the minute they left office - who adopted such cheery tactics as pouring blood on the steps of the Capitol to attack Richard Nixon's inhumanity make no appearance in Klein's seven-page essay. Klein blames contemporary political incivility on Boomer politicians, but the Boomers' alleged youthful idealism is still a shibboleth for him as for Clinton. Unsurprisingly, the key Boomer politician who caused civility in Washington to go down the tubes was a certain Georgia Republican. ("Newt Gingrich arrived in 1979, a professor and political activist who had only read about the wartime horrors that Bob Michel had seen," writes Klein, who has given the tiresome Michel yet another forum to slam his former GOP colleagues.) What Klein and other left-leaning pundits really miss are the days when Republicans knew their place: under the thumb of a Democratic congressional majority, right alongside Bob Michel.

Klein also lobs a bomb at Ken Starr, making a none-too-subtle comparison to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. (Talk about "the present era of personal political assault"!) He also dismisses Starr's labors at exposing President Clinton's perjury and obstruction of justice: "The subsequent investigations by Kenneth Starr's prosecutorial team ... seem more a sort of political harassment than the pursuit of serious legal or ethical lapses." There's even a casual reference to "the Lewinsky perjury entrapment." Yet Klein dresses up his charges in snazzy New Yorker prose, so he won't ever be accused of Newt-like "bomb-throwing." But the effect is the same. It's a personal political assault against the entire Republican Party.