Foster Caper--Reprise of the Pink Panther? : Clinton’s bumbling could look heroic in ’96 if Republicans don’t stay focused.

You may think that Bill Clinton is the most dithering, irrelevant President since Chester Alan Arthur, but maybe that’s just what he wants you to think. Perhaps the Administration’s bumbling, Inspector Clouseau-like ways are just a disguise to conceal Clinton’s truly Machiavellian guile. Whoa, you say. Is this the same Clinton bunch that nominated Henry Foster to be surgeon general and then spewed forth more misinformation about the Tennessee doctor’s abortion record than a used-car salesman pitching his “lost-our-lease-final-blowout-sale”?

Yes, it is. Admittedly, Clinton’s cleverness is well concealed. But a master pilot never lets short-term turbulence interfere with the long-run flight path. Since we know Clinton’s ultimate destination is reelection, we might ask if the Foster fiasco is part of some grand plan to divert the Republicans from their strongest issues, economic growth and reducing the size of government, and toward their area of greatest vulnerability, the “below the belt” issues of sex and privacy.

For now, the Foster flap energizes Republicans and demoralizes Democrats, who wake up each morning wondering what new revelation about Foster will greet them. But the GOP’s early warning lights ought to be flashing as well. This is the 44th of the 100 days in the “contract with America,” and the Republicans are “off-message”: There is more discussion today of bedroom behavior than of balanced budgets, more time spent pondering hysterectomies than high taxes.

If activist Republicans, scenting prey, get their bloodlust up for the sort of Pat Buchanan-style “culture war” that emerged from the 1992 Houston convention, then Clinton could, like Peter Sellers in all those “Pink Panther” movies, have the last laugh.

Clinton can’t be as dumb as his aides make him appear to be. In 1992, he saw that the Democrats needed a new face if they were ever to recapture the White House, so he gave them one, and it worked. Yet in 1993-94, his “New Democrat” pose was obscured by the Old Democrats on Capitol Hill. But they’re gone now. Today, it is the Republicans who are showing signs of regression. In the last Congress, the Republicans united to oppose first the Clinton budget and then the Clinton health-care plan. The GOP lost the fiscal battle but they won the political war: The Clintons were stamped as Big Government liberals, a label that proved fatal to Clintoncare.

The “contract” was a carefully crafted continuation of the GOP’s less-government stance--a focus-grouped flock of tax and spending cuts targeted to the libertarianism of swing suburbanites. This repositioning of Republicanism was working. As recently as mid-January, Ralph Reed, director of the Christian Coalition, said that his top priority was the enactment of the yuppieish contract.

Then along comes Foster, fronting and centering the ultimate social issue, abortion. Say goodby to cool and cerebral discussions of the flat tax; say hello to hot and visceral wrangling over teen-age sex. Reed is a changed man. Juiced up for Kulturkampf, he now declares that the Republicans must write a pro-life platform and nominate a pro-life ticket in 1996. The sucking sound you hear today is the shrinking of the inclusive “big tent” of Republicanism as Reed and the religious right seek to exclude from presidential or vice-presidential consideration pro-choicers with attractive ideologies and geographies, from New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman to Pete Wilson.

Democratic spin doctors are already composing their attack riffs: “Republicans Dance to the Anti-Choice Tune of Fundamentalists.” And so the tax-and-spend debate that the Republicans can win threatens to be replaced by the fire-and-brimstone brouhaha that the Republicans always lose.

The ideal political scenario for Clinton would be for Foster’s nomination to be voted down by the Republican-controlled Senate. Imagine the drama: Upwardly mobile African American struck down by the likes of Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) One moderate senator, Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), is already stepping back from such a racially charged confrontation, worrying aloud this week that Foster is being “railroaded.”

As for Clinton, he doesn’t need a surgeon general, he needs a martyr to remind pro-choice Middle Americans that on this issue at least, he’s on their side. Just as the GOP won by losing in the 1993 budget struggle, so Clinton could lose the Foster fight and emerge with a winning issue for 1996. And just think--none of this would be happening if the Clintonians had done their homework on Foster.

Is Clinton really that cunning? Probably not. But he may be that lucky.