WASHINGTON'S NUTTY PROFESSORS TEACHERS RULE THE ROOST IN THE CAPITOL THESE DAYS. BUT EVEN AS THEY LECTURE THE REST OF US, THEY'RE LEARNING A FEW THINGS TOO.
By DAVID SHRIBMAN

(FORTUNE Magazine) – For years we've been governed by generals and lawyers. We've also sent a postmaster, a cowboy adventurer, an engineer, a haberdasher, a peanut farmer, and an actor to the White House. The nation's outlasted them all. But can we survive the professors?

Never have so many teachers held so many positions of prominence in Washington. There are Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton (both taught at the University of Arkansas law school) in the White House. And among the Republicans on Capitol Hill there's a veritable faculty: Newt Gingrich (assistant professor of history, West Georgia College) sitting in the Speaker's chair; Dick Armey (chairman of the economics department, North Texas State University) serving as House majority leader; and Phil Gramm (professor of economics, Texas A&M) running for President.

It's no secret that the pedagogues in both parties love lecturing the rest of us about the true nature of the country's problems--and how to solve them. What's less well known is the extent to which the professors--especially the Republican Ph.D.s-- have lately been learning some lessons too. Such as:

The government isn't as worthless as they thought. Seven decades ago Calvin Coolidge, no pioneer in the GOP war against boredom, said that "if the federal government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time." We've finally tested the Coolidge thesis, and anyone who needs a passport, a Social Security card, or a college financial-aid form will agree that government sometimes is the answer, not the problem. Surprise of the 20th century: The government shutdown caused more national anxiety than the baseball shutdown.

Dweebs have more fun. Today's Republicans aren't the uptight stiffs of yore: Thomas Dewey, Robert Taft, Richard Nixon, the sort of fellows who looked most comfortable on Wall Street, or at least in Brooks Brothers. The new crowd is off the rack and a bit off the wall.

While no one would mistake Gingrich Armey & Co. for the life of the party, former Delaware governor Pete du Pont has a point when he claims, "There's nothing boring about Newt Gingrich, there's nothing boring about Steve Forbes, and there's nothing boring about Phil Gramm." Like the buttoned-down du Pont, who transformed himself into a fire-breathing revolutionary a decade ago by talking about nutso stuff like privatizing prisons, putting school districts out to bid, and slashing taxes--ideas that don't sound so crazy today--the Republican professoriate are colorful mainly because of their intensity about ideas. Meetings of the House GOP Conference once had all the fizz of a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Omaha. Today they've got all the decorum of Lenin's revolutionary council meetings in the Smolny Institute.

Result: For the first time since the Teddy Roosevelt days, it's the Republicans who are splashy, unpredictable--even funny. "We have more of an ability to laugh at ourselves than they do on the left," Arianna Huffington, the GOP's doyenne-in-training, told me. "Even so, we could use more of it." No argument there.

Candidate Clinton doesn't roll over as easily as President Clinton. Clinton won in 1992 with Michael Dukakis's philosophy, he governed with George Bush's, and he's running for reelection with more than a bit of Newt Gingrich's. But the President began rebounding in the polls when he stopped talking like a professor and started sounding like a preacher. "Bill Clinton's talking values and principles, and we're talking numbers," Frank Luntz, the wunderkind Republican pollster, says with exasperation. "Clinton's showing emotion, and we're not. We sound like accountants."

Balancing the budget isn't as easy in the Capitol as it is out on the campaign. In fact, it looks a lot like the weather, as defined by that great student of political behavior, Mark Twain: Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. The budget negotiations have dragged on so long that I'm beginning to suspect they are really an employment act for caterers. All those folks who argued from the safety of the campaign trail that balancing the budget was a cinch have learned it isn't as easy as it looks--but that the food is pretty good.

Washington isn't a Southern city. There are still some neighborhoods of the capital that haven't dug out from the Blizzard of 1996. Funny thing too, given the fact that there's such call for shovels in Washington these days. But then again, maybe professors don't shovel.

DAVID SHRIBMAN is Washington bureau chief for the Bos-ton Globe and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter.