(FORTUNE Magazine) – Despite the volcanic scandals that periodically erupt for their amusement, the pundits tell us that Washington is dull these days, sunk in a slough of ennui. I hate to say this, but the pundits, for once, are right. In the stuff that makes Washington genuinely interesting--the battle of ideas, the clash of powerful interests--Washington is about as zippy as a Bergman movie. Or worse, a Woody Allen movie imitating a Bergman movie. Or even worse, a review in Film Quarterly of a Woody Allen movie imitating a Bergman movie. Or...

But you get the idea. In any case, the pundits shouldn't be surprised. We were warned months ago that politics was entering a sleepy new era by the very men who are leading us there. Cynics complain that politicians never do what they say they'll do, but that doesn't mean that what politicians say doesn't matter. I recently read the inaugural speech Newt Gingrich gave to the House of Representatives last January, right after his colleagues reelected him Speaker, and then I got out a copy of Bill Clinton's second inaugural, which the President delivered a few days later. They are both remarkable documents, billed as defining utterances at the time they were delivered, and indeed they are revealing: They explain why American politics seems destined to remain, for the foreseeable future, comatose.

The similarities between Gingrich and Clinton are obvious. They're both prematurely gray and chubby-cheeked, wily in the ways of politics, and inexhaustible in their ambitions and appetites. Both, too, have carefully cultivated reputations as men of ideas who have been thrust into politics by their devotion to very different political ideologies.

Reputations, especially in Washington, can be misleading, and this has certainly proved true about the President and the Speaker. Their respective inaugural speeches make the point. Quite often each sounds like the other is supposed to sound. Who, for example, said this: "We need a new government humble enough not to try to solve all our problems for us, a government that is smaller [and] lives within its means." Newt Gingrich, the right-winger? No, that's Bill Clinton, whom Gingrich describes as a "McGovernik." Or who said this: "We have every opportunity through reform to shrink the Pentagon to a triangle." A wild-eyed McGovernik, no doubt? Wild-eyed, maybe, but no McGovernik: It's Gingrich, routinely dubbed an extremist by the White House. By contrast, Clinton boasted about his hairy-chested defense policies: "We will stand mighty for peace and freedom, and maintain a strong defense against terror and destruction."

The speeches offer many more examples of this ideological cross-dressing--Clinton bragging of balancing the budget, for instance, Gingrich extolling the healing powers of government activism, and so on. It can get confusing. Confusion, in fact, may be the point. When the top Democrat sounds like a Republican and the head Republican sounds like a Democrat, the public's expectations for each gets confounded, and both will find it easier to slide off the hook to do...well, nobody can be sure what they will do.

The speeches offer almost no specifics, and to be fair, inaugural addresses seldom do. But they are at least supposed to point in a general direction, to suggest some ideological thrust toward one course of action and away from another. Not these two. The ideology implicit in both speeches is too vague even to be called centrism, since it could be used to justify almost any specific policy. "Today we can declare," Clinton declared, "government is not the problem, and government is not the solution." You can almost see Gingrich pat his tummy and shout, "Hear, hear!"

Well, thanks so much--but what, precisely, does that mean? Which policies would be excluded, and which required, by that philosophy of government? Should we eliminate the estate tax? Reform affirmative action? Build a ballistic missile defense? Invade Canada?

I myself am in favor of all of the above, and maybe Gingrich is too--or maybe Clinton is. Who knows? Their inaugurals--their defining public statements--offer no clue. When political rhetoric is drained of ideas, or meaning and specificity, mush is the inevitable result. So far this year, the President's premier policy proposal seems to be his initiative to get parents to use their child safety seats properly.

And Gingrich's agenda? I'll let him tell you in his own words--in a sentence I swear I'm not making up: "I want to put it right on the table today that everyone of us as leader has an obligation to reach out beyond party and beyond ideology and as Americans to say one of the highest values we're going to spend the next two years on is openly dealing with the challenge of meaning that when we say in our Declaration that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that every child in every neighborhood of every background is endowed by God."

I'll bet the President agrees.