On the eve of what is almost universally predicted to be a Democratic White House sweep of huge proportions, the admonition about excessive pride could hardly be more timely. In the old funny papers the model for all this was the stuck-up, stuffy old guy whose black silk high hat was dislodged by a snowball hurled by some scruffy kid. In the new funny papers, which I believe to be the cartoon-strippish account of Washington politics played out across the press and in the broadcast media on the same sort of daily, three-panel, serial take, the guys in the top hats are of course Newt Gingrich and his 1994 congressional majority. They are an object lesson. The Clintonites, who already show early, pre-election signs of terminal self-infatuation, should study them. Their implosion wasn’t about Gingrich’s politics or the ““Contract With America.’’ It was about pride and its treacherous little siblings: giddiness, self-satisfaction, a progressive loss of ability to see anything beyond the circling ring of admirers, photographers and infinitely obsequious appointment seekers.

Military officers know the truth about this as well as politicians do: triumph undermines judgment; headiness is more dangerous than despair; such moments are when you are likeliest to do something really dumb. Gingrich is surely far from being the only example of how this happens. He is just the most recent and vivid example. He seemed to have it all in 1994. He had smarts, power, overnight national celebrity and the likelihood of seeing his face on the cover of everything even marginally respectable on the newsstand. He was in demand. He had to turn down more invitations than he could accept. Big shots from business and industry and media and every other realm, both at home and overseas, were eager to wine and dine and flatter him. The Republican so-called ““revolution’’ he and his colleagues proclaimed was pronounced to be the way of the foreseeable political future.

But those who were riding high in the wake of the ‘94 elections presumed much too much about the intricate inner workings of the individual voter’s mind, and didn’t bother to study it. They presumed it had given them unlimited license. They also underestimated the capacity of Clinton and company to move to ape and co-opt their politics. They took way too much for granted. They overplayed their hand. They tried to get it all at once. You could say that Republican presidential nominating politics had plenty to do with the current troubles the party is in, as did and does the inept campaign of Bob Dole. But the big story, meaning the big turnabout that made the Clinton resurgence possible, was surely the precipitous fall from grace of the revived Republican major- ity of 1994.

Watching the campaign play out, one sees not so much a transfer of power (plenty of power was already in the White House) as a transfer of pride and self-satisfaction and a belief in their own political invincibility from the cocksure Republicans of 1994 to cocksure Democrats of 1996. In the presidential campaign the latter have been smug and unresponsive to the point of arrogance about answering just and legitimate questions concerning some of the scandals that have marked their term. They assume that they are going to win by so much that they aren’t going to have to answer questions concerning campaign slush funds, unsavory deals and the reckless handling of classified FBI files, for example. They junk positions dear to their followers at will and simply assume their followers will go along because they have no place else to go. They repeat assertions about their record and the opposition’s record that aren’t really true, even after they have been called on such assertions. They are quick to characterize tough questions about their conduct as victimization of some sort. There is very little in the air around them that you would mistake for a decent, proper humility. They are, in my view, right at the very dangerous edge of what we may think of as the ““goeth before’’ zone.

I don’t underestimate the seductiveness of their situation. It takes will and discipline and ruthless self-scrutiny to avoid the predictable fall. Gingrich, who went from a celebrity pinup to a national bedtime scare-story figure in a nanosecond of political time, didn’t summon these qualities. And apparently he did not have people around him who could call him back to reality. What about Clinton & Co.? Discipline has not been their strong suit except in following the dictates of campaign consultant Dick Morris. Do they also have the discipline to accept responsibility for the things they did wrong in the first term and that still require adjudication? The discipline to listen to their opposition, even when it has been diminished in Washington? The discipline not to try everything they want at once on the theory that they have prevailed and there is no one to stop them? The discipline to listen for something other than their own self-justification in what the voters are saying? The answers to these questions could have a lot to do with the success or failure of a second Clinton term in office. They could have a lot to do with the tone of that term, too, not to mention what comes after it. There is one sense, at least, in which Newt Gingrich should be foremost in their minds.