Denny the dullard: speaker of the House Hastert's all-too-revealing autobiography.

• Author: Oliver, Charles
• Position: Speaker: Lessons From Forty Years in Coaching and Politics - Book Review

Speaker: Lessons From Forty Years in Coaching and Politics, by Denny Hastert, Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 312 pages, $27.95

THOSE WHO CAN, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, coach. And those who can't coach become speaker of the House of Representatives.

OK, that's a bit unfair to Dennis "Denny" Hastert. In Speaker: Lessons From Forty Years in Coaching and Politics, he tells us that in his 16 years coaching high school wrestling, he produced one state championship team and almost a dozen individual state champions and was once named state coach of the year in Illinois. That's not a bad record. Then again, Lou Albano managed 18 world tag team wrestling champions, two intercontinental champions, and one world wrestling champion in the WWWF (later WWF and WWE). And no one seems to be seeking his political leadership.

Still, Hastert says his experience in coaching taught him several lessons

that have propelled him to political success, such as "Never underestimate your opponent" and "Never rely on your opponent to help you win." (Aren't those really the same thing?) The real lesson of this book, however, is that it's physically dangerous to stand between Denny Hastert and higher office. One of his longtime aides once summed up Hastert's rise to power as "illness, illness, scandal, and dumb luck." That's no joke. (No, really--Hastert's jokes aren't that funny.)

In 1980 Hastert lost the Republican nomination for an open seat in the Illinois legislature. Just a few weeks later, the other Republican who represented the three-seat district had a stroke and gave up his nomination for reelection. Party bosses picked Hastert, and he won.

Six years later, after U.S. Rep. John Grotberg (R-Ill.) was nominated for a second term, he was diagnosed with cancer and fell into a coma. The Illinois state Republican convention drafted Hastert, and the wrestling coach was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 1998 House Republicans were growing tired of the leadership of Newt Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who had masterminded the GOP takeover of the House and his own rise to the speaker's chair four years earlier. "He would have good ideas; he was just amazing with good ideas," Hastert writes. "The problem was he would have three good ideas a day. He'd give me the job of following through on at least one of them. I'd still be working on this one idea that was, say,, two weeks old when all of a sudden he'd change course."

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