Myers Wins--But Really, Everyone Loses : The White House press secretary hangs on, but Panetta looks weak and Clinton’s pledge to women has cracks in it.

So, contrary to the months of gossip, White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers hasn’t been fired. Instead, she’s getting a promotion--except that she has also said she will let go of the job in three months.

The confusion reminds me of what my mother used to say about dating: If out of kindness or fear you pretend to like a boy you don’t really like, you will end up suffering more embarrassment than if you had summoned your courage and told him to get lost in the first place. Myers has now taught the Clintonites this basic lesson.

After her service during the 1992 campaign, in keeping with President Clinton’s promise of gender diversity in his appointments, Myers got the press secretary’s job. Yet clearly she did not have her bosses’ full trust.

Was it a matter of competence? Did the name Dee Dee seem incompatible with serious power? Was it her youth? Her not-ready-for-Washington looks? The Clintons’ desire to downgrade the job of feeding the press? Whatever the combination, Myers was not treated like a grown-up. She did not occupy the press secretary’s traditional office. She did not get the high-level title “assistant to the President.” She was not allowed to attend some of the most important policy-making meetings.

In a press crisis she often simply did not know enough. So she was stuck behind the curve--peddling the White House version of a story, then being contradicted by events. Even in the best of circumstances it is hard to exert authority over journalists. Myer’s circumstances were sometimes the worst.

Then came the new White House chief of staff, Leon Panetta, with full authority (it was said) to reorganize. He looked at the bad situation with the press and decided Myers had to go. For weeks, unnamed White House sources reminded us of this decision, making sure no one missed the message. According to the script, Myers should have gotten the idea and vamoosed.

But she didn’t and new questions arose: How come, with President Clinton’s big commitment to women, we’re on the verge of having a White House whose only big-deal female figure is--shades of tradition--the First Lady? Yet if Panetta can’t fire Myers, where is the massive authority the President promised him?

Finally the last minute arrives, Myers holds her climactic meetings with the President and he tries to dig out of the mess by splitting the difference. Loyalty and diversity win, sort of. On the one hand, Myers gets her enhanced status. On the other hand, she does so only after saying she’ll leave at year’s end. On the third hand, the end of the year is a long way off; who knows, when it finally comes, whether anyone will be able to dislodge her?

Here are the end results: The President has satisfied neither Myers’ critics nor her friends. It looks as if his indecisiveness and sentimentalism have undercut Panetta.

The much-anticipated White House shake-up has turned into a mere tremor. Panetta looks silly. More dangerous, this man who has a reputation for candor with journalists has now stood in front of them and denied that he planned to get rid of Myers in the first place. In a recent close-up news photo, he looks like a man who just realized that he forgot to wear his shoes to work.

To top it off, Myers’ reputation has suffered and the White House commitment to women looks more than a little insincere.

If they didn’t want her, they shouldn’t have appointed her. My mother could have told them that someday they’d pay plenty for their efforts to have it both ways.