WILLIAM WELD 0, WINDMILLS 1

Politics can be a hotbed of the bizarre, but few events in recent days can match the strange quest of William F. Weld, former Republican governor of Massachusetts, to become ambassador to Mexico.

Consider the strangeness of President Clinton's nomination of Weld, or the fact that Weld would find the post so attractive that he would give up the top elected post in a key state. After all, the prize in this case was an ambassadorship to our neighbor to the south, which has never been a key diplomatic post by any measurement.

Some say Weld had his eye on a run for the presidency in 2000 and would use the ambassadorship to keep his name before the American public. Is that what ambassadors are sent to do? Some say Clinton nominated him so Weld would be out of the way for a Democrat to run for governor of Massachusetts.

Whatever the speculation, Weld didn't count on the unflinching tenacity of U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Helms refused to hold a hearing on the nomination, because he found Weld unfit for a foreign-affairs post.

So Weld quit as governor, a grandstanding move that was supposed to make Helms blink. He didn't. And with virtually no support either from the Republican leadership in the Senate or from the White House, Weld finally tucked his tail and ran.

It's better to know now what Weld is made of than after he gets on the hustings in a presidential contest. The voters can move on to better-qualified candidates now.