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The problem is he got too big to edit. His writing took a flying leap over the shark somewhere in Executive Orders (a book sadly in need of a good editor to weedwhack out some of the "goes nowhere, does nothing" subplots). When either nobody dared tell him his work needed editing, or he didn't listen, the quality suffered badly. Compare Hunt for Red October with anything from Executive Orders and later. It's night and day. Red October has a crisp, clear, tight plot; recent books have wandered vaguely all over the map. Plus Jack Ryan has gotten so over the top I expect him to go shopping for a cape and a spandex leotard any time now. Jack Ryan the man was awesome; Jack Ryan the superbeing is predictable and boring.
Also, thinly-disguised political screeds rarely make good novels, particularly when they involve equally thinly-disguised copies of certain politicians. The fact that I strongly disliked a certain politician did not make his appearance as a prattling fool in Clancy's books any easier to take; if anything it doubled the dose, since I was now subjected to both the real one and Clancy's straw man (and one dose was already too much).
I half-remember some SF writer having said that some of the best advice he ever got, when he was stuck in writer's block due to being upset some politician, was from famed editor John W. Campbell. It was something like "Write a story about a man whose wife is meeting him at the bus station, and as his bus pulls in, he sees another man kiss her and hurry away. Write that story, and everyone will know how you feel about that meathead politician." What a writer feels strongly about, what they believe, will come through in any story. It doesn't have to be jammed down the readers' throats. And that's where recent Tom Clancy novels fail. Whether or not I agree with an author, I want to read the story, not some political diatribe disguised as a story. When I want my political diatribes of any stripe, there are blogs for that.
Hopefully the past seven years of cashing checks for books he hasn't written has given Tom Clancy time to regroup and start writing awesome books again.
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