Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 13, 1993 TAG: 9302130079
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
VOICE OF AMERICANS TODAY: LOUD, DIRECT, AND SHARP
Something has gotten into the American people. They're acting like they're in charge.In politics, they chased a one-term president from office. In business, their discontent led to the toppling of chief executives of three multi-billion dollar corporate icons within a week.
"In business and in politics, people are saying they're fed up with people spending other people's money with no accountability," said Ralph Whitworth, president of the United Shareholders Association, representing 65,000 small investors.
"For the politicians, it's the taxpayers' money and for CEOs it's the shareholders' money."
In Congress' first eight days this year, 1,650,143 telephone calls came through the Capitol switchboard - more than twice last year's number.
The day Zoe Baird want to a televised Senate hearing to explain hiring undocumented aliens as household help, the Capitol received 263,947 calls. Two days later, she was gone.
Baird's nomination to run the Justice Department was a flashpoint, as was President Clinton's proposal to permit homosexuals in the military, but evidence suggests people are taking an uncommonly close and continuing interest in affairs that affect their lives - or simply catch their eye.
Behind this turn of events are several factors: the discontent with the status quo that is a driving force in today's politics; the technology revolution that amplifies such discontent; the information explosion that undermines the father-knows-best attitudes that once may have prevailed in government circles and boardrooms.
Talk radio, crackling over nearly 1,000 stations and listened to regularly by an estimated one American in 10, contributes to the explosion of public expression. So does the cheap long-distance telephone call, fallout from the breakup of AT&T. Both invite people to sound off.
Denise Rousseau, professor of organizational behavior at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, said ordinary people no longer fear they may not know enough to have a well-founded opinion.
"They're reading business books, they're into continuing education and they're going to seminars," she said. "People are most likely to take responsibility for their circumstances when they feel that they have knowledge and expertise."
C-Span, the cable network that broadcasts House and Senate sessions, takes some credit. It has a relatively small audience - perhaps a few million at any time - but an activist one. A recent survey says an astonishing 98 percent of C-Span viewers voted last November.
C-Span demystified Congress. With the cameras on, legislators know they are being watched.
Recent history is full of events an attentive public shaped or shook.
Congress' stealthy pay raises a year ago were made for talk radio. So was the House bank scandal, which became one reason for the departures of 110 House members.
The public divided in believing Supreme Court Justice nominee Clarence Thomas and his accuser, Anita Hill, but it was a talk show-fed clamor that forced the hearings in the first place.
Ross Perot tapped into public discontent - and the public airwaves - to make himself a 50-state presidential candidate and the winner of 19 million votes. Term limits, a hot radio topic, were approved in all 14 states they were voted on in November.
The fall of the chairmen of Westinghouse, IBM and American Express, all within a week, was not instigated by little shareholders, but did represent a loss of power by insiders.
Instead of a corporate board, the string was pulled by such collectives as mutual funds representing millions of smaller investors and the $71 billion pension fund representing California's public employees.
Gerald C. Meyers, former chairman of American Motors, said that unlike insulated corporate directors, these "humongous institutions" must heed constituencies that increasingly are "well educated and can think for themselves."
Whatever the source, the public opinion surge has pitfalls too.
Talk show host Diane Rehm of Washington's WAMU-FM, whose inside-the-Beltway audience has grown tenfold in 13 years, worries that sound-off radio oversimplifies issues and distorts what the silent public may be thinking.
"Maybe 2 or 3 percent of my listeners will ever call in," she said. "We elect officials to take more than public opinion into account. They have to do the homework on all these issues that you or I can be so vociferous about."
The outburst of public opinion can add to gridlock. Public opinion is an effective naysayer, but not so good at finding solutions or shaping compromise.
Virtually every congressional office keeps a running tally on calls. In some, the staff is instructed to listen for repeated phrases that would suggest an orchestrated effort.
Sen. David Boren, D-Okla., gets a daily tally on hot issues. "He pays quite a bit of attention," said aide Dan Weber. "But in the end he feels he has to do what he thinks is right. There's always a dichotomy between representing the vocal minority - or even the vocal majority - and doing what you were elected to do."
Tony Blankley, press secretary for House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., dismissed worries of Congress being swept away on a wave of synthetic opinion.
"Members of Congress are nothing if they're not sophisticated in figuring out where the majority of their constituents are," he said.
Still, he added, "the very fact that some people bothered to pick up the phone and call tells you that a certain number feel strongly."
Blankley predicts Clinton and the baby boomers he brought into office will exploit the technology that allows a closed-circuit talk on health care with workers in every urban hospital in the country on Tuesday and with insurance carriers on Wednesday.
"We're going to see a crescendo of communicating, back and forth, not just one way," he predicts.
If so, the American people have just begun to talk - and talk back - to the institutions in their lives.