
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 26, 1993                   TAG: 9305270316
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

POLICY MIRE

THE CLINTON administration has become mired in side issues to the detriment of the top-priority ones. For that, the president himself is due much of the blame.

Every minute and piece of political capital expended on the question of gays in the military, for example, is a minute and piece of capital lost for deficit reduction or health-care reform.

But you can't blame Clinton for all of it.

The national media - and the public, if it's true that the media are responding to consumer demand - display an infatuation with trivia these days that confounds and complicates policy-making, as does the contemporary disengagement of bumper-slogan political demands from their consequences.

Americans apparently have developed an intense interest in the subject of first-family haircuts over the past week and a half. Initial discussion of Hillary Clinton's new - and costly - hairdo soon gave way to criticism of the president's $200 job, administered last week by a Beverly Hills barber on the tarmac at Los Angeles International Airport.

Pundits analyzed. Seriously. (It was OK for Hillary, said Mark Shields on the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour, but a bad example for Bill to set at a time when people are being asked to sacrifice.) Newspapers thundered. Seriously. ("Next time, Mr. President," said the Los Angeles Times, "try getting it cut in a less public place.")

In the furor, a few pertinent details tended to get lost. The $200 came out of Clinton's, not the taxpayers', pocket. Tight security for traveling presidents, which in this instance delayed the landing of two commuter flights by 25 minutes, is a sadly necessary fact of modern life. And in any case, it wasn't worth the ink and airtime devoted to it.

An example of the gap between rhetoric and acceptance of its consequences is the national press corps' outrage over the firing of its pals in the White House travel office.

Work that had been done by seven people, say the Clintonites, can be done by three. It was time to end the loose accounting, overbilling and disinclination to accept competitor bids, say the Clintonites, that have been keeping travel costs higher than necessary.

Perhaps the Clintonites held an exaggerated view of the office's failings. They certainly shouldn't have cast aspersions on the employees unnecessarily and without a strong basis. They have bungled the matter, and not only in the media spin it received.

But there predictably is adverse reaction when people are fired from public positions. Theoretically, everyone wants government to operate more efficiently and more cost-effectively. But everybody's also got interests, which can be threatened when something is actually done to streamline government.

If a tiny White House office, none of its employees under civil-service protection, can't be reinvented, how can any of the rest of the federal government be brought to heel?

by CNB