Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 27, 1993 TAG: 9402180003
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES P. PINKERTON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Presidents who make sweeping change are remembered, for better or worse. Think of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society or Reaganomics.
Clinton's offer sounds good. We'll hear the buzzword litany over and over again: security, simplicity, savings, choice, quality and responsibility.
If Clinton is to be another FDR, this had better work. But the biggest challenge he faces is the deep public skepticism that the government really is here to help us.
Theodore Lowi saw it coming. In 1969, he wrote ``The End of Liberalism,'' a far-reaching critique of the post-New Deal welfare state. Lowi, a former president of the American Political Science Association, now at Cornell, is no conservative. He would describe himself as committed to real democracy, which he sees as threatened by the delegation of legitimate authority to the Iron Triangle of bureaucrats, lobbyists and special interests.
As government grows bigger and bigger, representative government will inevitably give way to the undemocratic rule of insiders.
Think about it: How many members of Congress actually read the 1,000-page legislative phone books they vote for? They can barely lift them, let alone comprehend them. So elected officials turn to unelected officials to explain the law and help implement it with thousands more pages of legalese. It's like the Marx Brothers movie ``A Day at the Races'': You need a code book to read the code book.
Lowi coined the term ``interest-group liberalism'' to describe the bargaining and brokering among the Washington elites that has characterized American politics since the '30s. What we will get, Lowi prophesied, is ``a crisis of public authority'' leading to the ``atrophy of institutions of popular control.''
If the Clinton plan passes, there will be a can of worms for every bureaucrat in Washington. Consider just some of the thousands of to-be-determined questions that lawyers and logrollers will resolve in the shadowland between K Street and Capitol Hill:
The famous One-Page Form. If you don't ask questions, how do you keep people from ripping off the system? The Reaganites simplified banking regulation so much that the S&Ls made off with 12 zeroes worth of our money. So, does this mean we will all have a chance to play Charles Keating? Unlikely. The EZ form is the tip of the red tape iceberg. The administration wants $2 billion to hire additional auditors and overseers to keep track of our pills and proctoscopies.
Medical specialties. ``Regional review boards'' will allocate slots in medical schools so that we get the politically correct ratio of general practitioners to specialists. Stay tuned for the story about how Senate baron Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and the multiculturalists have cut the ultimate deal: affirmative action and quotas enabling all West Virginians, from Bluefield to Beckley, to attend medical school, as long as they promise not to be plastic surgeons.
The National Health Board. This new regulatory agency, its members appointed by the president, will have responsibility for making the whole trillion-dollar operation work. NHB is an acronym to remember, because the board will be in charge of everything from baseline budgets for the health alliances (adjusted to reflect regional variations, of course) to providing technical assistance to help dawdling states get up with the new program.
If popular sovereignty is to mean anything, then sovereign power has to be understandable to the populace. Lowi's book is a restatement of the truism: The devil is in the details. A quarter century ago, he warned that the details were drowning us. Today, it looks as if democracy is about to take another dunking.
\ James P. Pinkerton, a policy advisor in the Bush administration, is now a fellow of the Manhattan Institute. He wrote this article for Newsday.
\ Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service
by CNB