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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 10, 1994                   TAG: 9408100060
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FIDDLING WITH THE RULES

Roanoke seems also to have won a reprieve from the prospect of a ward system for electing City Council. A report this week by City Attorney Wilburn Dibling said it would take at least until 1998 to put a ward system into effect; in addition, as Mayor David Bowers noted, a ward-system proposal could encounter trouble with the U.S. Justice Department.

Alas, neither reprieve may prove long-lasting. Both proposals are too much within the current American habit of dealing with disappointing political outcomes by fiddling with the rules.

Such fiddling is nothing new, of course: That's why constitutions have rules for how to change the rules. But rules-fiddling these days is too often taken as a substitute for facing up to the fact that good public policy - any coherent policy, when you come down to it - requires making tough choices.

The effort to look to rules changes to determine outcomes, as Alan Ehrenhalt observes in the August issue of Governing magazine, cuts across ideological lines. On the left, Lani Guinier thinks up Rube Goldbergian rules changes to guarantee legislative outcomes more favorable to minorities (not necessarily racial). On the right, a constitutional amendment is held up as the way to balance the federal budget, and term limits as the way to get better laws from legislatures.

But the trouble is less in the process than in what the process more or less accurately reflects: an America so focused on narrow interests that it's almost impossible to forge majorities that look at the big picture.

For a while in the early '80s, Ronald Reagan found a majority for his three-pronged platform of a balanced budget, tax cuts and increased defense spending. As the skyrocketing national debt has borne out, however, those three goals - however popular - were also utterly incompatible.

In the '90s, Americans' flight from hard choices continues.

The latest issue of The New Republic cites results of a recent Wall Street Journal poll. Asked whether they favor cutting entitlement programs to curb the deficit, 61 percent of Americans say they do. But 66 percent oppose cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and farm subsidies. That doesn't leave much entitlement spending to cut.

Proportional-representation schemes, term limits, balanced-budget amendments, and direct-democracy initiatives - whether to elect school boards or to hold national electronic referenda on tax legislation, as urged by Ross Perot - can't alter the arithmetic facts of life.

Nor are such process alterations likely to end government by interest group. Indeed, some changes - elected school boards in Roanoke, a ward system for City Council - are apt to make matters worse, by making government more responsive to special interests and less responsive to the commonweal.