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April 2000

Governments End: Why Washington Stopped Working By Jonathan Rauch Public Affairs Click on the title to buy the book

In early March, as John McCain's banging of the "iron triangle" reached fever pitch, a poignant little ceremony took place at the National Press Club in downtown Washington. In a windowless room, officers of the American League of Lobbyists (ALL), gathered to unveil their spanking new code of ethics, and to share their pain.

Two lobbyists told of how their mothers burst into tears at the news that their offspring had joined the profession. Another said sadly that his son did not know what he did and did not care to learn. Another recalled a family gathering where he was snickered at by some, yelled at by the rest.

It has never been easy to tell your loved ones---or, for that matter, complete strangers---that you are a lobbyist. And it is only getting harder as the term "special interest" gathers the kind of totemic, repulsive force that "Mason" once held in American politics. Presidential candidates fell all over each other this year in the scramble to declare their hatred of these sinister influences. But Al Gore sometimes gave the emptiness of this talk away, when in reeling off the list of interests he has opposed he stretched for a word to encompass the scope of his belligerence and declared that he has fought against "everyone."

Everyone is, of course, who the special interests add up to. At the press club, Kenneth E. Feltman, the president of the aptly-acronymed ALL, made much the same point as Gore, if more intentionally and plaintively. "You know, all of us have a lobbyist," he told the tiny assemblage of reporters. "If you have a credit card, you have a lobbyist. Are you a member of a frequent flier club? You have a lobbyist." Do you read books? Then whether you buy them or check them out of a library, you have a lobbyist. "Are you married? Well, you have a lobbyist. Single? Yes. Separated? Yes."

That we are all players in the lobbying game is a fact that Jonathan Rauch documents, with a relentlessness bordering on cruelty, in Government's End. Bear with me while I summarize:

Mature democracies, Rauch argues, inevitably are larded with associations of narrow interests competing to redistribute to their clients the wealth created by others. Hence the National Paint Varnish and Lacquer Association, the Frozen Pizza Institute, the Possum Growers and Breeders Association. Each new federal program calls into being new constituencies, which then lobby to preserve it, in effect turning every federal program into an entitlement. If the program accomplishes its original mission, it finds a new one. With so much pie-carving afoot, any group that abstains is acting against its own interest; that is why in 1987 the Baha'i faith opened a $400,000 lobbying office---even though it forbids its members to participate in politics.

In the aggregate, the costs of this special pleading are enormous. But legislators approach programs individually, awarding 10 million here and 10 million there. Since the benefit of, say, a sugar subsidy to one group is huge, while its particular cost to each taxpayer is tiny, that group will fight far more intensely for its preservation than the citizenry will for its elimination---though occasionally some deft public relations is required. When it was discovered that the federal government was spending millions to promote products like Chicken McNuggets and Mars candy overseas, Congress cut some of the program's funding, but it also changed its name. Targeted Export Assistance, which sounded like a handout, became the Market Promotion Program, which still sounded like corporate welfare, and then finally wound up as the Market Access Program, which sounded like a righteous kick in some foreigner's pants.

This is all well told in Government's End. Rauch profoundly understands the lobbying culture and its enabling cons. He understands that lobbyists, like the folks from ALL, think of themselves as valiantly serving the public---indeed, that one of the keys to the system's endurance is that each player thinks of himself and his cause as good, and of his opponents as threats to the common weal.

But---and thanks for your patience---didn't all that sound a little familiar? If it did, that means that you have been alive and have paid at least scant attention to public policy at some point in the last 20 years. I have admired Rauch's reporting and analysis, in the National Journal and elsewhere, for years. He is a crisp and persuasive writer, and he is refreshingly willing to stand conventional wisdom on its head. But his new book falls prey to the success he, this magazine, and others have had for some time now in portraying the special interest culture. Rauch described it in a previous version of this book, "Demosclerosis." By contrast, his proposals for addressing this culture get elbowed further and further back, until they are finally found cowering in the final pages.

Rauch uses his aggregation of lobbying tales to build a case for hopelessness, which he casts as hard-nosed realism and, ultimately, argues could serve as the ground for hope. This system is here to stay, he insists. "Government has become what it is and will remain: a large, incoherent, often incomprehensible mass that is solicitous of its clients but impervious to any broad coherent program of reform. And this evolution cannot be reversed." And since government reform is impossible, fresh government action against other problems is also a pipe dream. Existing programs have eaten up so much of the discretionary budget, and the programs' clients fight so fiercely to preserve their benefits, that government innovation is crowded out. "In a society dense with professional lobbies," he contends, "FDR's brand of experimental central government cannot exist."

Rauch provides a compact and illuminating tour of the reform efforts of the past 20 years, from the attempts of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to dispose of programs to Bill Clinton's attempt to create one big one, health care. All three leaders failed, Rauch argues, because they had no room to maneuver among entrenched interests. "Taxpayers will not allow the government to do a great deal more than it does," he writes. "Sorry, liberals. The client groups, however, will not allow the government to do much less than it does. Sorry, conservatives."

Rauch harbors doubts about the usefulness of reformers' grails, like changing the campaign finance system and imposing term limits. He calls instead for devolving more federal programs to the states, so that lobbies would have to disperse their influence around the country, and for competition for federal programs, like vouchers in education. Neither argument is adequately developed. But he is clearly right when he calls on liberals to take the lead in searching out programs to eliminate, in order to create the space for the ones the country needs.

In the end, Rauch urges a "radical incrementalism" that admits government cannot be overhauled. Once voters abandon their dreams of a house-cleaning, reformers can scrub away bit by bit, combining "maturely diminished expectations" with "maturely persistent ministrations." He never really explains how these reformers will summon the political will for such hard work when the voters no longer much care.

Rauch is too smart not to sense the paucity of his prescriptions, and he acknowledges toward the end of his book that "you may feel unsatisfied." I sure did. I wished I had read a different book---one that could well have been written by Rauch. It would have looked instead at those moments when government managed to break through the encrusted special interests, moments that Government's End treats glancingly. Against a briefer description of the stultifying influence of lobbies, a look at what has gone right or at least involved fundamental change---the tax reform of 1986, the welfare reform of 1996, the erasure of the federal deficit, the reduction in crime rates---could provide a primer for government reform; or, if Rauch prefers, a more persuasive argument that such change is unlikely, and only possible under exceptional circumstances.

It seems to me, though, that we are in a time of exceptional circumstances, when prosperity is combined with a potent political thirst for reform and when such a primer would be valuable. Rauch writes that the period from 1981 until "perhaps" 1996 "marks the most concentrated period of government reformism since the Progressives swept to power" almost 100 years ago. I don't think that period is over. The reform urge is sharpening, not subsiding, which helps account for McCain's amazing run and for the loosening of the two parties' grip on the electorate. We may all be implicated in the hobbling of government. And particularly this year, as George W. Bush calls himself a "Reformer with Results" and Gore claims a lifelong passion for tightening the campaign finance system he abused, Rauch is right to raise doubts about any politician's sweeping promises of change. But voter frustration with government is so great that the right candidate could use it to do more than just get elected by railing against special interests. If a reform candidate hopes to get anything done he needs to have the guidance of experts like Rauch, but he better not have maturely diminished expectations.

Oh---about that new ethics code for lobbyists. The American League of Lobbyists tightened its old rules, but in ways that unintentionally highlighted how dodgy the system is. The new rules insisted, for example, that a lobbyist, on learning that something he had told a government official was false, should immediately correct his earlier statements; that a lobbyist should have a "basic understanding" of the "legislative and governmental process;" that a lobbyist should actually perform the work his clients are paying for.

These poor people from ALL were a fat target, and they knew it. Yet they urged the reporters in the room not to cynically dismiss what they insisted was a good-faith effort. No, they would not enforce the code themselves, they said, but journalists could use it to hammer malefactors. They did not pretend such malefactors did not exist. And they complained about how awful it was to receive as many as 40 invitations to fundraisers in one day, and how degrading and disillusioning it was to be ordered by a Senator to drum up paying guests for such events. If even lobbyists now perceive the need for reform---or even if they just perceive the need to appear to perceive the need for reform---isn't there hope for change that goes beyond maturely persistent ministrations?