Tilting Archives - About C.P. - Respond

December 1998 - Volume 30 Issue 12

" A King's Compliment... Hinkley's Holiday... Tripp's Step... Ground Truth... The Case of the Vigilant Taxpayer..."

"It's Impeachment or Nothing, Panel is Told by Experts," was the headline of the lead story in The New York Times of November 10. The subhead was "Scholars Warn Lawmakers that Compromise Like Censure is Not in Constitution." Readers who managed to get to the article's tenth and eleventh paragraphs must have been astonished to learn that at least two constitutional scholars, including the only witness to appear under the sponsorship of both parties, had declared that censure was a legitimate option. One pointed out that censure had been used against five judges and presidents Jackson and Polk. You don't have to know much about constitutional law to know that Congress can pass a resolution of censure against anyone it wants to. It may not have the right to call Bill Clinton into the well of the House to listen to a lecture, as Gerald Ford recommended in The New York Times, but its power to give the lecture is beyond question.

If you are sometimes suspicious of polls, you will be interested in the range of answers that the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press got to the question, "How often do you vote?": 62 percent answered, "Always" in September 1997. But just two months later, in November, only 42 percent answered "Always." One of these figures has to be wrong. Maybe both are. Or maybe the truth lies somewhere in between.

As I watched, courtesy of C-SPAN, the world leaders who had negotiated the Wye memorandum make their statements to the press in the East Room of the White House, I was struck by the words King Hussein addressed to Clinton: "Mr. President, I've had the privilege of being a friend of the United States and presidents since the late President Eisenhower. And throughout all the years that have passed, I have kept in touch. But on the subject of peace, the peace we are seeking, I have never, with all due respect and all the affection I held for your predecessors, have known someone with your dedication, clearheadedness, focus, and determination to help resolve this issue."

To the best of my knowledge, this statement was not shown on any of that evening's news shows. It was omitted in the transcript of Hussein's speech that appeared the next day in The New York Times. The first time I saw attention paid to it was in a column the following week by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter.

It would be nice if this would turn out to be the last example of media unfairness to Bill Clinton. That's unlikely, given the number of hard-core Clinton haters who remain in powerful positions. But there have been signs since the election of an abatement of the hysteria that reigned in the press from January through October. Since the attention given the Lewinsky story is the most disproportionate I've seen in the press in my lifetime, it's good to see that at least some of my colleagues are regaining their senses.

Those of you who fondly remember Paddy Chayevsky's great satire on the medical profession, "Hospital," with George C. Scott and Diana Rigg, should be sure to see "Critical Care," a new film with Albert Brooks, Helen Mirren and James Spader. At one point, a cynical physician played by Brooks asks, "How do you avoid the trouble of preparing a living will [telling doctors when you want them to stop using expensive medical procedures to keep you alive]?" His answer: "Don't have any health insurance."

When one of those big trucks looms in your rear view mirror, do you feel just the faintest tinge of apprehension? If so, your fears are well-founded. More than half of the 42,256 trucks inspected by Virginia State Police during 1997 were defective, reports The Washington Post's Alice Reid. She adds, "more than 20 percent were in such bad shape that authorities took them off the highway." And if you're thinking Virginia may be unusual, nationwide 22 percent of all trucks inspected must be taken off the road.

Defective vehicles are only part of the problem. In Virginia 45 percent of the inspected trucks' drivers had traffic violations on their record, 9 percent serious enough to require taking the driver off the road. Of course, a lot of drivers escape inspection and continue to operate their trucks despite bad safety records. One of them recently slammed his dump truck loaded with gravel into a school bus, injuring the bus driver and 17 children, one of them critically. The truck driver's record included an arrest for drunk driving and drug possession. And his license had been "suspended or restricted twice in the last 18 months."

In addition to the threat they pose to people traveling on the highways, big trucks pose a danger to the highways themselves. In West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette recently observed, "Everyone knows that coal trucks routinely run up to twice the legal weight, yet nothing is ever really done about it. These mammoth trucks pulverize roads and endanger other drivers."

Pollster Geoff Garin re- cently explained on C-SPAN why the Democrats did so well in last month's election. He said that 20 percent of the voters polled on election day expressed a combination of respect for Bill Clinton as president and disdain for his personal life. Two-thirds of this group voted Democratic.

As we go to press, Congress is listening to more testimony about whether Bill Clinton lied about his sex life, and I am reading an article that reminds me of the lies tobacco executives told Congress in 1994. The lies they told weren't about the personal lives of the executives. Instead they were about something clearly affecting the public interest, namely the public's health. The lies, in case you've forgotten, were that nicotine is not addictive and that they had done nothing to manipulate the level of nicotine in their product. Congress did nothing about those lies. To me, they were much more important than Bill Clinton's.

Yet a Washington Post editorial asks for even more testimony in the Clinton case: "The factual record that now exists is not conclusive on certain key points, particularly whether President Clinton instructed Betty Currie to retrieve from Ms. Lewinsky gifts he had given her." A key point? For a congressional hearing on impeachment? We all know that Bill Clinton attempted to cover up his misbehavior with Lewinsky. The question that Congress - and the Post - should have asked before the hearing began was did all credible evidence about the Lewinsky affair taken at its worst amount to an impeachable offense. If not, there is no point in hearing more about Betty Currie or the other evidence, almost all of which we have heard repeatedly anyway.

If you're getting on in years you may be thinking about moving into one of the 2,700 residential retirement facilities that offer to take care of you for the rest of your life, from the time you're relatively independent to the time when you're bedridden and require nursing assistance. The deal often sounds good. But sometimes it isn't. If you are required to pay a large down payment, you could lose it all and end up uncared for if the facility goes bankrupt.

This is exactly what happened to William and Creta Sabine, according to Michael Moss of The Wall Street Journal. They sold their home in Scottsdale, Arizona and paid $143,500 in entrance fees to the Park Regency Village in Phoenix which also required them to pay almost $3,500 per month for taking care of them and Mrs. Sabine's sister. "Nine months after they moved in," reports Moss, "Park Regency's owner called everyone into the facility's dining room to say he was filing for bankruptcy-court protection."

There is little regulation of these places. Fourteen states don't have any rules. Most of those that do have rules don't require operators to have reserves or other safeguards to make sure the entrance fees aren't squandered. And most states do not, notes Moss, monitor the claims made in sales brochures.

John Hinckley's lawyers got him a soft deal when they succeeded in having him committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital instead of being imprisoned for the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan and the shooting of a D.C. police officer, a Secret Service agent, and James Brady, the White House press secretary. Now they want him let out for a holiday dinner with his parents and girlfriend. The severity of his incarceration is suggested by the fact that the dinner is called an "off-campus visit" by St. Elizabeths. When I think of James Brady still confined to that wheelchair, I vote to keep Hinckley confined to campus.

Now for a kind word about the Post, or to be more precise, about Liza Mundy, a columnist with the Washington Post Magazine. Mostly she writes first-person accounts about experiences she's had that illuminate truths about life. A recent one dealt with our growing incivility to one another. The scene was in the shower room of Mundy's health club. One woman left the room with her shower still running. Another woman shouted after her, "Turn that water off!" The first woman returned, looking mortified to shut the water off. She tried to explain, "At the pool where I usually go, the showers turn themselves off."

"You had to turn it on to begin with, didn't you," said the enforcer, "so it stands to reason you have to turn it off when you finish!"

The first woman fled. And the enforcer turned triumphantly to the other women in the room and said, "I pay my taxes. I don't want my water wasted." A few minutes later, writes Mundy, "as the vigilant taxpayer continued to shower, secure in her frugality and rectitude - a sort of piscine Kenneth Starr - the water waster padded barefoot into the shower area, clutching her towel. ŒYou didn't have to be so, so mean about it!' she sputtered helplessly."

Of course, she's right, we don't have to be so mean about each other's shortcomings, we need to have a sense of proportion, we need to avoid self-righteousness.

Those qualities have not been manifested in the Clinton-Lewinsky case by Ken Starr or the Post's editorial writer, Meg Greenfield, or by the great majority of the American press. How can they solemnly intone heavy words like "perjury," "obstruction of justice," and "constitutional process" about a cover-up of consensual sex!

Clinton's sexual shenanigans are the proper subject for well-deserved jokes by late-night comedians and for gossip that we find as delicious as everyone else does. But they are not the proper subject for grand jury investigations and Congressional committee hearings.

Linda Tripp just got a raise. She now makes $90,767 a year. How could she get a raise when no one can explain what she's doing to earn any salary from the Pentagon? According to Reuters, the Pentagon's spokesman, Navy Capt. Mike Doubleday, "declined to give any details of her current duties."

Doubleday did say, "If an employee were judged to be performing unsatisfactorily, they would very well not get that [raise]."

In fact, 99 percent of federal civil servants get those "step" or "merit" increases whenever they are eligible. So Tripp is merely another example, if a grotesque one, of a sad truth about the civil service generally. Far too many raises are awarded automatically without regard to the performance of the employee.

The main problem with the police is incompetence. Consider the District of Columbia's record on burglaries. District police have a closure rate of 5 percent on burglaries. As usual, they are worse than other departments. But the national closure rate on burglaries is only 14 percent.

And even that doesn't tell you how bad the situation really is. Consider the definition of closure. "A case is considered solved or closed," according The Washington Post's Cheryl Thompson, "when there is an arrest, the suspect is dead, or authorities don't have enough evidence to prosecute." So those five percent and 14 percent figures don't mean they caught the burglar and put him in jail. In fact all they really seem to mean is that someone summoned the energy to mark the file "closed."

Why don't more bright people become detectives? Many of my most intelligent friends devour detective fiction. Why not try the real thing? It has to be more interesting than corporate law or taxation, trusts and estates, and the other less than exciting subjects that dominate the workday of most of the brilliant people I know who have become lawyers.

Another great truth about the career service comes from Defense Secretary William Cohen who recently complained to journalists that reports reaching him from subordinates have often been "sanitized," "filtered," and "softened," as they have traveled up the bureaucratic ladder from the field to his desk. "Much of that information that we receive from regular channels, by the time it gets to Army Secretary [Louis] Caldera or me, doesn't have the same intensity" as when it was first written, he noted. "Sometimes the complaints don't come all the way to the top."

If you've ever worked in a bureaucracy you know there is a tendency to soft-pedal the bad news and exaggerate the good as it climbs the chain of command. One way an agency head like Cohen can be sure he knows what's going on is to make frequent visits to the field but not give advance notice of those trips. Too often, according to Ernest Blazar, who writes a knowledgeable column about the Pentagon called "Inside the Ring," Cohen gives the bases he plans to inspect time to arrange dog-and-pony shows to conceal unhappy truths about their operations. This keeps him from finding about what service people call "ground truth," which Blazar defines as "an unvarnished version of reality stripped of staff gloss and polish."

The scandal of mountaintop removal in my home state of West Virginia has inspired at least two men to display unusual courage by acting against their own interest in order to serve the public. Cecil Roberts, the president of the UMW, has risked the wrath of his union members by saying that protecting the environment is as important as protecting jobs. "This union has a proud history of working not only in the interests of its own members but on behalf of all working people and the communities they live in. We fully intend to uphold that tradition." The other hero is Bill Maxey, the State Forestry Director who resigned in protest against Governor Cecil Underwood's mountaintop removal policy. Bureaucrats often mutter privately about their bosses' misdeeds but only rarely are they willing to sacrifice their nice jobs as Maxey has done.

Just in case you don't know what mountaintop removal consists of: In order to get at the coal beneath, the mountaintop is sliced off and dumped into the adjacent valleys. This has resulted - or will result under permits already issued - in the burying of 470 miles of West Virginian streams. "In addition to the habitat losses," reports the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, "the fills have displaced thousands of acres of deciduous hardwood forest.

Those of us who are against affirmative action when it involves racial preference must face the consequences of our views. At UCLA, the 1998 freshman class, the first to enter after the implementation of the anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, had 3,775 members, with 160 blacks compared to the 230 in 1997, 485 Chicano and Latino students compared to 590, and 15 American Indians compared to 40. So we have a problem. But the answer is not to let more unqualified people into our universities. It is to produce more high school graduates who are qualified for college.

African-American students generally do not do so well as whites on their SATs. But some do. Five percent of black males and four percent of black females who take the test score 1200 or better, and this is so even though they are likely to have had fewer advantages than white students who score that high. In other words, black kids can achieve even when the deck is stacked against them. What explains their success?

According to a recent study by the Mellon Foundation and the Urban Institute, one factor is having attended Catholic or other private schools that require a rigorous college preparatory curriculum. The lesson for the public schools is to get rid of their junk and challenge students with more demanding courses. This in turn will produce more black students who can get into college on merit, without the crutch of affirmative action.

Growing up in West Virginia, it was not hard for me to develop a suspicion that the coal companies might not always be good guys. I had similar feelings about the chemical companies, whose pollution of the air rivaled the pollution of water and land by the coal companies. So I was delighted to see that last month my old friend Richard Neely persuaded a jury to sock it to the FMC Corp. to the tune of $38.8 million for the damage it did by the careless release of hydrochloric acid.

The conservatives who so enthusiastically supported welfare reform may be interested to learn one of its effects: an increase in abortions. The family cap, which was designed to end the practice of giving increased benefits to mothers who have more children while on welfare, has resulted in 14,000 fewer births but has also produced 1,400 more abortions, according to a study conducted by Rutgers University and reported by Cheryl Wetzstein of the Washington Times. The decline in illegitimacy is, of course, something the conservatives sought, but the 1,400 abortions sounds like one of those unintended consequences conservatives so love to ridicule when they happen as a result of liberal legislation.

"Make Believe = Survival is the Washington Equation." That's what I said in my book, How Washington Really Works, first published 18 years ago. Does it still hold true? The answer is, not always, but there's still some life in the old theory. Witness the banking bill in the last Congress. Some form of this legislation has been before Congress for twenty years but it never passes. Nonetheless, it employs a vast number of Washingtonians as lobbyists who in turn contribute vast sums to Congressional campaign funds. Legislative inaction means that both the lobbyist and the congressman flourish. Make believe = survival.

~Charles Peters