One of the most astonishing developments in America's primary and secondary schools in the last 30 years has been the explosive growth in drug use by the pupils. I'm not talking cocaine or heroin, I'm talking about legal drugs, notably Ritalin. It is the best known of the drugs prescribed for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. In a Washington Post op-ed Lawrence Diller estimates that four million children are taking Ritalin and one million Prozac or similar drugs. Laurence Zuckerman of The New York Times estimates the users at three to five percent of American schoolchildren. In Britain by contrast, he reports that the figure is "fewer than one percent." One can't help suspecting some pharmaceutical companies in the American wood-pile.

Bill Bradley had led Al Gore in New Hampshire public opinion polls for months, but when Gore finally won the primary by a 52-48 margin, the pundits almost acted as if Bradley had won instead of hailing Gore for a come-from-behind victory. Why? One reason is that Gore had, in the 10 days before the primary, overtaken Bradley in the polls and in some for a few days at least he was ahead by a margin greater than he ultimately won by. The other reason is that reporters love a horse race and they don't like to see any candidate anointed too early. They therefore tend to build up the second-place finisher and to disparage any victory less than double-digit. Bill Clinton was helped by this tendency in 1992. It has even affected history. Many people think that Eugene McCarthy won the New Hampshire primary in 1968 and that George McGovern won it in 1972. Actually Lyndon Johnson won in 1968 and did so, incredibly enough, with write-in votes. Ed Muskie beat George McGovern but most people remember that Muskie lost because he cried in the snow. The reason Mc-Carthy and McGovern are remembered as the winners is because that is the impression the media wanted to give.

One of the best explanations of John McCain's appeal to thoughtful people is this list of his main congressional enemies that appeared in the February 21 issue of U.S. News and World Report: Trent Lott, Tom Delay, and Mitch McConnell.

Two trends to worry about on Wall Street are the increase in margin buying and the decrease in long-term investment. Buying on margin, meaning investors borrow up to half the cash from their broker, grew by 62 percent last year. The danger here is that the drop in a falling market will become precipitous as margin-borrowers rush to sell in order to cover their debts. That rush will become especially desperate for those margin borrowers who are also among the millions of Americans who have been ringing up record amounts of consumer debt in recent months.

As for the decrease in long-term investment, 79 percent of the shares of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange were traded last year compared to 46 percent in 1990. In other words, most investment was long-term back then. Now only 21 percent is. On NASDAQ the situation is even worse. The turnover was more than 200 percent last year. This means more people in a hurry to get rich and more people getting involved in day-trading and other lunacies. "Today stock market in-vestors are trading more frequently than they have since the 1920s," reports The New York Times, and you know how that decade end-ed. Similar turno-ver also happened in 1901 followed by the Panic of 1903 and again in 1905 followed by the Panic of 1907.

Right-wingers had begun to froth at the mouth over recent news stories suggesting that the Clintons were going to ask the government to pay their legal bills. But the president told Larry King on December 23rd: "I've never considered doing that."

My own feeling is that he is entitled to reimbursement for all the fees he incurred until he lied in sworn testimony. This occurred in January 1998. All of Hillary Clinton's legal expenses should be reimbursed. She was never shown to have done anything wrong beyond being excessively defensive. (Okay, she probably did conceal those billing records for a while, but the point is that they contained no evidence that she had committed a crime.) As for the president, Ken Starr totally failed to find him culpable in Whitewater, Filegate, or Travelgate. If Ronald Reagan and George Bush could be reimbursed as they were for their legal expenses stemming from Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton shouldn't have to pay a dime for defending himself against the unjust and unproven charges of Whitewater, Filegate, and Travelgate.

In fact, the case for reimbursing Clinton is better. He lied about a private sexual matter. They lied about their public duties.

Have you noticed how frequently the word "extraordinary" is employed by people who are trying to appear high-toned? The other night during a PBS special on Greece, the narrator managed to use it twice in less than five minutes.

In his new book, A Vast Conspiracy, Jeffrey Toobin explains why Clinton had to endure investigation after investigation:

"The Lewinsky immunity debacle [in which Starr reneged on the original immunity deal his office had proposed to Monica Lewinsky and had been accepted by her]Š illustrated a larger truth about Clinton's enemies, too. StarrŠ [was] convinced she was withholding additional evidence of Clinton's criminality. This belief was pervasive among those who tried to drive the president out of office--that some grander conspiracy was sure to be uncovered, just over the horizon. Of course this evidence was never located because it didn't existŠ. [T]he case was never anything more than it appeared to be--that of a humiliated middle-aged husband who lied when he was caught having an affair with a young woman from the office."

Toobin's book and the one by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons excerpted in this issue should redden a lot of faces at The New York Times and The Washington Post. Time after time their reporters got the story wrong, mostly because they were conned by anti-Clinton sources who they wanted to believe because the allegations were so juicy. Just for example, I urge you to read pages 284-85 of Toobin for a devastating demonstration of the high percentage of falsehood and misleading innuendo in a February 5, 1998 story by Susan Schmidt and Peter Baker in The Washington Post.

Please read our debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik. Gopnik eloquently presents the case for universal health care. I agree with him. As I never tire of asking my friends on the Christian Right, wouldn't Jesus want everyone cared for? Gladwell is also convincing as he argues that we don't want American medicine to lose its cutting edge. But I can't resist pointing out that one of his examples of American leadership, the development of advance procedures for emergency care, was the product of the socialized medicine practiced by the U.S. Army in Vietnam. We hope you too have points you can't resist adding to this important debate. Your letters and email will be welcomed.

Although both The Washington Post and The New York Times have had to endure a good many slings and arrows from this column over the years, there is much that I admire about both papers. They are far ahead of the competition in the number of Monthly Journalism Awards they have won (see pg. 16 for their latest). The most recent occasion for applauding them is not the awards they get but the awards that they give. These are to outstanding principals and teachers in the Washington and New York areas. These people get so little in the way of material reward that it's crucial for society to find other ways of honoring their contributions. And few rewards equal praise from your home-town paper.

My friend Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles.com recently published a critique of my friend Jason DeParle's reporting on welfare reform in The New York Times. Kaus, who campaigned for welfare reform, is understandably less enthusiastic about reports that show the ways it is not working. But DeParle's reports ring true to me. The most recent describes the extent to which life remains unchanged for the poor. That doesn't mean that Kaus is all wrong. To me he's a great hero for having persuaded a critical mass of liberals to support welfare reform. The fact that some problems remain doesn't mean he wasn't right that we had to get rid of the old welfare system. It just means that we should join DeParle in facing those problems.

If you have doubted me when I've said that the work of Supreme Court justices is not excessively demanding, consider that in 1900 the court heard 157 argued cases for which opinions were written. In 1999, the figure was 84.

The most difficult welfare-to-work challenges come from the multiple-obstacle cases where the women encounter difficulty not only in finding jobs but in arranging the training they need, transportation to the training site or to the job, and day care for their children. Combined problems like these can in themselves be defeating and when they are compounded by addiction or by a boyfriend who is abusive or ridicules work, they spell disaster. Women facing such overwhelming odds against success in the job market need help. That is why the most important of DeParle's articles seems to me to be the one that he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in December 1998. It emphasized the need for able social workers to provide that help and explained that there weren't nearly enough of them. We aren't going to have much success cracking the hard cases unless we make a crash effort to attract a lot more good people to the challenge of helping women move from welfare to work.

Another reform obviously needed now is to radically upgrade the day care available to welfare mothers. A study of 1,000 single women moving from welfare to work found, according to The New York Times, "that many of their children had been placed in child care where they spent hours watching television or wandering aimlessly and had little interaction with their attendants." It's as if we were deliberately trying to create a new generation on welfare!

We can also learn from the states that have been most successful. Indiana has the best record for getting welfare recipients into jobs. And Minnesota does the best at keeping them in their jobs and increasing their earnings. Let's hope reporters like DeParle will study what those states do to find out if it can be replicated elsewhere.

One thing is for sure. We need to change the "reform" rules that actually discourage women from trying to improve their lot. In West Virginia, one mother, who was taking a full-time college program and working 25 hours a week while caring for her two daughters, was told that she had to increase her work to 35 hours a week. That, to put it simply, was both crazy and cruel.

The Fed, continuing to fear that low unemployment will lead to inflation, raised interest rates again in February. That fear which once held that unemployment below six percent would produce inflation has had to be steadily readjusted downward to the present rate of four percent. And despite the Fed's fears, there's evidence that it could go lower. Colorado, Virginia, Minnesota, and Nebraska already have rates below three percent, according to an article by William Drayton in the Los Angeles Times. The Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina is down to 1.6 percent. I haven't heard anything about rampant inflation in any of these places.

There are 4 million children without health insurance on the school lunch program. Many of them could be covered by CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program. But federal law forbids the lunch program, according to The Wall Street Journal's Shailagh Murray, from giving the CHIP program information it needs to enroll the kids.

Having gone out on a very long limb in December to say that for the Democrats to win they had to stop being ashamed of Bill Clinton and take pride in his administration's record, you can imagine that I was not exactly displeased by a January 26 Washington Post report from New Hampshire. "Gore embraces Clinton's record as New Hampshire voting looms," followed by a February 3rd post-election story, "Clinton is providing a crucial ace in the hole for Gore."

Although, on the whole, I applaud Clinton's record in the White House, there is one thing about him that drives me bats. It's not his sex life or his lies about it. I know too many people for whom I have affection and respect and who have also had embarrassing romantic adventures about which they have from time to time prevaricated. No, it is not sex. It is his inattention to the government under him. What he cares about is policy. And at the policy game, he is very good indeed. This was evident as early as in the economic summit in Little Rock in November 1992. He's like the political scientists who love to talk policy but don't bother to find out about how it's being implemented. He lacks FDR's sublime curiosity about what's going on down below. The result is that while Clinton's policies are often admirable, their execution leaves something to be desired. Consider three recent bureaucratic scandals: The revelations that "thousands of errors were being made in VA Hospitals, many causing death," (The Washington Post, December 20, 1999), "Pilot in Fatal Crash Faced Sanctions for Past Mistakes," (The New York Times, December 23, 1999), and "Earlier Gene Test Deaths Not Reported," (The Washington Post, January 31, 2000). Each of these dealt with problems an attentive president would have known about: the FAA's dangerous indulgence of bad behavior by private pilots, incompetence in the Department of Veterans' Affairs, and inadequate oversight of researchers by NIH. As we have already pointed out, these lapses by Clinton are not atypical. From Waco to the IRS, he's shown that too often he doesn't pay enough attention to what his subordinates are doing until it's too late.

While Clinton may be unique among recent presidents in his passion for policy, similar indifference to what's going on down below has been manifested by most of the other presidents of the last 30 years. One reason may be that the White House has become a world isolated from everything but its own concerns and the problems that the headlines compel it to face.

The number of nuns in the United States has dropped from 179,000 in 1965 to 82,000 today. This is bad news for the Catholic Church because as Notre Dame's Scott Appleby tells The New York Times, "Sisters really did build the Catholic Church through their teaching in the parochial school system and their staffing of Catholic hospitals." It's also bad news for the rest of us because we need the schools and the hospitals. Why not lift the requirement of chastity? Or at least permit nuns to marry? They could still devote their working lives to the service of their faith. I'm aware that the bishops are not likely to leap to embrace either proposal. But I am reminded of an idea that Ralph Nader once mentioned to me in conversation. Why not have secular monks? People who devote their lives to service without regard to material gain, who surrender dreams of affluence in favor of a life devoted to helping others. To be deprived of physical affection is too hard a prospect for most of us to face. And many people have trouble accepting organized religion. But they should not be deprived of the opportunity to serve. Or the challenge to serve. This means we need new institutions that will offer that opportunity and that challenge.

Passenger complaints about the 10 major U.S. airlines grew by more than 150 percent in just the last year. American Airlines is feeling the heat enough to widen the space between rows of seats. But the increase--from three to five inches depending on the aircraft--strikes me as too little and too late to appease the millions of airline coach passengers who have to endure the miserable conditions of today's steerage. Not only are they packed into too little space and given snacks that are barely edible, they know that just beyond the curtain first-class passengers are being wined and dined as they lounge in roomy seats solicitously served by flight attendants who always seem to rush by you during their rare appearances in the rear. I see the ingredients of the next great revolution. All we need is a Madam Defarge in seat 32F.

The major factor nudging prices up recently is the price of oil. This was also true of the two bouts of double-digit inflation in the 1970s. What we thought then was why doesn't the government target the specific problem of oil prices, instead of taking down the whole economy through high interest rates. Oil is not as big a factor in the economy today but as its recent impact demonstrates, it can still cause trouble. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson says he's going to do "something" but he has ruled out taking the step that Senator Charles Schumer has urged and that seems most sensible to us: Threaten to sell enough of the oil in our Louisiana reserve to bring prices down to a level where they no longer pose any inflationary danger. As prices come down we can replenish the reserves and incidentally pocket a neat little profit for the taxpayer. If you don't like this idea please come up with another strategy for countering OPEC's cartel pricing. The free market doesn't always afford protection against monopoly power.

We like New York governor George Pataki's proposal to deal with the teacher shortage by offering to pay the college tuition of students who agree to teach in New York for four years. This is another version of Adam Walinsky's Police Corps idea, which offers a similar deal to students who agree to join the police force for four years. That, too, was a good idea when he originally proposed it years ago and it's a good idea now. Walinsky, by the way, was the closest to Robert Kennedy of all his aides. Fittingly enough, his idea has been adopted by the state of Maryland where RFK's daughter, Kathleen, is lieutenant governor.

1,543 citizens' complaints about police brutality have been substantiated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board of the New York Civil Liberties Union since 1996, according to The New York Times. Guess how many of these cases resulted in punishment of the officer involved? Only 24 percent.

If you are wondering whether the situation could be worse, consider the reaction of the Chilean government to the 40,000 cases of civilian torture under the Pinochet dictatorship. According to another article in the Times, "no torturer has been investigated, no torturer has been tried, no compensation has been paid."

Congress-bashing is a common practice here in Washington. Often it is justified. But sometimes, the fellows do something good. An example is providing money in last year's budget to encourage smaller high schools. One in 10 of America's high schools has more than 1,500 students. The Columbine-style institutions are just too big. Many students get lost in the shuffle. Rep. Baron P. Hill, the Indiana Democrat who sponsored the smaller high school measures says 600 students is a good size to aim for. Makes sense to me.

I was happy to see "Air Time is Money, Networks Not Eager to Give Candidates Access" by Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. Few reporters and few newspapers have campaigned for free time for political candidates. One reason is that so many newspapers like the Post also own television stations and make a lot of money from political commercials during the months leading up to elections.

Have you ever wondered why so many barns are painted red? According to Dirk Johnson of The New York Times, it's because "the pigment oxide was cheap and durable." This interesting tidbit was contained in an otherwise depressing article about the rapid disappearance of the wood barn from rural America. Iowa alone is losing 1,000 wood barns a year. They're being replaced by metal structures. "The whole countryside is soon going to look like an industrial park with all those metal buildings," Jacqueline Shmeal, an Iowa preservationist, told Johnson. "Those barns are America's best example of folk art. It's terrible to lose them." Amen.