Reviews of New Books

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S JOURNALISTS
By Doug Bandow

The System: The American Way of
Politics at the Breaking Point
By Haynes Johnson and David Broder;
Little, Brown, 668 pages, $25.95

Imagine: an idealistic president, dedicated to healing America’s scandalously flawed medical system, takes office. To run his reform task force he chooses his equally idealistic wife, along with a too-smart-by-half policy nerd. The latter develops an admittedly complicated plan that attempts to combine just a tiny bit of regulation with a lot of market competition. Alas, evil interest groups and partisan Republicans vilify the President's proposal, shamelessly calling it "government-run health care." The President blunders, Democratic congressional leaders can’t get their act together, liberal interest groups are disorganized, and a rare chance to do good is lost. We are left to wonder if "the System" is capable of meeting Americans’ needs.

Such is the story told in The System by reporters Haynes Johnson and David Broder. Were this all the book offered, it would not be worth its price (or any price). But in addition to this misleading morality play, The System paints a fascinating picture of raw politics in action.

The story begins in the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, as competing factions struggle for control of the health-care issue. Ira Magaziner, who had previously sought to reorganize Rhode Island's economy and promote cold fusion, emerges victorious. Then comes the wondrous task force, peopled by hundreds or even thousands of "experts." While Hillary is officially in charge, Magaziner drafts the plan. The resulting Health Security Act is a 1,342-page monstrosity.

Despite their otherwise almost psychotic attention to detail, Johnson and Broder don’t bother to explain the actual content of the President’s proposal: a National Health Board, the requirement for employer-provided insurance, a standard federal benefits package, Health Alliances, premium caps, regional spending limits, new medical-school regulations, pharmaceutical restrictions, mandatory insurance coverage, expanded Medicare benefits, tax hikes, subsidies for business, ad infinitum.

The opposition quickly develops an effective strategy—simply expose the plan for what it is: "government-run health care." The President complains that "we were...at a disadvantage." But it’s not for lack of resources. He is, after all, President, and his party controls both houses of Congress. The administration is at a disadvantage because its plan is a Rube Goldberg scheme that cannot work.

Nothing seems to go right for the Clintonistas. Hillary Clinton’s vilification of the insurance industry backfires after the revelation of her unusually profitable cattle trades. The President is buffeted by Troopergate and Whitewater. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) is indicted. Left-wing Democrats war against centrist Democrats. Free-market activists, journalists, and think tanks work to turn the public against Clintoncare. Administration P.R. initiatives, like the "Health Security Express" bus tour, flop. And skittish Republican legislators finally realize that it’s in their political interest to act like an opposition and oppose. In the end, Clintoncare crashes.

Johnson and Broder cover the story step by step. Unfortunately, the reader can’t escape the authors’ whining about the unfairness of it all: "A historic opportunity to improve the lives of all Americans was lost," etc.

The authors don’t seem to understand health-care issues, or, for that matter, basic economics and government operations. They treat inadequate insurance and overcrowded urban hospitals as if they resulted from, say, sunspots. Actually, federal programs and tax policies have led third parties to cover three-fourths of the nation’s medical expenses. The natural result of separating demand from payment and people from their insurance has been to make medical care expensive and bureaucratic, to discourage portable and guaranteed insurance, to shift costs throughout the system, and so on.

The authors also fail to understand the complexities of the Clinton plan, especially the fact that by simply forcing an expansion of existing insurance coverage and benefits it would have worsened the problem of third-party payment, further inflating the demand for medical services. That, in turn, would require either tax hikes or government-mandated rationing—as explicitly envisioned in the Health Security Act’s premium limits and Health Alliances. Nor do the authors seem to understand that an employer mandate would raise worker costs, which would require firms to either cut workers, lower wages, or raise prices. In fact, for journalists purporting to be scrupulous in ferreting out the facts, they are quite cavalier in tarring as "largely false" the criticism that Clintoncare "would mean not only lower wages and fewer jobs but less freedom to choose a doctor, a hospital, or an insurer… more bureaucracy and lower-quality care." Given the plan’s perverse incentives, these things were actually inevitable.

Johnson and Broder worry about "the System" as only Washington pundits would: Are we descending into Social Darwinism? Can we stop the "public interest" from being overruled by "private interests"? How was "a powerful minority" able to "manipulate opinion to defeat a reform desired by the majority"? Can the American republic survive? In reality, these concerns would have been more pressing had the Clintons succeeded in imposing their plan on the country than they are today.

That the Clintoncare fight was close shows how grievously "the System" is flawed. And the most important flaw is political hubris: the belief that government can solve all ills; that legislators who have, as Johnson and Broder admit, no "expertise on the subject," ought to micro-manage health care for 260 million Americans. In the end, we should thank our Founders that "the System" worked as intended in this case, so that perhaps the most extreme social engineering proposal ever advanced in this nation finally collapsed.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of The Politics of Envy: Statism as Theology.

SHE MEANT WELL
By Alan Pell Crawford

Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of
Postwar Liberalism
By Allida M. Black; Columbia University Press, 300 pages, $29.95

In late spring of 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt traveled to Arthurdale, West Virginia, a settlement for hard-pressed Appalachian coal miners and their families created through a New Deal program that the First Lady had championed. Arthurdale consisted of a school, community center, craft shop, and 50 dwellings inhabited by families who—the theory went—would someday repay the government for its investment.

When Mrs. Roosevelt arrived, she discovered to her dismay that the homesteaders had grown to depend on her personal efforts. Things had come to such a pass that, when their school bus broke down, they sent it to the White House garage for repairs. "‘Deeply disillusioned’ at the sight of what she now recognized as a frightful loss of initiative," she admitted later that these beneficiaries of New Deal largesse "seemed to feel the solution to all their problems was to turn to government."

This story is told, not in Allida M. Black’s new study of "America’s foremost postwar liberal," but in No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s portrait of the Roosevelts in World War II. Black includes no such revealing anecdotes in Casting Her Own Shadow, a scrupulously researched if frequently obtuse book devoted almost solely to Mrs. Roosevelt’s good intentions. The author seems uninterested in—or blind to—their effect.

Eleanor Roosevelt's "deep disillusion" must have been short-lived, for during her remaining 24 years she was a crusader of extraordinary tenacity and courage who believed the solution to virtually every social ill could be engineered in Washington. From 1933 to 1945, this dynamo of national uplift wrote six books, 200 magazine pieces, and more than 2,500 newspaper articles. At its peak, her "My Day" column reached 4.5 million readers of 48 newspapers. She also delivered more than 70 speeches a year, politicking all the while.

Mrs. Roosevelt worked tirelessly for the Democratic Party of New York, sat on the boards of national civil-rights organizations, and served twice as U.S. representative to the United Nations. By the late 1950s, when the dithering Adlai Stevenson enjoyed her patronage and the eager young jfk lusted for it, she had become, according to Black, "the consummate liberal power broker."

While Eleanor Roosevelt's significance is undeniable, this claim, like others in Casting Her Own Shadow, is the work of an author somewhat more enamored of her subject than behooves a historian. An assistant professor of history at George Washington University, Black is at her best when she sticks close to her sources and at her worst when she allows her sometimes strident ideology to intervene. She makes a persuasive case, for example, that Mrs. Roosevelt was shrewder than previously believed and far more formid-able a politician. But she also suggests, somewhat less convincingly, that the First Lady would have been better off without fdr, who is depicted in these pages as her old ball-and-chain.

More "progressive" than Franklin, Eleanor said that she would have voted for the Socialist candidate Norman Thomas in 1932, had she not been married to the Squire of Hyde Park. There is little question whom Black would have preferred. With time, Eleanor would realize "that fdr’s death expanded, rather than limited, her sphere of influence," that she could push her left-of-center enthusiasms with greater abandon in his absence. How lucky for her.

Where these enthusiasms would lead is a question Black leaves unexamined. The consequences of the policies Mrs. Roosevelt promoted—wholesale slum clearance during a housing shortage, for example—would seem hardly irrelevant to any study of a figure presented as a "consummate political realist." Black also ignores the origins and development of Eleanor's political thought, leaving the reader to wonder whether it developed at all. The Arthurdale, West Virginia episode, which she witnessed rather early in her career, seems to have left no lasting mark.

That this admirable woman felt our pain is undeniable. Whether the programs she sponsored with such regal certitude eased that pain or exacerbated it is another question altogether, and one that goes unanswered and unasked in this book.

Alan Pell Crawford, author of Thunder on the Right: The ‘New Right’ and the Politics of Resentment, is senior counselor with Martin Public Relations in Richmond, Virginia.

CAN THE MUMMY WALK?
By Samuel Francis

Left For Dead: The Life, Death,
and Possible Resurrection of
Progressive Politics in America
By Michael Tomasky;
Free Press, 214 pages, $23

A new genre of public commentary seems to have evolved which might be called "political autopsy." Its practitioners dwell on the theme that the categories of "Left" and "Right" are no longer meaningful. These morticians appear to be correct, given recent political conflicts over trade, immigration, foreign policy, and the counter-terrorist policies of the federal government. Yet those who ring the death knells of these ideological categories are often trying to raise them from their graves. Certainly that is the mission Michael Tomasky has assigned himself in a kind of funerary companion to David Frum’s Dead Right.

Tomasky’s main argument is that the Left is now defunct because it has abandoned what he calls "Enlightenment universalism," and cloaked itself instead in an "identity politics." Left-wing advocates of identity politics hold that "it’s not universal rights and bonds...that elevate people and give them power, but their own particular histories and involuntary affiliations—be they cultural, racial, ethnic, or gender-based—that enable them to act politically." The Left can rise from the tomb, Tomasky argues, but only by somehow synthesizing liberal "Enlightenment" views with what he takes to be the "legitimate" issues raised by identity politics.

It is not clear that can be done. "Identity movements" like Louis Farrakhan's racial nationalism, or authoritarian feminism and multiculturalism, display many anti-liberal tendencies and much indifference to the individual rights and liberties for which the historic Enlightenment Left fought. Efforts to combine such movements with old liberalism face a virtually insurmountable paradox: The whole point of the Enlightenment’s universalism was to emancipate people from "particular histories and involuntary affiliations." A politics that defends those histories and affiliations is not of the Left but of the Right.

Tomasky repeatedly beats the Left over the head with the irony that today’s Right has captured the rhetoric and ethics of the Enlightenment (he even cites Pat Buchanan endorsing the good old Enlightenment principle of "equality of opportunity"). In Tomasky’s view, the Left needs to do two things: first, recapture the belief in universal rights, democracy, and reason—envisioned not as dead ends but as processes that can and must be improved. Second, respect natural group identities, but do so in a way that stretches people’s affiliations beyond the simple definitions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation.

This sounds nice, but it’s easier said than done. Those elements of contemporary leftism that Tomasky most dislikes—its snobbery, hostility to working-class whites, and "increased identification with selected liberal elites"—derive directly from the Enlightenment legacy. It is most Enlightened of Hillary Clinton to avow that "she’s not some little woman standing by her man like Tammy Wynette," or that she had better things to do in life than "stay home and bake cookies." This is rejection of the "involuntary affiliation" of pre-Enlightened womanhood. It is most Enlightened for the Left to demand laws against hate speech, despite Tomasky’s dislike of such measures, since emancipating people from "hate" and "bias" by force of the state was a central project of the Enlightenment. It is most Enlightened for the Left to insist on gun control, despite Tomasky’s advice to give it up ("while we’re defending amendments, let’s not exclude the Second"), because gun control reflects the Enlightenment’s faith in elite control, state engineering, and managed emancipation from the "irrational" proclivities of the masses.

Tomasky's ideal Left would in many ways resemble a real Right (rather than the Enlightenment Right that now flourishes or the historic Left that the Enlightenment Right emulates). But it would repel those who have been
drawn to the Left by the very vices Mr. Tomasky criticizes. So the ideological cadaver Tomasky seeks to resuscitate seems unlikely to wander very far from its slab in the morgue.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

AL GORE’S NEWEST HORROR STORY
By John Baden and Douglas S. Noonan

Our Stolen Future
By Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski,
and John Peterson Myers;
Dutton, 306 pages, $24.95

Our Stolen Future portrays a frightening world where synthetic chemicals assault our fertility, intelligence, and survival. But instead of delivering substance, it capitalizes on hype. It hit bookstores just in time for Earth Day, and on the heels of the National Academy of Sciences’ investigation of synthetic estrogens. Thanks to the big behind-the-scenes boost given to the book by Fenton Communications—the same P.R. firm that ginned up the 1989 Alar-on-apples scare—the book received coverage in nearly all national media, and backing from hip cultural figures like Robert Redford.

The book’s message is dramatic, urgent, and personal: In a terrible "Faustian bargain," we have bought technological progress at the price of the environment, the well-being of our children, and perhaps even our survival. Touted as a "scientific detective story," the book combines suspenseful narrative and apocalyptic overtones into a real page-turner. Ambiguous prophecies of "fates worse than extinction," of terrible forces that are "slow, invisible, and indirect," are bandied about darkly.

The villains are chemical manufacturers and profiteering corporations. Synthetic chemicals, the authors say, are disrupting human hormones and causing widespread developmental abnormalities. The authors suggest that synthetic chemicals could potentially be responsible for nearly every prominent social ill. Poverty, educational breakdown, crime, homosexuality, deteriorating family life—these may all be the fault of corporations like DuPont and Dow Corning.

Actually, hormone disrupters are poorly understood, and there is no conclusive evidence linking developmental problems and environmental chemicals. The science behind Our Stolen Future is unorthodox. It indicts the very concept of causality, and other basic tools of the scientific method that have been used to challenge environmental claims. Indeed, it rejects the scientific method itself as Enlightenment arrogance. That kind of thinking, the book argues, is what got us into this mess in the first place. A new wave of thinking, "eco-epidemiology," is now required.

This brings to mind the debate over global warming. Problems in human reproduction and development, like climate change, can only be reliably observed over long periods of time. Links between plastic lining in beer cans and illiteracy are about as tenuous as links between chlorofluorocarbons and the 1996 blizzard in New England. But the authors are very clever. They display short-term tragedies and augur long-term catastrophes. So none of their claims can be disproved in the near future.

The marketing appeal of the synthetic chemical scare far surpasses that of global-warming alarmists. It is racy and anecdotal: Synthetic chemicals affect our sexuality; they are so prevalent no one can escape them. Painful, personal experiences pile up. One couple’s dreams of a family are ruined by des, another sees their children’s future spoiled by ddt, a third is rendered infertile by declining sperm counts. Al Gore, who wrote the introduction for this book, invokes children
three times.

Fortunately, Our Stolen Future will not become the next Silent Spring. Reputable critics have trashed the book for all manner of scientific and logical flaws. And after repeated wolf-calling, the public has become more jaded and cynical about predictions of ecological catastrophe.

John A. Baden is chairman of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), where Douglas S. Noonan is a research assistant.