More than any other factor, that presidential privilege has politicized the system of public broadcasting. Every administration has loaded the CPB board with blatant political cronies, including pollsters, media consultants and speech writers. Their allegiance to individual presidents, the Democratic and Republican parties and to Washington’s permanent governing class stifles public broadcasting and makes the possibility of genuine reform remote.

Three decades after LBJ’s bill became law, optimism has been replaced by snarling. There is no governmental consensus about how well public broadcasting performs its functions. There is, despite promises from LBJ and many of his successors, no consensus about how — or even if — a permanent method of funding public television and radio should be established. There isn’t even an American consensus on what public broadcasting means. The Republican majorities that took over Congress in 1995 made public broadcasting their first and most fervent target. In the new Republican order, the very use of the term public was suspect. “I don’t understand why they call it public broadcasting,” Newt Gingrich said. “As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing public about it; it’s an elitist enterprise. Rush Limbaugh is public broadcasting.”

The confusion over what constitutes public broadcasting is not merely a political posture. A neutral public television viewer might well wonder what, exactly, is “public” about a quilting show. Why does public television avoid almost any original comedy programming, but remains perfectly content to air 10-year-old British sitcoms? Why should taxpayer dollars support a supposedly noncommercial medium that now uses, in some cases, the idea of a clutter-free broadcast environment to sell “underwriting” spots at a rate three or four times higher than that charged by commercial broadcasters?

The lack of consensus on all these questions suggests a system in turmoil, and one that must change. And for a time in 1995, it appeared that the Republican-led attacks on public broadcasting might force the system to confront these harder questions.

But despite months of huffing and puffing, the GOP found it impossible to blow down the house. Ultimately, little more was accomplished than a medium-sized cut from the CPB budget. While public television and radio managers prided themselves on stopping the congressional onslaught, they actually — in classic Washington fashion — preserved an inadequate status quo. Indeed, when the federal managers of CPB, the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio did defend themselves, they often seconded key points made by their supposed critics.

We are inefficient and wasteful, public TV managers seemed to say, and drew up plans to eliminate so-called secondary stations. In New York City and Pittsburgh, such stations were formally decommissioned. The fact that the remaining public TV stations in those markets provide virtually no programming for local communities did not perturb the all-powerful accountants who have taken over public broadcasting.

We should let the private sector run public broadcasting, said the managers of public TV and radio in response to congressional insistence. That’s why Turner distributes PBS videos, and why the production company responsible for “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” is majority-owned by John Malone’s TCI, one of the nation’s largest cable firms. It’s also why the theme song for public radio’s daily “Marketplace” suddenly shifts, as the program’s sponsorship by General Electric is announced, into the familiar GE jingle “We bring good things to life.”

As if in complete agreement with Gingrich’s assertion that Rush Limbaugh is public broadcasting, station KBDI in Colorado began running Limbaugh’s atrocious television program every weeknight. And Atlanta’s public TV station, WPBA, brought Gingrich into its studio to tape a fund-raising spot for its spring 1995 pledge drive. “Tell ‘em Newt sent you,” said the speaker who had denounced public broadcasting as elitist. Another tactic practiced by the CPB in the face of Republican criticism was to throw money at any conservative who showed up at their door. CPB signed up lobbyist Vin Weber, a longtime Gingrich political ally, to a $100,000 contract, even though Weber publicly stated that in his opinion CPB should receive no federal funds. The contract had to be revoked when some CPB directors reminded their colleagues that the CPB is barred by federal law from lobbying.

Republican speech writers suddenly became public television’s hottest producers. Peggy Noonan got $100,000 from the CPB to produce a poorly reviewed series on values, and George Bush speech writer Tony Snow got $155,000 from the CPB for a documentary and a two-hour special. Who says conservatives don’t want federal money for public broadcasting?

The farcical public broadcasting “debate” of 1995 demonstrated that the mandarins who run American public broadcasting have become so cowed by decades of political attack and interference that they can no longer even pay lip service to the legislative requirement of political independence. A system politicized at its highest levels is bound to react with mere symbolism and back-room buyoffs.

American public television and radio are in need of dire reform. Public broadcasting’s programming and funding must be changed, its purpose clarified. No single measure will accomplish it all. But tying the top management of public broadcasting to the mucky machinery of electoral politics is a fundamental flaw. Until that LBJ legacy is eradicated, any other reforms are unlikely.

I suppose the story begins seven years ago when, a week before my
college freshman orientation, I walked into the welfare office with my
daughter, Maia, then 6 months old, and applied for a cash grant. At the
time, applying for welfare seemed like an all-right thing to do: My mom had
been on the rolls for a few years when I was a pre-schooler. For the next
six years, I got an AFDC check almost every month and promptly signed it
over to my landlord. And I learned, slowly, that there were a whole hell of
a lot of Americans — from Newt Gingrich on down to the next door neighbor
who used to bang on my door screaming, “Whose responsibility is it to raise
your damn kid, anyway?” — for whom my income source was not the least bit
all right.

We never lived solely on that $500 check from the state. When they
don’t give a family enough to survive on at the beginning of the month and
that family is still alive at the end of the month — well, obviously
some fraud has taken place. My “fraud” was mostly legal; it consisted of a
few thousand dollars a year in student loans, the odd work-study job,
periodic checks begged from my grandmother and the Salvation Army, meals
from various soup kitchens, Christmas presents from the local fire station
giveaway, and about $30 a week I made by buying books and CDs at
garage sales and pawning them off on resale shops at a minimal profit. My
six years on welfare earned me quite a few premature gray hairs, but we got by.

Or maybe the story begins in late May of last year. I’d just finished
graduate school, hadn’t landed a job, and Hip Mama, the zine I’d been
publishing for two and a half years, was still showing a loss. My cutoff
notice from the welfare office was hanging on the wall next to my telephone
when it rang at 7 a.m. I was already up, on my way out the door to get to a
local morning radio show to talk about being a welfare mama on the chopping
block. Thinking it was my baby sitter calling, I answered the phone. A woman
with a thick New York accent who identified herself as my agent’s partner
told me matter-of-factly, “We just sold your book for $100,000.”

Silence. I wasn’t speechless about the book deal or the sum of money –
I was just trying to figure out who the crank caller was. “Hello?” the
woman with the New York accent said after a minute. “You’re kidding,
right?” I said softly. Granted, I’d written the proposal and prayed for the
money, but I don’t like being teased. When I was about 8 years old, my
big sister and her friend told me that if I laid perfectly still on my
stomach on top of the cab of the white pick-up truck that was parked in our
driveway, it would take off and fly me into outer space. I wasn’t about to
give this woman the same satisfaction my sister and her friend got when
they came outside two hours later, laughing hysterically at me lying
perfectly still on top of that damn truck.

On the radio show later that morning, I announced that I’d gotten the
deal to write “The Hip Mama Survival Guide,” but I didn’t mention the sum.
Perhaps I’d heard it wrong. It was nearly noon by the time I let the
reality of my new wealth sink in. And suddenly I felt like Cinderella. I
called everyone I knew and a few people I didn’t. I don’t remember what I
said to them. Probably something like, “And then, this dude showed up with
the glass slipper …” After six years on welfare, $100,000 minus the
agent’s cut and the illustrator’s fee sounded to me like millions. I’d
never be broke again. I could buy anything my heart desired. I could buy
Maia anything her heart desired. I could pay back all my debts and
live in the lap of luxury for eternity. The phrase “And they lived happily
ever after …” might have crossed my mind.

I started making lists of all the things I would buy when the check
arrived. I had never been a “responsible” poor person. I didn’t clip
coupons and, sometimes, we went out to dinner even as checks to the phone
company bounced. When I was on welfare, I spent all the money in my pockets
on whatever Maia or I wanted before I ever said “no.” But I was an even
less responsible rich person. When I had more money in my pockets, it
simply took me longer to get to “no.” For a year, I was a mama who only
said “yes” (“$100 worth of trinkets from the Statue of Liberty
gift shop? Why not?”). For a year, I was a friend who wouldn’t let anyone
she knew get evicted (“Three-day notice? I’m on my way”). For a year, I was
a writer-for-hire with a seriously snotty attitude (“Kiss my butt,” I told
an editor from a national magazine who had always annoyed me when he called
with a dollar-a-word assignment).

The sobering bank statement didn’t arrive until this summer: I was on
the verge of being totally broke again. The resale value of my couch and
car are negligible. And, so, the “reality” part of my story begins. Even
though the heroine is still sitting here in the same apartment in a nice
part of town that the city planners nonetheless call an “area of persistent
poverty,” she’s had a little bit of time to think about the real difference
between rags and riches.

It is amazing to me how much kinder the world is to people with any
disposable income to speak of. When my daughter had some cavities that
needed to be filled this year, one phone call and one trip to the dentist
did the trick — gone were the days of calling two dozen dentists and
social service agencies in an attempt to get someone to take my Medi-Cal
government insurance. When I bounced checks this year, my bank spoke of
“oversights” and covered the difference — they used to speak of
“irresponsibility” and charge me 25 bucks for the insult. When I was on
deadline and my hard drive crashed recently, I drove over to Circuit City
and bought a new computer. When my daughter’s father started acting
bizarre, I didn’t have to yell at him, I just wrote a check to a lawyer and
she did my arguing for me. When Maia and I were driving to Los Angeles and
we got tired of being in the car, we stopped in San Luis Obispo, booked a
big pink room at the Madonna Inn and took a horse and carriage ride around
the lake. When a friend’s car was being lifted onto a tow truck and she
started screaming and crying and pleading with the driver, I said
“Shhh …” handed the guy my secured credit card, and the ordeal was over.

They say you can’t buy happiness, and they’re right, but you can buy an
awful lot of peace and quiet. You can buy grace. I used to think that if your
house burns down and you’ve got money, you don’t suffer. Now I know that
you do, but you get to grieve in comfort. Your kids still get cavities,
it’s just a lot easier to fill them.

Next to motherhood, being on welfare was the most radicalizing
experience of my life. When you cannot stop the cruelty of the world with a
secured credit card, you can’t avoid seeing the oppressive reality of it.
And even if you know enough to appreciate the swiftness with which the
cavities of people with bank accounts can be filled, it’s easy to forget,
while you’re sitting in the waiting room reading People, the evil
cluelessness that once denied your government insurance. I’m trying to get
a second book deal now and my mother says if it works out, I should put
some money down on a house. But I probably won’t. Houses are flammable, and
anyway, I bought the big purple couch on such a whim that I forgot to
measure my door. I ended up having to recruit two neighbor chicks to hoist
it up over my second floor balcony. I don’t think we could get it out of
here nearly as gracefully. But maybe we’ll go to Club Med.

First, the basics: In August, a federal overseer nullified Ron Carey’s narrow reelection victory over James P. Hoffa (son of the mobbed-up and still-missing Jimmy Hoffa) after she discovered the Carey campaign had engaged in serious campaign irregularities. Subsequently, three top Carey advisers pleaded guilty to various charges, including running illegal contribution swaps. For instance, according to court documents, the Teamsters gave $475,000 to Citizen Action, a liberal grass-roots group with over 1 million members; in return, donations arranged by a Citizen Action fundraiser were funneled to Carey’s reelection campaign. In essence, Carey’s election team laundered union funds into dollars for his own campaign.

Carey claims he was not in the loop. Still, he may be disqualified from running again. Even if he runs, his reelection is far from secure, despite his victory in the recent UPS strike. And if he is booted out of office, the entire labor movement could suffer devastating consequences.

For one thing, Carey, who did much to reform the sleaze-ridden Teamsters, will immediately be portrayed as just another corrupt union boss. For Republicans, still smarting from the anti-GOP organizing role played by the AFL-CIO in the ’96 election — not to mention the $35 million it spent on advertising — Carey will be the perfect tar baby. You can imagine the GOP ads in next year’s mid-term elections: “Those same Big Labor leaders who are attacking Republicans stood right behind a corrupt union boss who the U.S. government said was too crooked to run his union.”

The ripples spread beyond Carey and the Teamsters. John Sweeney and his slate won control of the AFL-CIO in a tight election, largely thanks to the Teamsters who account for about 10 percent of the vote. If Hoffa and the old guard, many of whom supported Republicans, take back the Teamsters, the balance of power within the whole labor federation could shift. The AFL-CIO could be further damaged if it is proved, as court records suggest, that the AFL-CIO’s No. 2 man, Richard Trumka, approved an under-the-table transfer of $150,000 from the Teamsters, via the AFL-CIO, to Citizen Action. Trumka claims he thought he was facilitating a legitimate contribution.

The scandal obviously threatens Citizen Action, one of the more dynamic outfits on the left. In 1995 and 1996, it mounted an energetic assault against the GOP on the issues of Medicare, Medicaid and environmental regulations. This included an extensive get-out-the-vote project targeting voters who would be more likely to vote Democratic. It is not clear that Citizen Action’s leaders were knowing participants in the contributions swaps with the Teamsters. It’s possible that just one of its fund-raiser orchestrated the deal. Presently, Citizen’s Action is cooperating with the ongoing investigation. Clearly, it has a lot of explaining to do.

There are not many effective organizations remaining on the left. If Citizen Action goes down, Republicans will have one more reason to cheer their 1998 prospects. It may also put a scare into the small group of rich progressives who fund Citizen Action and similar activist organizations on the left. They might decide their money would be better spent supporting some save-the-whale types rather than activities such as get-out-the-vote campaigns.

Those liberal consultants who went to illegal extremes in trying to save the progressive-friendly leadership of Ron Carey have done great damage to their own cause.

Kids are disappointed. Parents, including myself, eat their rage and scramble to home-school their children. The pols play the blame game.

“Not my fault,” said House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who fingered the city government for holding back funds that Congress had made available. Julius Becton, the retired Army general appointed to run the schools, blamed the judge who ruled that school roofs had to be fixed before students arrived. Mayor Marion Barry, our very own two-bit despot, tried to play the local hero by keeping city pools open while blaming Becton for taking so long to repair the roofs.

Barry has earned his reputation as a villain in the sickening decline of Washington, from calm capital when he arrived to murder capital with its unschooled children of today. He began his political rise as school board president in 1971, but rather than fixing schools, he started building his future political base. As mayor for 15 years, he’s steered school contracts to his cronies, who then delivered lousy food and left trash piling up around schools.

But Barry can legitimately argue that he’s not directly responsible for public education, since it had been under the jurisdiction of the school board rather than the mayor, and now it’s controlled by presidential appointees. The villain of the piece now is Bill Clinton.

Clinton — maybe he doesn’t know this — is responsible for running the District of Columbia’s schools. Over the past two years, Congress, the courts and the White House have gradually taken control of all important city functions, from trash collection to law enforcement. Clinton appointed Dr. Andrew Brimmer to chair the federal control board that essentially governs the city, over the mayor and the city council. Brimmer ousted the elected school board and appointed retired Gen. Becton to run the schools. So the man who failed the students is Clinton’s creation.

The Constitution gave Congress and the president ultimate control of the federal city. Other presidents have used that power to improve the city. John F. Kennedy put in motion a plan to renovate Pennsylvania Avenue. Lyndon Johnson gave the district its first appointed mayor and city council and put it on the path toward home rule. Richard Nixon beefed up the police force and signed the 1973 Home Rule Charter. To give Clinton his due, he did come up with a recently passed bill to take pressure off the district’s budget. That same law, however, took more power from elected officials and put it in the hands of the president’s handpicked appointees, like Brimmer and Becton.

Which brings us back to the president and the unschooled students. The message heard ’round the world is that Washington, which can airlift half a million soldiers and tanks and planes and missiles halfway around the globe in one week to do battle in Iraq, cannot educate its own students.

The message to the students is that they cannot depend on officials — from Barry to the appointees to Bill Clinton — to give them a decent education. What does that say about a president who talks big about national education standards and wiring all public schools to the Internet and building a bridge to the 21st Century when the students in his backyard need real roofs, not rhetorical bridges?

In many ways the district’s public school system is a Rorschach test for urban public education across the nation. The problems here are no different than in East St. Louis or Dallas or Oakland. Except for one thing: D.C.’s school population — at 78,000 — is relatively small, making it easier to attack the basic problems of no-account bureaucrats, lousy teachers and crumbling school buildings.

Bill Clinton’s golf game may have gotten better in the cool New England autumn; here in the vacant schools, he’s failing the little kids. His big talk about being the “education president” is falling on silent walls.

In 1990, following his father’s death and his mother’s stroke, Branfman dropped out of politics and began a spiritual journey that took him from India, where he worked briefly at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying; to Hungary where he studied with spiritual teacher Laszlo Honti; to Jerusalem, where he lived and studied with Hasidim; and to six months of silent meditation, including a three-month retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA.

Branfman is currently directing For Generations to Come, a San Francisco-based project that supports people grappling with the meaning of life in the face of their own death.

how is it that most of our politicians, left or right,
start out well-motivated — a teenaged Bill Clinton earnestly
pumping John F. Kennedy’s hand, an idealistic Newt Gingrich
visiting European battlefields and vowing to end war — and
turn years later into the paunchy, cynical and compromised pols that we have come to so distrust?

We tend to blame the politicians themselves, focusing on Clinton’s indecisiveness or Gingrich’s
pettiness. But in fact, our present system would
corrupt even Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama, were either to run for office in America.

To a young person asking me for advice about getting into politics today, I’d say you must be prepared to confront the Four Iron Laws of political
life:

Law #1:
Money talks, bullshit walks.

Congressman Ozzie Meyers of Abscam fame was right.
Your main activity in politics, for the rest of your
life, will be raising money. And raising it from total
strangers, many of whom you will neither like nor respect,
and who are mainly interested in having their egos stroked
and/or getting something out of you.

The chief personal trait you will need to succeed is
insincerity. We’re talking a dozen or more phone calls a
day, as you exude warmth to disembodied voices, no matter
how tired, distracted or miserable you actually are.

We’re talking an endless round of cocktail parties,
breakfasts, lunches and dinners, making small talk with
strangers, laughing at their jokes, learning to tell little
stories with a wink of the eye and pat on the shoulder,
communicating how much you really like and value people for
whom you feel nothing.

Why bad things happen
to good people in politics, page 2

i remember sitting in on a little
tete-a-tete&nbspbetween Gary Hart, who just hated this kind of
thing, and two major donors. It was excruciating to watch
Hart, who is basically uncomfortable around other human
beings, do his best to perform: taking two extra drinks in
an attempt to become more sociable, his face reddening,
searching desperately for some anecdote to lighten things
up, trying to fill the increasingly long silences.

In real life, a Hillary Clinton wouldn’t spend five
minutes with people like the MacDougals. In political
life, they become part of her extended family.

I remember once talking to a millionaire who doled out
$1,000 checks to various politicians. He smiled happily as
he listed, one by one, the various politicians who had
trooped to his home for personal visits — Congressional,
mayoral, gubernatorial candidates. “They come to me, someone who has barely a high school
education!” he said. “I don’t understand how they have all
this time to visit a crummy $1,000 contributor. Don’t they
work for a living?” What did he get out of it? I asked, since I knew he had no interest whatsoever in issues or legislation . “Ego,” he laughed, “what else? I
mean they’re coming to my house, I’m not going
to theirs.”

Once in a while the politician gets tired of playing the game. Long
negotiations once ensued, for example, between the Jerry
Brown campaign and a major contributor, who had just one
little demand: that Jerry attend his daughter’s wedding.
Governor Brown finally agreed to put in a phone call that
would be broadcast to the 1,000 assembled wedding guests. The moment
came. The crowd hushed. The host stood before his guests
speaking into a telephone. “Hello, Jerry!” he boomed. Oops, no Jerry. The governor, who was staying at Linda Ronstadt’s house
at the time, simply did not come to the phone.

But that was the exception. Michael Berman, who
managed California Congressman Mel Levine’s primary race for the
1992 Democratic U.S. Senate nomination, finally reached the logical
conclusion. Since only money for TV commercials mattered in
a statewide race, his candidate would not waste time on
irrelevant matters like making campaign appearances or
meeting with the press. The congressman would spend the election season in a room, dialing for dollars. He would only be
allowed out for the unavoidable: casting a vote, visiting a
particularly wealthy contributor personally or going
home to sleep. Levine agreed and succeeded in raising a record
amount of money for the Senate primary.

It turned out, however, that Berman had made a major
miscalculation. The public and media are unwilling to admit
this dirty little secret of American politics. Decorum must
be maintained. The candidate’s refusal to appear in public became
the issue in the primary — he was tagged the “Stealth Candidate” by the press — and he was defeated by Barbara
Boxer, who went on to win the Senate seat.

Berman was just being honest. Politics is primarily about raising money for TV
commercials. Campaign appearances and media interviews are
mere window-dressing. If you enter politics, raising money
will consume the single largest portion of your time — far
more than the combined time you will spend learning about the issues, formulating policy, enjoying your family and simply thinking.

Law #2:
The media rules.

The second iron law of politics is that you will
inevitably become obsessed with seeing your name in print or
appearing on radio or TV. You will much rather be mentioned
in a story that opposes your beliefs than ignored in a story
favorable to them. Other than raising money, nothing will
matter more to your political future than this “free media” exposure.

The moments before the Normandy Invasion were pleasant
compared to the nerve-twisting mornings when then-Congresswoman
Bella Abzug’s staff arrived at the office to find the
morning papers waiting. Trembling, they opened the pages to
stories on the Vietnam war, abortion or other issues that Abzug
was identified with. If she was not mentioned, a gloom
settled over the office so thick that one would have thought
a close relative had died.

Sure enough, the congresswoman would enter her office
and, a few moments later, a bellow would issue forth from
the inner sanctum: “Smith (or whatever the names of the unlucky
aides of the moment were), get the fuck in here!” The next 15 minutes would feature some of the most
creative use of profanity this side of Texas. The storm
over, the red-faced aides slunk back to their desks,
trying to regain some composure and remember what it once
felt like to be a human being.

Bella, another good person to whom bad things happened
by being in politics and who mellowed considerably
afterwards, was only a slightly extreme example of what
dependence on media does to politicians.

The media is never good for a politician’s character development. The press will
only consistently cover you if you are shrilly negative, constantly carping about your opponents’ failings.
And it will never give you the benefit of the doubt. The
assumption whenever a politician goes into a press conference or other media
event is that he or she is a self-aggrandizing, ambitious,
hypocritical human being who is motivated only by the desire
for power.

Your success in this profession, in short, will
largely lie in conforming to the values of journalists who
lack the slightest respect for yours. Your ability to think,
reason or reach wise decisions will become much less
important than your ability to create soundbites and spoon-feed reporters. But no matter how hard you try to ingratiate yourself with the media, they are always poised to lunge for your neck. The press pack is never happier than when blood is in the air. And don’t ever forget — you are the prey.

Which brings up the next law.

Law #3:
There really is someone out to get you.

That’s right — you’re not paranoid. And not just someone. Lots of people are out to get you. Every candidate
you will ever run against, backed by an army of
researchers, media specialists, even private detectives. And
if they don’t get you, you know the media will.

Know now that every action you take for the next 50
years, in public or in private, at three in the afternoon or three
in the morning, may someday be publicized to everyone you care about, and twisted
luridly out of shape to boot.
As a politician
you have no right to privacy, no right to fairness, no right
even to the safeguards we grant a criminal.

I remember, for example, a terribly nice
Republican mayor who made the
mistake of challenging California Democratic Assemblyman
Richard Robinson. Robinson sent his research “hit
man” to the mayor’s city to gather dirt. It turned out
that the mayor, a conservative family man, had attended a
national mayor’s meeting in Denver, where his host had
invited his fellow mayors to a harmless luncheon
at the local Playboy club. Without thinking, Robinson’s future opponent filed a receipt from the luncheon with his
trip expenses. Wrong move.

During the election every household in his district
received a mailing in big, bold letters, entitled “YOUR
PLAYBOY MAYOR!,” implying that the mayor was a sexual
libertine who was unfaithful to his wife and worse. He lost
the election. Years later, he still got tears in his eyes
describing the pain his daughter had suffered from the
taunts of her classmates as well as the shame and embarrassment it had
caused his wife.

What will it do to your own capacity to grow, to
lead an authentic life, if you must live in fear that any
risks taken, harmless or not, will one day be used against
you? And what will it do for your soul to authorize,
election after election, the same kinds of petty, vicious
attacks on your opponents that they are unleashing on you?

Law #4:
Your brain will drain.

Perhaps the most important impact on you personally
will be the loss of your ability to focus or concentrate.
Kept running from event to event like a rat in a cage, your
mind will fragment, to the point where you’ll find it difficult
to read a book, reflect or just sit quietly. Your most
important survival trait will be mastering the art of
simultaneously thinking four or five things, while giving
others the impression that you are following what they say.

If you are a member of Congress, for example, you will
run from committee hearing to press interview to fundraising
lunch to floor vote. Wherever you are, you will
often need to be somewhere else.

Thoughts will flit continuously through your mind at
any given moment: what position you should take on an issue,
how to find time to call an important contributor or
journalist, how to deal with your family’s demands for more
time.

The most dramatic examples of this phenomenon are President Clinton and his predecessor George Bush. Bush was literally unable to sit still.
“Gotta move, gotta move” was one of his well-known expressions,
uttered on vacation, as he careened from speedboat to
jogging track to tennis court. And one of our most vivid images of Bill Clinton is of the President sitting in the Oval Office,
simultaneously eating a big meal, conducting a phone
conversation, reading a policy memo, tracking CNN and
interacting with family, aides and friends. Political mind
fragmentation is bipartisan.

While the media presents this as a positive trait —
how wonderful that our man can get so much done — you
may not find it so enjoyable from the inside. There are few
politicians who know the joys of contemplation
and inner peace — let alone have the ability to write a decent speech of their own.

After Clinton moved into the White House, his staff quickly realized they needed to focus him on a few key issues, to maintain a “theme for a day.”
But our fragmented President could not comply. He had long
ago lost the ability to concentrate or focus.

I remember meeting with then-Governor Bill
Clinton, to recruit him for the board of directors of an economic competitiveness organization. I described our
activities for 15 minutes or so. When I paused, he responded
by describing in intimate detail his work on welfare reform,
an interesting topic but one that had no relevance to the
point of our meeting. He then agreed to join
our organization.

I wondered afterwards why he had gone on about
welfare. Then I realized that his goal was to impress me with
his grasp of policy, and he probably hadn’t heard a word
I’d said about competitiveness. Since he agreed to join
our board, I didn’t take it personally. He was just
another politician with attention-deficit disorder.

Perhaps this is why you will probably find yourself
talking far more than listening if you enter politics. It’s
so much easier to talk than to pull the mind together and
hear what others are saying.

So are we doomed to live out our days in a political system that keeps churning out morally and intellectually stunted leadership? Not if we begin to seriously confront the roots of the problem. I’d begin with these three sweeping reforms:

1. Public financing of all elections, a ban on all lobbyist and large donations
to the political parties, and a ban on self-financed campaigns.

Politicians can neither deeply understand issues
nor maintain their integrity if their major waking activity
is sucking up to the rich. Nor do Steve Forbes-style vanity campaigns elevate the political process. Level the playing field by financing elections with taxpayer dollars. There is nothing wrong
with a millionaire or celebrity running for office, as long as they win on their own
merits and not on their bank accounts.

2. Strict term limits.

It is critical that our politicians have real lives before and after entering politics. Tough term limits will force them to pursue other careers and interests, during which they may even develop the habits of reading, thinking and spending time
with their families. No politician should be allowed to serve more than 12 years in public life.

3. Reject media cynicism and negative campaigning.

A free press is critical, and democracy will not
survive with government-imposed or legal constraints on the media. At the
same time, however, democracy cannot thrive in a
media environment that degrades politicians and patronizes voters.

We’ve already seen signs of a growing public
revulsion against media excess and negative campaigning.
Steve Forbes’ key loss in the Iowa primary, for example, was widely
attributed to public distaste for his vicious attack ads.
Groups like the Common Ground coalition are working to
encourage politicians to campaign on their ideas, and recent
decisions by major networks to let the candidates directly
address the voters is a big step in the right direction.

As millions of voters, particularly swing voters who
determine elections, change their values, so too will the
media and political campaigns.
The public clearly wants
substantial political reform and, sooner or later, the
system will respond.

Until then, however, voter beware.