Governing America: An Insider's Report from the White House and the Cabinet

...Despite criticism from the Right for going too far and the Left for not going far enough, the liberal formula for social policy seemed to work and was politically popular...

...By the time Califano returned to government, this was no longer the case...

...Has political self-interest become national self-indulgence...

...Even the civil rights laws, though meant to impose remedies for state and local wrongs, rested on the premise that all minorities needed was an equal chance...

...In education, the administration" vigorously resisted providing assistance to parents who wished to send their children to private schools, while entangling all schools in so much red tape that their traditional independence of federal control was jeopardized...

...Though Califano's portrait of the Carter White House is far from flattering, his description of his own actions, such as leaking a memo to "trim the White House staff sails," may inadvertently evoke a certain amount of sympathy for President Carter and his aides...

...In almost every area, the changes have resulted in a set of policies less helpful and more divisive than-and often entirely antithetical Leslie Lenkowsky is research director for the Smith Richardson Foundation...

...Programs like Medicare and Medi-caid aimed to expand access to health care...

...Furthermore, on some major issues, the preferences of such groups did not always coincide with the direction chosen by the Carter administration...

...The greater access to health care permitted by Medicare and Medicaid, Califano writes, helped push up doctor and hospital costs...

...In place of equal opportunity for all, it championed special treatment-"affirmative action"-for some...

...Reflecting upon his difficulties in dealing with highly charged issues in health care, he writes, "At this stage, I believe both freedom and morality are better served by leaving these decisions to a variety of individuals, doctors, hospitals, and communities than by asking the Secretary of Health and Human Services to play Solomon...

...Califano seems to know this...

...By relinquishing their claim to compassionate social reform, liberals lost not only their own bearings but also what had best distinguished them from conservatives...

...The elderly opposed raising the Social Security retirement age (even though the change would have been phased in over a number of years...

...Hard choices did have to be made, but these need not have been incompatible with increased personal freedom...

...As he sees it, social policy has been twisted into serving narrow purposes rather than the national interest...

...Second only to the White House," he writes, "HEW was the most treacherous turf in Washington...

...Instead of championing improved education for the poor, HEW seemed more interested in busing them from school to school...

...Simon and Schuster / $16.95 Leslie Lenkowsky Not for a generation has American liberalism seemed in greater disarray than during the first six months of the Reagan administration...

...The full but unstated truth is that during Califano's tenure, as under his predecessors for more than a decade, the course HEW took was charted internally at least as much by the predominantly liberal group of professionals working there and colleagues outside who helped shape the views of those within as by single-issue groups...

...Who it was clamoring for the anti-smoking crusade and other preventive health measures is never revealed...

...The Carter administration inherited a legacy in which social policy was understood primarily as a means to increase options...

...In health care, the Carter administration was preoccupied with finding ways to control costs, reduce access to medical technology, and, with macabre logic, make dying more pleasant...

...Otherwise, liberals may well spend a long time in opposition, bemoaning the malaise of the American people when it is they who are really ailing...

...Judging from the record provided by Governing America, in virtually every major area of social policy, the Carter administration sought to be more hard-hearted, not less, and to limit options, not broaden them...

...In part, this was because the Carter government came to recognize that the generosity of the previous era now...

...With apparently little regard for the financial consequences, it began requiring state and local governments to provide costly services, often of dubious value, for the handicapped and other groups...

...Although liberals continued to claim the mantle of compassion, in reality they had become meddlesome at best and perhaps even an obstacle to true well-being...

...In response to Senator Kennedy's proposal for a national health system, the Carter administration put forth plans for catastrophic illness insurance and children's medical care...

...To be sure, vestiges of the old-time religion could still be found...

...Califano asks at the conclusion of his book...

...But since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, the performance of the opposition has been notably ineffective...

...Through the legislature and the courts, they were even able to force the administration to act against its better judgment...

...In the name of public health, HEW took to banning widely used foods and additives...

...Furthermore, judging from the growing number of people willing to identify themselves as Republicans, the setbacks may be more than temporary...

...Califano prefers to blame the influence of single-issue groups for this failure...

...Joseph A. Califano, Jr.'s account of his tenure as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the Carter administration shows not just that a prematurely dismissed Cabinet officer can gain a measure of revenge by publishing his memoirs first...

...If Governing America helps his fellow liberals learn that lesson too, it will have served a useful purpose...

...As a way of relieving the pressure on Social Security, it considered expanding private pension coverage...

...While one teachers' union strongly favored creating the Department of Education, the other major one was just as strongly opposed...

...On some issues, notably education, the HEW Secretary was less willing than the White House to expand the federal presence...

...Purporting to represent the clients of HEW programs, in some cases spawned by them, such groups, in Califano's view, constantly sought to expand the Department's role and thwarted efforts at better management...

...Even after the McGovern debacle, liberals retained considerable influence in the legislature and, on a number of issues, were able to prevail over an executive branch weakened by Watergate and other misadventures...

...Despite increased federal financing for education, school quality worsened...

...Although this analysis is not without merit, it is far from being the whole story...

...By assuring a minimum income, Social Security would enable the retired to live on their own, rather than become dependent upon relatives or welfare...

...Rather, what Governing America really demonstrates is how far liberal thinking on Social Security, health care, education, civil rights, and similar topics has travelled since the triumphant days of the Great Society, which Califano served as assistant to President Johnson for domestic affairs...

...Indeed, the administration has so far encountered little serious resistance to its assault on some of liberalism's most cherished ideas and programs...

...Except for qualms about the political impact of some of the changes (e.g., in the tobacco-growing states) or their costs, HEW was becoming something of a national nanny and no one in the administration seemed much to mind...

...The Social Security checks that enabled a retired person to live decently grew increasingly hard to finance in a period of inflation and declining productivity...

...No solution was beyond trying, no cost was too great, and no program, once established, was to be cut back...

...When financial incentives and social services seemed unlikely to reduce welfare dependency, President Carter and his Cabinet proposed to require recipients to work at public service jobs, and when the largest payroll tax increase in American history failed to rescue the Social Security program, they began thinking about raising the retirement age...

...The war on poverty, like the first major federal aid-to-education bill, sought to improve the opportunities available to the poor...

...For those liberal stalwarts who want to learn what went wrong, a good place to start is Governing America: An Insider's Report from the White House and the Cabinet...

...The reason was simple: Social policy-still heavily influenced by liberals even in Republican years- had grown increasingly coercive...

...Much less clear- astonishingly in an "insider's" report on policy-making-is why they were so frequently passed over in favor of a larger, tougher, and even mean-spirited role for the federal government...

...On others, such as his anti-smoking crusade, he was more so...

...The great burst of reformist energy let loose by the Great Society had by the Carter years turned into a smothering cloud of federal do-goodism...

...Only by understanding what happened to these views can one really explain the changed nature of liberal social policy...

...From Governing America, it is clear that Califano knew of them...

...to-those for which liberalism once stood...

...But these were not the main lines of activity...

...Whether this was Califano's doing or the work of the president and his aides is a minor matter...

...Its major civil rights efforts involved promoting quotas (lightly disguised as "goals") and inventing new forms of discrimination that required redress...

...What matters more is how little dispute there was in the administration over the ugly turn in liberal social policy...

...No problem was deemed too small, no need unworthy of assistance...

...In short, from being a force for increasing personal freedom, liberal social policy as embodied in the programs of HEW and other agencies was becoming a device for restricting it...

...The whims of single-issue groups would surely have mattered much less if those in office had been less willing to indulge them...

...During Califano's thirty months in office, such attitudes came into full flower...

...Yet, nothing about these circumstances required liberals to become social engineers...

...When coupled with increasingly bizarre notions of who needed help, such ideas produced a set of policies hard for even so able a lawyer as Califano to defend...

...Throughout the Carter years, in fact, ideas of just the other sort were becoming more plentiful: increased competition in health care, tuition tax credits for education, new ways of financing retirement, and so on...

...seemed unsuited for a new set of problems-which that generosity had perhaps created...

...My experience inclines me to say yes...

...Higher welfare benefits seemed only to lead to more dependency and family break-up...