POLITICAL BOOKNOTES

...The author of The Culture of Narcissism has written a strong indictment of our political culture, which he says is dominated by a concern for individual survival and little else...

...In the book's most interesting section, Hess deals with the important press-government connection outside the domain of the press officers: leaks...

...By Harrington's count, there remain 40 to 50 million Americans living in poverty, which is about what there were when he wrote The Other America...

...Charlotte Mecklenberg Board of Education, which gave us busing, Morgan spends just as much time trying to prove that court-enforced busing is the single biggest reason for the decline of American public schools as he does supporting his contention that Swann has a shaky constitutional foundation...

...It's a closeknit, attractive middle-class community of less than 5,000 with a dedicated police force and civic pride...

...Greenhaw has an interesting chapter on how the Somocistas ran the Nicaraguan marijuana business, a story that has been told before, but not so convincingly...

...The story Edsall tells begins with a simple and fundamental political truth: elected officials tend to represent the interests of those who put them in office and who hold the power over whether they stay there...

...The book does offer valuable information and some hopeful examples...

...For starters, take the replacement of closed-door backroom deals with primaries and open caucuses as the way Democrats now choose most of their candidates...

...They therefore felt the political necessity—the selfinterest if you will—of choosing Democratic candidates who, once elected, would provide a good representation and a share in the spoils of office to the party's core constituency of working-class and lower-income Americans...

...The political fights we have joined are single-issue oriented and tend to alienate rather than unite...

...Timothy Noah Disabling America: The Rights Industry of Our Time...

...Christopher Lasch...

...In the case of the career press officer, the Washington press corps regards him as a failed journalist—a view that, as it pertains to some press officers, is valid but as a generalization reflects, I believe, the arrogance conferred by the press's power...

...But Democratic primaries, while open to all, are not participated in by all...

...Brookings, $22.95...

...They always fail...

...What such accounts usually lack, and this book is no exception, is any hint that the author sees the absurdity in enforcement...

...Fortunately, there's a book suited to your needs, offering state-by-state descriptions of largely affluent towns and villages with relatively low crime rates...

...In contrast, the "hacks" and "bosses," whose influence has been curtailed by the reform movement, traditionally had built their power base on getting out the vote among poorer Democrats...

...Vice President Bush's task force, equally laughable, gets wide-eyed treatment in books like Greenhaw's...

...While whitecollar workers were just 25 percent more likely to vote than blue-collar workers in 1964, for example, by 1980 the white-collar voting advantage had jumped to 48 percent...

...Dodd, Mead, $15.95...

...These include such vital intangibles as close public-citizen cooperation, a strong sense of community and small-scale, decentralized crime programs...

...Harrington, whose 1963 book, The Other America, helped inspire the war on poverty, reports 21 years later that "the poor are still there...

...the politician and the bureaucracy suspect that his sympathies are too much with the prying press...

...David and Holly Frank...

...This trade-off, incidental or deliberate, makes a mockery of the federal pronouncements and is deserving of further exploration...

...John Rothchild The Government/Press Connection: Press Officers and Their Offices...

...the same set-up, Greenhaw implies, exists in Central America today...

...Morgan is an "interpretivist," which means he thinks that judges deciding constitutional issues should confine themselves to enforcing norms that are stated or clearly implicit in the Constitution...

...Greenhaw is a reporter from Alabama...

...Our approach to politics and everyday life, Lasch says, has been shaped by the unhappy developments of our time—the Nazi holocaust, the arms race, the bureaucratization of everyday life, and environmental degradation...

...It's too bad the authors didn't spend more time trying to understand what makes towns like Glenarden really work, rather than simply advising readers to head for the hills with a few hundred thousand dollars in spare change...

...Near San Francisco in Marin County, for instance, you might pick up a little bungalow for a mere $500,000 in lovely Belvedere (pop...

...Indeed, of the $316.6 billion in the 1981 federal budget allocated for payments to individuals, less than $43 billion went to the poor...

...Why has federal economic policy—on taxes, government spending, regulation, and practically everything else dealing with money—shifted so hard to the right in recent years...

...Outright lying is rare—but the use of halftruths to mislead reporters is part of the game...

...Wayne Greenhaw...

...Richard E. Morgan...

...A federal task force aligned against the Miami rum-runners in the 1920s got snickers even in The New York Times...

...Yet some of the features of the authors' safe places can be adapted to the lower-income, more urban neighborhoods they scorn...

...Perhaps most inspiring is the small, all-black town of Glenarden, Maryland, near Washington, D.C...

...Lasch's argument is wide-ranging and original...

...It is plain that drugs are the price of our anticommunism in Latin America, just as Albert McCoy argued they were in Southeast Asia...

...2,599...

...To the contrary, they typically are dominated by the richest sectors of the Democratic electorate— the yuppies and the upper middle class, whose concern about liberalism on "social issues" is generally not matched by any enthusiasm for sacrificing their own economic self-interest to protect the interests of the less well off...

...Harrington notes that our present system of social welfare is geared primarily to the elderly, "most of whom are not now, and for a long time have not been, poor...

...How many more of these low flights to rural landing strips, undercover agents on the ground, conniving offshore bankers, venal unloaders, and powerful local politicians with a hands-off attitude can we take...

...Dial, $18.95...

...The temptation to manipulate is greatest at the highest—the press secretary—level, where politics and even questions of the national interest are on the line...

...Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $17.95...

...While noting that the good press officers he met seemed on at least an intellectual par with most reporters he studied, he also failed to find any career press officer "with that combination of analytical ability, writing skill, and overdrive that is apparent in the best reporters ." Of major concern to the public is the question of whether the press officer manipulates the press, and Hess's answer is, probably not as much as most people think...

...Teresa Riordan Safe Places for the 80's...

...One consequence of smugglers leaving Florida for other parts of America is that every newspaper can follow the same trail from its county airport to the hills of Colombia...

...Don't just say "Ronald Reagan...

...In the press officer's linguistic casuistry, the decision that has, in fact, been reached, is "made" only when the secretary of state signs the cable...

...What went wrong...

...Like most white millionaires, you've no doubt asked yourself, "Where can I live a life unsullied by the spectre of Roving Gangs of Negro Youths...

...Stephen Hess...

...Glenarden neatly challenges the racist assumption that equates black neighborhoods with high crime rates...

...But over the past decade and a half there have been major changes—often styled "reforms"— in the way we choose our representatives in Washington and in the pressures they are subject to once they get there...

...Charles Euchner Flying High...

...All our private airstrips and the little armies we cannot admit we finance are the perfect conduits for the drugs we cannot admit we import...

...to the contrary, it's what representative democracy is supposed to be about...

...Edsall concludes that, by defeating the bosses, the reformers unwittingly reduced the political power of lower-income Americans —and thereby helped shift federal economic policy to the right...

...Robert S. McIntyre The New American Poverty...

...He only alludes to this argument's logical conclusion— strengthen our party system, increase employee control of the workplace, and get more involved in the broad issues of local government...

...For example, in his treatment of Swann vs...

...Edsall shows that these changes have helped fragment the Democratic party and undercut its ability to represent its historic constituency, while bringing new cohesiveness to the Republican party...

...The shift began well before his ascendancy, and while Reagan's programs certainly have accentuated the trend, they found approval in a House of Representatives under overwhelming Democratic control...

...In point of political fact," writes Harrington, "if there were a major effort to end poverty in a short time—and particularly in the eighties, when the illusion of endless growth has long since vanished—it will have to be redistributionist...

...We have adopted a doomsday mentality that leads us in the two directions depicted in the Louis Malle film, My Dinner with Andre...

...Hess is undoubtedly correct in his opinion that leaks are among the less rational systems of communication between the government and the public and that they interfere with the president's ability to make an orderly presentation of his case to the people...

...Hess spent a year doing one- to three-month live-ins at the press offices of four federal agencies and the White House, and his book is a reasoned, if limited, study of how information about government doings gets to the public...

...Thus, the disadvantaged and the bosses had a stake in each other...

...Some, like Wally, content themselves with the mundane pleasures of ordinary life...

...The authors do recommend some less pricey towns, of course, in their overview of "safe places," but they offer little hope for anyone who might actually want to live in a city and virtually nothing for readers seeking insights into stopping crime...

...he is also correct when he writes, "to stop leaks, presidents resort to wiretaps and lie detectors...

...But he spends just six of the book's 259 pages exploring how we can get out of our false structures of "mysticism, spirituality [and] the power of 'personhood " His answer is "practical reason," an Aristotelian term for hammering out problems as one community rather than as members of distinct interest groups...

...Special note: Boston is the unsafest city, and West Virginia the safest state, measured by crimes per 100,000 population...

...Indeed, as Edsall points out, that convergence of interest made the Democratic party a major engine for upward social mobility, particularly in the era beginning with Franklin Roosevelt's presidency...

...Working from the assumption that cities are hopeless snake pits stalked by psychopaths, the authors are completely indifferent to the fate of millions of Americans without the means or opportunity to move tomorrow to their recommended havens...

...Norton, $16.95...

...With direct patronage-based incentives to go to the polls reduced and with the precinct lieutenants and ward captains largely pushed aside, turnout in general elections by the less well off has fallen sharply...

...The drugrunning story has become tiresome...

...On the first page the attorney general reminds us that marijuana and cocaine are the nation's biggest business, and then for 200 pages beyond we hear of the noble frustrations of stopping it...

...The press corps regards him with suspicion as a protector of the elected officials or as part of the bureaucracy...

...Thus, there's no mention of the successful efforts of cities like Detroit that have cut crime up to 60 percent in some neighborhoods through the use of Neighborhood Watch programs...

...One of the more spectacular leaks of recent years occurred in a Bob Woodward Washington Post story—on the basis of notes taken by a participant at one of Secretary of State Alexander Haig's senior staff meetings, Woodward reported that Haig had called Lord Carrington, the British foreign secretary, "a duplicitous bastard," and although various motives for the leak were suggested, the most plausible was that someone was out to get old Al...

...For among the causes of the current skewing of economic policy in favor of the affluent, says Edsall, are "reforms" ostensibly designed to improve the quality and fairness of representation in Washington but which ironically have played a key role in producing just the opposite...

...In a system of such breathtaking diversity they always will ." —Leonard Reed...

...In fact, a meanstested welfare program that provided generously for the poor (as present welfare programs, admittedly, do not) would be just the radical solution to income inequality that Harrington seeks...

...Harrington denounces means-tested welfare programs as "humiliating" and "reactionary...

...Their stress on merely surviving, Lasch says, "tends to strengthen the inertia it Seeks to overcome...

...It's too bad Lasch doesn't flesh this argument out...

...Nor do these "elites," as Edsall calls them, have either the inclination or the ability to bring the lower-income Democrats to the polls on election day against Republican opponents...

...others, like Andre, gamely seek "spiritual transcendence:' Few of us have gotten into the political arena to better the world...

...In his book Thomas Edsall provides a persuasive and comprehensive explanation of what has happened—one that goes far beyond pointing to the president's winsome smile...

...Morgan, a professor of constitutional law at Bowdoin College, argues that a "rights industry" composed of judges, activist lawyers, and law professors has, during the past two decades, expanded and manipulated the law of civil rights to create new rights that have little or no constitutional basis, and are therefore illegitimate...

...One key problem noted by Harrington was the assumption that poverty could be eliminated without taking from the rich to give to the poor...

...A reporter who asks whether a special envoy is being sent to the Soviet Union and accepts at face value a press officer's reply, "No decision has been made," is something of a schlemiel...

...There's nothing sinister about this...

...Michael Harrington...

...From the exalted role of press secretary to the more routine work of the career press officer, the lot of the government press man is not always a happy one...

...Ostensibly he is arguing against many of the civil rights decisions of the Warren Court on the basis that they are "noninterpretivist"—that the court was enforcing norms it considered "right" for society, rather than norms that can be discovered specifically in the Constitution...

...But many of those who type themselves as "reformers" may be a bit taken aback...

...But Morgan undermines his credibility as a disinterested constitutional scholar by making much of his book an attack not merely on the judicial means by which liberal policies are implemented, but also on the policies themselves...

...The secret war against Castro in the 1960s produced a generation of Miami smugglers who sent guns in one direction and controlled substances in the other...

...Even Hess's own attempt to be kind is not quite successful...

...Art Levine The Minimal Self...

...The book, despite its impressive compilations of housing prices, scenery, school quality and the like, also embodies the sort of smug mentality that gives affluence a bad name...

...Various motivations inspire leaks: the irresistible urge of a congressman to share an administration "secret" with the press, a bureaucrat's desire to derail a policy he abhors, the opportunity for high political figures to undercut a rival...

...Anyone who has admired Edsall's brilliant financial and political reporting at The Washington Post (and, as a friend and occasional source, I certainly have) will not be surprised to find that his book is as good as it is...

...Unfortunately, Harrington is not willing to face up to the logical consequence of these facts: that we need to siphon money away from the welfare state's well-off beneficiaries in order to redistribute income to its poorer ones...

...The good-government types who promoted these reforms thought that by "broadening participation" they would produce more responsive and equitable government policies...

...Basic Books, $16.95...