TILTING AT WINDMILLS

...Let's say you get a new job and have to move across the country...

...According to scripture, a congregation is supposed to pay its pastor about what the average parishioner makes...

...A more recent volunteer worker in that neighborhood is former President Jimmy Carter, who put his carpentry skills to use helping to renovate an 80-year-old tenement into low-priced cooperative apartments...

...Then, in the delivery room, she had to put her hand on the baby's head to keep him inside—the doctor was on his way over, and because this was how he earned his fee (which was more for five minutes' work than the nurse would make for her five hours), it was outside the nurse's jurisdiction...

...That is, they lacked Ronald Reagan's gift for persuading people to look past automatic group responses...

...Another of our editors is a new father...

...Nothing like that happens, but there is a little of the feeling, common to combat veterans, that you'll never be the same again...

...The sponsor of the project was Habitat for Humanity, an organization based in Americus, Georgia that seeks to provide "a decent house and a decent community for God's people in need!' Jimmy Carter had his failings as a president, but it is hard to think of another ex-president who has shown as little concern about outward status and has brought as much dignity and genuine humanitarian concern to that difficult exofficehood as he...

...How does Felix Rohatyn do it...

...you just got in a little over your head, as anyone might...

...What made many people feel uncomfortable about Carter was the suspicion that his morality might be sincere...

...For five hours a registered nurse, who was one of the calmest and most competent people we'd ever met, guided us through the storm, performing the pelvic exams, de facto prescribing drugs, guiding the baby into the birth canal...

...He has become the 1980s version of Henry Kissinger, the powerful figure whose mere presence stupefies usually capable journalists...

...One of them buys your house at the kind of price you've been looking for, then resells it for $70,000 less, absorbing this loss himself...

...Mondale's weakness shows how wrong that view is...

...Now imagine that you're the righthand man of the president of the United States...

...Which suggests a question for Rohatyn's next interviewer, if he can avoid McClintick's fate: Felix, why don't you quit...

...In fact Meese committed an important sin, which was taking advantage of the opportunity a top government job affords to live by different rules from ordinary people...

...After an agonizing minute or two he swept in, whisked out the baby, cut the umbilical cord, and departed...

...If we have sown spiritual seed among you, is it too much if we reap a material harvest from you...

...If you're a product of the post-World War II meritocracy, you're subliminally trained to think that anything that's difficult must be accomplishable by only a tiny, elite fraction of the population, as is the case with organic chemistry or the bar exam...

...When the fun is over and Felix gets down to work ("the day I don't put my business first is the day I'll be out of business"), he flits around the globe arranging mergers and takeovers, rearranging the world's assets rather than increasing them...

...But Washington, with its fixation on finding smoking guns, has reacted to the finding that Meese did nothing illegal by letting him off the hook entirely...

...Why else would any autoworker vote for him...

...If you own a house, you might find the first part of this story plausible, but you'd probably find the second part a fantasy—you may have very loyal friends, but they're probably not that loyal...

...Washington at its highest and smoothest levels is not a quid pro quo town, but rather one of sweeter and subtler blandishments, of which the real estate help Meese got is a classic example...

...When he was gone the nurse shrugged, as if to say, Welcome to the real world, kid...

...This story is of course Ed Meese's, and the key to it is that, even if he didn't give his friends federal jobs as a quid pro quo, it is inconceivable that they would have helped him in the same way had his new job in Washington been as a professor at, George Washington University Law School...

...Apart from making you wonder where McClintick parked his brain and conscience when writing this article, the piece made a nice if inadvertent point...

...The last time the Democrats were thumped, there was much talk about the need to "rethink" the party's platform and come up with some "new ideas...

...But the heart sinks at the possibility of a second Reagan landslide, which is widely anticipated (including by friends in the Mondale campaign) as we go to press...

...For anyone uncomfortable with Reagan, here is the job for the next four years: making ourselves seem less like threats to each other, finding the large areas where we can agree...

...Walter Mondale got the nomination mainly because many Democrats believed that they had to appeal to voters bloc by bloc—teachers, Hispanics, women, etc...

...Felix Rohatyn (pronounced ROE-uh-t'n) is the perfect host through it all...lively and twinkly as he circulates, freshens drinks, and maintains a stream of droll commentary on the egg hunt...

...More than a year behind, in fact...

...It's too bad that this is a point that the press and congressional committees are anthropologically incapable of making...

...He wants deeply to be remembered as a great president, and he must know down in his heart that history's warm glow will fall upon that president who stems the nuclear arms race...

...Sometimes it's getting more and more difficult for me to do the things we do because in the last analysis I don't think that's what I want on my tombstone...

...here may be one faint glimmer of hope in the possibility of four more years...

...Ronald Reagan's sense of the spotlight—the warm glow—is sure...

...Our high officials ought to resist these...

...This suggests that while the poor regard their spiritual leaders as their social superiors, the rich regard them as their social inferiors...

...A slim, attractive woman with a luminous smile and short, streaked blond hair, Elizabeth has an explosive wit, and a richly developed sense of the ironic and absurd, that her friends and even her husband occasionally have difficulty keeping up with...

...Last summer's issue of Ministries, "the magazine for Christian leaders," featured a survey of pastors' salaries that raises an interesting distinction between the upper and lower classes...

...But here is something much harder—yet everybody does it: the woman screaming in the next room, the 15-year-old girl down the hall, the bubble-headed debutante over in the recovery room...

...Here are his thoughts: Leaving aside the things about which all new fathers gush, what was striking about it was the feeling that here, at last, was the democratic experience for which The Washington Monthly has been longing these many years...

...Carrying dainty wicker baskets ribboned in pink and lined with green cellophane grass, they peer into bushes, hedges, shrubs, trees, drainpipes, and other places where Rohatyn and his wife, Elizabeth—the instigator of the hunts—have hidden about 80 vividly dyed and painted eggs...

...Much of the article concerned the annual Easter egg hunt that Rohatyn holds for his best friends at his house in Southampton, Long Island: "Although the day is bright and sunny, the north breeze is chilly, and the guests—who include the Henry Kissingers [maybe he's the culprit after all], Oscar de la Renta, William Paley, labor leader Victor Gotbaum and his wife Betsy, and Mariella Agnelli, the wife of the Fiat magnate—bundle in sweaters and jackets as they make their way about the garden and grounds of the two-story grey shingle house...

...Our group of 16 people had three races and four or five occupational classes represented, and like Goldberg, Jones, and Pelleteri, by the end of six weeks they had gotten to like and respect each other, as well as having been whipped into lean childbearing trim...

...Fortunately, you have considerate friends back home...

...His best-selling book, Indecent Exposure, told the story of the David Begelman scandals...

...A one-sided vote in 1984 would carry the same unfortunate message it did in 1972: it would give the incumbent that most dangerous of illusions, the sense of "mandate...

...Carter traveled to New York City by bus with 40 of his neighbors from Plains, Georgia and stayed at a local Baptist church along with everyone else...

...There is a kind of irresponsibility to almost everything Ronald Reagan has wrought: fiscal irresponsibility ("we'll pay for it tomorrow"), social irresponsibility ("I'm all right, Jack"), and personal irresponsibility ("Don't bother me with the facts...

...For sheer servility and ill-concealed yearning to walk among the rich, the story is hard to top...

...But Lamaze class comes pretty close...

...It just might encourage him to make his final presidential role that of peacemaker...

...For proof, Ministries cited 1 Corinthians 9:7-11: "When the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest...

...McClintick wrote a cover story for The New York Times Magazine about Rohatyn in August...

...A different approach to tax policy and entitlement programs, for instance, would do more good for the Democrats' constituency than the Republicans, and a revived, universal draft would reduce the chances of another poorman's war...

...He is approaching his twilight years...

...It turns out, however, that congregations in the lower salary range somehow scrape up the money to pay their ministers more than they themselves make, while those whose congregations are in the upper range pay their ministers less...

...The latest victim is David McClintick, a first-rate reporter heretofore best known for his willingness to stand up to Hollywood's titans...

...When Gary Hart and Ernest Hollings proposed various "new ideas," those men and their views were instantly classified as threats by the union leadership and by minorities...

...Rohatyn's own acute sense of humor is his wife's best spur: as he offers withering quips about the cheating, she teases, cajoles, and upbraids the searchers until the laughter convulses everyone, most of all Rohatyn himself, whose light, youthful speaking voice breaks frequently into falsetto guffaws at his wife's and the group's antics...

...The old war-movie scene in which green inductees named Izzy Goldberg, Booker T. Jones, and Carmine Pelleteri nervously eye each other and shuffle their feet while they wait for the drill sergeant to introduce himself has been made obsolete by the allvolunteer military...

...But when Ronald Reagan, nonchurchgoer and absentee parent, talks about sacrifice or sharing, we pat ourselves on the back and reach for another beer...

...But put him in Rohatyn's clutches and what happens...

...I'm worried about the investment banking industry because I think the substance of many of the things we do is getting questionable," he broods...

...Doesn't it seem that if you had that kind of job people might be willing to do wonderful favors for you, for no reason other than to feel close to you...

...The oddities imbue the proceedings with elements of drollery and latent silliness, which are just the tones that Elizabeth Rohatyn, a Memphis Episcopalian, wants to exploit...

...So you—well, frankly you get a little behind on your mortgage payments...

...If Lamaze is like basic training (it certainly has the same generous component of wasted time), then the labor room at the hospital is like the foxhole in which, in the movie version, Pelleteri might sacrifice himself to save Goldberg's and Jones's lives...

...Unfortunately, you find it difficult to sell your house, even though you've already bought a new one...

...But at the moment too few people believe that: Gary Hart ended the race with virtually no black or labor support...

...The editors (Charles Peters is on vacation this month...

...Its title was "Life at the Top," and, on its evidence, the top is not a haven for textbook civic virtues...

...The Democrats' next task is political, in the noblest and (unfortunately) most difficult sense of the term...

...Ronald Reagan has never been known for asking people to rise above self-interest, but he has• proven that an appeal to larger goals, even misleading ones, can attract people whose own interests run the other way...

...When he talked about charity and service, you knew he was going to roll up his own sleeves, and you might be expected to do the same...

...But this Brigadoon of classlessness ended abruptly in the delivery room...

...for new-idea Democrats than for Reagan...

...Is it an elixir that wafts from his pores...

...You're not a bad person...

...Does this deserve ringing reaffirmation...

...Walter Mondale's defects are all too obvious, not least to readers of this magazine...

...Another lends you more than $100,000, and it's okay if you miss several months of your payments...

...While we want to stay in the new-ideas business, we suspect that there's an even greater challenge for the Democrats...

...The president has now established his masculinity in foreign affairs beyond dispute...

...That job should be easier...

...The independent counsel's report on Meese understandably didn't get into this issue, concentrating instead on the strict legality of what he did...

...Still another gives you a great stock tip, and then lends you $15,000 to buy the stock— with no interest...

...For all Ronald Reagan's talk about the volunteer spirit and helping your neighbor, how often in his life has he practiced what he preaches...

...it is one of the strengths of our democracy that the people who run government live only somewhat better than most of us...