Political Booknotes

...Philadelpia Story by Michael Brus ED RENDELL IS A LIKABLE MAN...

...The more you can make things a matter of contracts and market bargaining, the less government-and the less agreement among governments-you need in the first place.’’ What’s as noteworthy as Dyson’s arguments is how widely they are now accepted...

...He returned to private practice a year ago...

...Even when the purpose of the talk was to make peace, the pressure could surface...

...The NRA did call for increased penalties for the use of firearms during a crime as a way of obstructing gun-control legislation, but those sentenced under so-called firearm enhancements make up a minor percentage of those incarcerated...

...The Road Not Taken by Joseph D. McNamara READER BEWARE: Sensible Justice: Alternatives to Prison is not what it appears at first glance...

...One was FDR’s first special assistant, the Washington lawyer James Rowe...

...Nine days into Johnson’s presidency I attended church with him on Capitol Hill...

...Political Booknotes Listening to Lyndon by Harry Mcpherson LYNDOM JOHNSON'S PRESIDENcy is among the more controversial in American history-in part because of the man himself, in part because of the chaotic period in which he served...

...The general rule applies to other areas, too...

...Michael Beschloss’ wise annotations bring Johnson into focus as if he were in the next room-on the phone, forever insisting, griping, mocking, leading a shaken country toward good and ill...

...To portray exuberance or irony or just about any other emotion, she deploys exclamation points...

...Franiework for Global Electronic Commerce” declared that government’s proper course of action was tnaction: that the way to protect the public interest was to let private interests battle it out...

...His impulsiveness, eternal optimism, and political dexterity have won him more popularity and better press than perhaps any other Philadelphia mayor...

...Always disciplined and tactful, he kept the mayor on message and on time...

...And although many Republicans like to rage about law and order, the harshest mandatory sentences in history were passed by a Democratically controlled Congress...

...When we reached the White House, he began a series of meetings with persons with whom he had become estranged, and whose help he needed...

...Cohen was Rendell’s political strategizer, media spinner, and intimate...

...These ruminations are single-minded and tiresome-at one point, Bissinger wastes half a page listing nearly every ship built at the naval yard...

...She is the daughter of renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, “raised in the academic hothouse around Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, with Nobel laureates as dinner guests...

...As such, the public is unlikely to be persuaded that tax dollars spent for prisons are wasted...

...The immediacy of that scene, the relentless attention to what Texans call “bidness” (in this case, making peace in order to pass legislation later), and the sheer fun to be had from hearing Johnson operate, are recapitulated in page after page of Taking Chnrge...

...Her latest venture is investing in computer companies in the young democracies of Russia and Eastern Europe...

...The prison-building lobby came along after the political rhetoric denouncing crime...

...On management: ‘As change becomes constant, leaders must have the flexibility and vision to handle it...

...Despite his unstinting admiration for the mayor and his political miracles, Bissinger duly notes that middle-class jobs and middle-class taxpayers continue to leave the city...

...I’d also have preferred to read much more about Dyson’s own life and less about her sometimes unremarkable thoughts on cyberspace...

...Prnyei- works best when it draws on its access to Rendell and Cohen...

...For now, though, her book is further proof that comDuterS and the Internet have secured-and perhaps validated-libertarianism's ascendance in America's public philosophy at the end of the century...

...The Net makes light work of what used to be tedious and slow,"she explains...

...Suppose a few people decide to e-mail scads of copies of Washington Monthly articles all over the planet or to post 30 years of issues on their website-in both cases, likely violations of copyright law...

...and a variety of approaches in opposition to prison...

...Granted, there is much to examine concerning the vast increase in the number of Americans incarcerated over the past two decades...

...Anderson oversimplifies, claiming that Republicans, the prison-building industry, and the National Rifle Association were the prime movers in the enactment of more punitive policies...

...Her annual conference, the P.C...

...She quickly became the Wayne Gretzky of high-tech-someone with an uncanny talent for skating to where the puck will be...

...Union fat was waiting to be cut...

...Anderson also fails to mention that it was Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson who first raised crime as a national issue in presidential campaigns (until then, it was viewed as a local matter), leading to increased publicity and alarm, and producing the present “crisis” atmosphere legislation on federal and local levels...

...As a Wall Street securities analyst a decade later, she was one of the first people to discover a fledgling company called Federal Express, where she became fast friends with FedEx chief information officer Jim Barksdale, now CEO of a not-so fledgling company called Netscape...

...Computers and the Internet that connects them make it easy and almost cost-free to reproduce content and send or retrieve it anywhere in the world...

...God damn it, Jim, can’t you be content to be the first man the thirty-sixth president of the United States has apologized to...

...It is remarkable that we now have roughly 1.5 million people behind bans and 4.5 million under some form of penal control-most of whom have been sentenced for nonviolent crimes...

...Dyson figures savvy companies will actually give away lots of content for free-not for moral or democratic reasons, but as a new business model...

...They do nothing to sharpen your arguments...

...After law school he became an effective and popular district attorney, but two poorly run campaigns sunk his primary bids for governor and, the first time, for mayor...

...Don’t call the cops or write your congressman...

...For relations among nations and businesses, Dyson suggests “pushing as much of world governance as possible into the realm of commerce, since commercial law arouses much less emotion than other kinds...

...After inauguration, Cohen calculated that the city’s five-year budget gap was larger than the entire budget of Boston, Houston, or Baltimore...

...JOSEPH D. McNAMARA, retired police chief of San Jose, Calif, and author of five books, is currently a research fellow at the Hoover Institution...

...Present the libertarian position on governing the Internet to just about anyone on the traditional right, left, or in between, and he or she’d probably agree...

...For example, in her design rules for digital life-her advice for how individuals can navigate the digita1 world-the exclamation points outnumber the pages...

...But his arguments are less than compelling-and unlikely to influence politicians in the current “tough on crime” atmosphere...

...After months of injunctions, court delays, union vandalism, and a short strike, the union blinked...

...Back in July, the president and vice president convened several dozen high-tech luminaries in the White House East Room to announce the administration’s policy governing commerce on the Internet...

...Instead of fighting technology with old laws, we should embrace it with the marketplace’s new logic...

...who celebrate Dublic schools but send their kids to private onesshe lives bv the credos she asserts...

...Take intellectual property...

...Dyson had a seat in that audience thanks to her reputation as one of cyberspace’s sharpest thinkers (and one of the few women to achieve influence in that male-dominated world...

...But more important, she says, companies don't need strict enforcement because intellectual property now abides by a new set of economic rules...

...That’s a good thing, because this papyrus-based software could use some de-bugging...

...And Dyson, to her credit, is Hippocratic in her views without being hypocritical in her actions...

...The Rowes and the Johnsons had been intimate friends for many years, until Johnson’s constant complaints about scheduling during the 1960 campaign had caused Rowe, his volunteer scheduler, to resign in a fury...

...On the way back to the White House, Johnson, who had seemed painfully shaken a week before, was ebullient...

...In fact, in many ways Release 2.0 is written more in the rhythm of a newsletter than a booksubheading, paragraph, paragraph, paragraph . . . subheading, paragraph, paragraph, paragraph...

...Bissinger is awash in nostalgia for Old Philly...

...And while you’re at it, kill half your parenthetical asides...

...Maybe by deciding to vote, she’s once again, onto the next big thing...

...Seriously, take it...

...Unfortunately, this narrative is interrupted by portraits of the other “heroes...

...He had just persuaded Earl Warren to chair the conimission investigating Kennedy’s assassinationby reminding him that he had put on a doughboy’s khaki in 1918 to serve his country, and could do no less in this hour of national need...

...The result is that the whole of its 289 pages is less than the sum of its 200 parts...

...Consequently, Dyson questions whether government should bother vigorously enforcing copyright laws that prohibit unauthorized duplication...

...What comes through these dialogues, superbly edited by Michael Beschloss, is Johnson’s relentless, unashamed pressure on the various parties who appear on the tapes- pressure intended to make the person involved feel that if he (there were few she’s in that era) failed to help, he would be letting down the nation, or some worthy part of it, or-at least as importantthe beleaguered Lyndon Johnson himself...

...Our approach to electronic commerce,” he said, “must be guided by a digital Hippocratic Oath: ‘First, do no harm...

...The president squinted at him...

...Rendell had no honeymoon...

...The assembled crowd of computer geeks and digerati applauded lustily, and the vice president soaked up the approval of his fellow cybertravelers...

...One of his worst publicity snafus was skipping a neighborhood meeting on violent crime in order to read a proclamation for “Hot Dog Day” at City Hall-accompanied by a six-foot pig...

...But whatever good may come of Rendell’s efforts, they may all be for naught, Bissinger laments...

...Rendell’s aides, Buzz Bissinger writes in A Prayerfor the City, see him not as a politician so much as “a big kid having the time of his life...

...sentencing to community work, residential confinement, boot camps, drug treatment...

...The fellow agreed, and Rendell’s newly-bought girl ended up as his wife...

...In the vice president’s remarks that afternoon, I gave him the following line, which he delivered with typical flair...

...Finally, while he points out that recidivism rates for offenders who have been incarcerated are no better-and the fiscal costs of incarceration considerably higher- than the alternatives to prison, this argument is unlikely to sway public opinion...

...A Democratic president and vice president-and a commission headed by Ira Magaziner, late of the Clinton health care plan-had studied the Internet and declared "hands off...

...On cultural anthropology: “Many social norms differ from community to community...

...I do...

...Considered a political hasbeen by 1991, an invigorated Rendell beat the odds and won the mayoralty...

...But the mayor’s identity has largely become that of corporate cheerleader...

...Just months into his first term, Rendell balanced the budget...

...Since bits move at the speed of light and law enforcement does not, such a tactic would likely fail...

...The real action will come from unique, customized products and services bundled with or connected to the copies’ content...

...Since 1990, he writes, Philadelphia has lost more residents than any other city in the country...

...I didn’t know it at the time...

...Their work could make money for this magazine by encouraging people to buy subscriptions, attend conferences sponsored by the Monthly, or pay to hear its editors speak before their group...

...Punctuated as it is with cliches and pretentiousness, Prayer is as an odd mixture of engaging political history and dreary nostalgia...

...Her newsletter on the computer and Internet industries, Release 1.0, is must reading for the digital elite...

...However, he acknowledges that for the most part, evaluation of these program does not show lower rates of recidivism for participants...

...He praises mentoring by parole agents and others...

...Score one for the libertarians...

...The smart move is not to shut down these folks...

...The present corrupt, racist, violent, and ineffective prison system could not exist without media complicity...

...Getting down to the actual task of exploring alternatives to the current penal system, Anderson makes a courageous plea for temperance in a time of public anger over crime, perceived failure of the courts and correctional programs, and increasing political demagoguery...

...MICHAEL BRUS is a student at the University of Pennsylvania...

...He insisted that he sayhad been most at fault, failing to appreciate the stress upon Johnson...

...Not only have we heard their tales before, these four people seem chosen solely to embody demographic trendswhite flight, blue-collar job insecurity, and black family breakdown...

...A pragmatist more than a sentimentalist, Rendell sees corporate cheerleading as the next best thing to giving up...

...They concluded that this massive network of networks-the most powerful social and economic phenomenon to emerge in several decades-was best regulated not by well-intentioned government officials, but by profit-seeking engineers and entrepreneurs...

...Written with exclusive access to both the mayor and Cohen, A Prnyerjbl- the City is partly the “inside story” of the Rendell administration’s first term and partly an elegy to a dying industrial city...

...Taking Charge covers this period, and the effect of reading it is to recall Johnson with a vividness not captured by any other book with which I am familiar...

...Lots of exclamation points...

...By 1983, she had taken over a newsletter that covered the computer industry-just as that industry was on the brink of exploding...

...Instead...

...The impulsive pol and precise, punctual chief of staff are the yin and yang of the mayor’s office, one handling the rhetoric, the other the details...

...She says she very recently registered, but has yet to cast a ballot...

...All of this is forgiven by Philadelphians, who see “Fast Eddie” as their irrepressible advocate...

...The political history starts early...

...Rendell knew another tax raise would hurt the city as much as bankruptcy would, so he had no choice but to strike a hard bargain with the unions-a Philadelphia bulwark...

...But about one aspect of his time in office there is, or ought to be, unanimity: Between November 22, 1963, and his nomination in August, 1964, Johnson performed a tremendous service for the nation, providing firm and resourceful leadership at a time when millions of Americans despaired of their civic order...

...At Philadelphia Airport, for instance, it literally used to take three people to change a light bulba mechanic to remove the cover, an electrician to replace the bulb, and a custodian to sweep up the debris...

...he was exhilarated by having obtained it through an irresistible appeal to Warren’s patriotism...

...Early this decade, she recast her newsletter to cover the Internetagain just as that industry was about to catch fire...

...Since free copies are a sound business model...

...And much of what’s on these pages is pedestrian...

...Once, on a double date, he offered his friend three Peter Paul Mounds bars to switch dates...

...Thus, it will be harder to make money merely selling copies...

...Johnson asked Rowe’s forgiveness, say ing, simply, that he had behaved atrociously...

...Voting does not make a real democracy, any more than taxes are an expression of philanthropy,” she writes...

...I wanted to know more about her experiences...

...At college, Rendell was a fraternity goof-off and academic underachiever...

...That afternoon, Dyson understood instantly what I realized only later: The public philosophy she embodies, evangelizes, and helped create had triumphed in spectacular fashion...

...The scene, in an Oval Office flooded with brilliant autumn sunlight, was affecting, bringing tears to Jim Rowe's eyes...

...HARRY McPHERSON, a Washington lawyer, was counsel to Lyndon Johnson from 1965 to 1969...

...Instead, watch them with a wary eye, but let them proceed...

...That's what Dyson advises...

...But Esther Dyson did...

...For foul behavior by individuals online, Dyson says that commercial Internet service providers ought to be the first line of defense...

...Moreover, although Anderson does allow that journalists helped create the public fear by sensationalizing crime, he barely scratches the surface of the media’s culpability...

...When Bissinger’s narrative leaves the confines of City Hall, however, his reach exceeds his grasp...

...A media study showed that from 1993 through 1996, while the nation’s homicide rate was decreasing by 20 percent, television news coverage of murders rose 721 percent...

...Still, Rendell makes a thrillingand sometimes edifying-subject for a book...

...As a book-the mother of all meme vessels-Release 2.0 is somewhat disappointing...

...She wrote for the Haruard Crimson in the late 1960s and Forbes in the 1970s...

...David Anderson, a journalist, and former member of the New York Times board, provides a more or less conventional journalistic road map of how we made prisons a growth industry...

...They are the protagonists in a never-ending political crisis-first the budget, then racial crimes, then the closing of the naval yard, and so on...

...I can suck up as good as anyone on Earth,” he reminds Cohen over the phone...

...I believe they had not spoken since...

...His manic enthusiasm is legendary, as is his temper-he has assaulted a reporter on two separate occasions, and propositioned another while on the record...

...That may be the best thing we’ve learned in my years on the job.’’ Rendell’s story says much about the possibilities and limitations of city government...

...They mostly contain afterthoughts...

...Never before had government evaluated something so fundamental to America’s economic and social foundationthink railroads, highways, or television-and announced its intention to do pretty much nothing...

...The paperback edition of her book will be called Release 2.1, because it will incorporate “comments, criticisms, examples, arguments, whatever” that readers have e-mailed to her (edyson@edventure.com) or posted on her Web site (www.release2-0.com...

...Along with his sidekick, chief of staff, and iiberadministrator David Cohen, Rendell has stared down the unions, saved Philadelphia from bankruptcy, and enticed countless developers to build their malls and hotels in Center City rather than in the suburbs...

...His valiant, albeit unsuccessful attempt to save the naval yard is emblematic of this approach-with a desperate Cohen even making an unannounced, 11th-hour flight to Bremen to court a German investor...

...tell America Online to kick the person out of your virtual community or you’ll sign up with Prodigy...

...Harry Middleton, the director of the Johnson Library, should be celebrated for releasing these tapes...

...On human nature: “Child or adult, we are all special compared with machinery...

...This notion-Dyson would call it a “meme,” an idea that evolves like a species and infects like a virus-pervades every chapter and leads to some provocative conclusions...

...Forty-something years old, well-educated, adviser to corporate titans and government leaders, Dyson has never voted...

...Furthermore, some of the programs that claim success are too new to judge and in many cases are evaluated by those running the programs, with the inevitable inflated claims of success...

...His was an utterly focused, almost hermetic world in which most things had value in proportion to their contribution to his political goalswhich, during this period, ranged from passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the “War on Poverty” program, to the avoidance of spattering by petty scandals, to the containment of his most feared and despised opponent, Bobby Kennedy...

...On this, President Clinton and Newt Gingrich hold almost identical views...

...By the turn of the niillenium it is likely that the majority of inmates will be serving time for non-violent drug offenses...

...The “five heroes” of the subtitle are Cohen and four other Philadelphia residents-a black victim of the ghetto, a white victim of naval-yard layoffs, and two middle-class city employees who reluctantly quit their jobs and move to the suburbs...

...He weakens his own arguments, however, by supporting unproven claims that tough police methods and the increased number of people confined have been partially responsible for decreasing crime rates over the past five years...

...Likewise, severe sentences- including the death penalty for some 50-odd federal crimes-increasingly have been championed by President Clinton, who has boasted that he must be doing something right because there were more than a million Americans in prison...

...Not unreasonably, he sees Rendell as its last, best hope...

...DANIEL H. PINK, chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore from 1995 to 1997, is a freelance journalist and speechwriter in Washington, D.C...

...Unlike many liberals-those, for instance...

...A journalist like Anderson could have shed light on a phenomenon that conditioned the American public to approve present policies...

...Anderson does deserve credit for pointing out the basic inhumanity of those policies, and through anecdotes he tries to combat the dehumanizing of criminals that allows the present treatment...

...Interspersed with these portraits is Bissinger’s lament for the gritty, industrial Philadelphia of yore...

...In Release 2.0: A Designfor Living in the Digital Age, Dyson's attempt to decode the Net, she advances the idea that private markets and self-organizing individuals can fashion the Internet’s rules and boundaries far better than any centralized, or even democratic, authority...

...Dyson is an intriguing woman, and the sections of the book-usually just a few sentences-in which she discusses her own life can be captivating...

...Rendell staked his career on the showdown...

...Then he ad-libbed, “I’m not surprised that Esther Dyson is leading the applause...

...Attending the meeting would not have solved much of substance, admits Bissinger, and Hatfield Quality Meats did contribute $5,000 to the city recreation department in exchange for “Hot Dog Day...

...Here’s Dyson on geopolitics: ‘% long as the world contains people, it will have conflicts...

...The key to the victory-and, as it turned out, to almost everything else-was Cohen, a Harvard Law phenom dubbed “the billing king” by his law colleagues...

...As Dyson smartly puts it, “The source of commercial value will be people’s attention, not the content that consumes their attention...

...Forum, is a greenhouse of new products, hot deals, and fresh gossip...

...and ”no vernments can’t and shouldn’t waste their time enforcing outdated intellectual property laws, Dyson is posting large sections of Release 2.0 on her website for anyone, anywhere to read-gratis...

...Consequently, it’s hard to understand why the decriminalization option doesn’t at least bear exploration...

...His lengthy profiles of “ordinary” Philadelphia heroes seem obligatory, and his prose is often flat and clicheriddenreminiscent of mediocre newspaper writing, not of a sweeping urban history, as the book aspires to be...

...Here’s an example of what she means...

...So some editorial advice for Release 2.1: Get rid of the exclamation points...

...Cyber-Mamma's Message by Daniel H. Pink OF THE FEW HUNDRED SPEECHes I wrote while working for Vice President Al Gore, the last one may have been the most significant...

...In a world of $695 newsletters and $25 hardcovers, we should applaud Esther Dyson for giving away some memes for free...

...And that presidential report issued in Julymost of which spells out things government should refrain from doingaffirms this remarkable libertarian consensus...

...Almost every conversation picked up by Johnson’s White House recording devices (without the knowledge of the other party, for the most part) had as its purpose, on LBJ’s side, the attainment of some political end-not stamp collecting, golf, tennis, poker, religion, sailing, or any of the other hobbies and interests with which presidents have entertained themselves, but politics...

...With iron-clad job security and salary hikes out-pacing inflation, municipal employees were among the most coddled in the nation...

...The subtitle of the book suggests, and the bookjacket promises, that the author will explore “creative solutions some states and cities nationwide have devised to tackle America’s expensive and controversial prison problem...

...It is to appreciate once again that this firm, resourceful leader was also a wheeling, dealing operator, and a provincial to boot-not of Texas alone, but of the province of politics...

...Meanwhile, the city grows poorer, with almost a third of its residents now living below the poverty line...

...It’s often difficult to follow, in part because readers confront a new subheading on just about every page...

...Polls show that Americans are still fearful of crime and angry at criminals...

...She also has a tendency to try to accomplish with punctuation what she cannot with words...

...Most disappointingly, Anderson fails to examine what is perhaps the most promising alternative to the current system of mass incarceration: decriminalizing drug use...

...One personal detail Dyson does reveal, however, illuminates much about her philosophy...

...One innovative aspect of Dyson’s book is that she considers it, like computer software, a work in progress, subject to innumerable upgrades...

...Before Rowe could answer, Johnson was asking him how he ought to deal with Joe Rauh, the liberal activist with whom Johnson had been at odds for years, and whom he now needed to reassure about civil rights...

...But even in exploring this Dhenomenon...

...He was pleased by Warren’s agreement, because it would give credibility to the investigation...