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Escape
Mechanisms
(From
Reason, August/September 1997)
By
James V. DeLong
Locked
in the Cabinet, by Robert B. Reich, New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 338 pages, $25.00.
This
is an odd and irritating book. On the surface, it is
a tale of an academic, author, and Friend of Bill of
25 years, reluctantly persuaded to become secretary
of labor. His motives are pure: using power to help
close the widening income gap between skilled and unskilled
workers; to raise government investment in human capital
by funding education and training; and, in general,
to aid the people at the bottom of society.
As
happens when the pure of heart meet the realities of
power in D.C., the dream goes awry. Reich portrays himself
as a naif about government who loses crucial battles
to economic trolls worried about the budget deficit
and inflation. He winds up so far out of the loop that
he hangs out in the White House parking lot to beg scraps
of information from passing officials. Final defeat
comes at the hands of Dick Morris, who seduces a once-pure
president into adopting the themes of the cold-hearted
Republicans and focusing on the suburban vote while
ignoring the economic anxieties of lower-class America.
In the end, despite his love for the job, the protagonist
is unwilling to sacrifice time with his family to carry
the crushing workload of a cabinet officer and to engage
in more losing battles, and he disembarks from the ship
of state to return to academia.
The
book is in the form of a journal, with entries for specific
dates scattered throughout the four years of the first
Clinton term. The entries grow steadily farther apart,
and are pretty skimpy for 1995 and 1996. Many bear the
mark of heavy reworking in hindsight, making the book
a fragmentary memoir illuminated by notes made at the
time rather than a real diary.
The
book is also redolent of literary forms beyond the memoir.
It is a bit of a Bildungsroman, a somewhat sappy
coming-of-age novel wherein a naive youth grows into
an adult. Or it can be read as a picaresque novel, recounting
the tale of a young, slightly roguish hero who goes
out into the world, meets wonders and adventures, and
makes faux-naive but actually shrewd comments on his
experience.
The
roman à clef, that form in which real
events and people are fictionalized à la Primary
Colors, also comes to mind. Lots of scores are settled.
Lane Kirkland of the AFL-CIO comes through as burnt-out
and inept, and a social snob to boot. Newt Gingrich
has "the meanness of a nasty little kid."
In fact, all Republicans are pretty rotten. Bridgestone
Tire, which out-PRed Reich over an OSHA rule, is strung
up to twist in a wind of corporation baiting and Japan
bashing. Alan Greenspan is a bloodless gnome. The National
Association of Manufacturers is a cigar-smoking lynch
mob. Even grandees of the Democratic Party, such as
Lloyd Bentsen and Robert Rubin, are spoofed for their
hidalgo ways.
Clinton
is treated with ambivalence, extending even to his name.
He starts out as "Bill," but Reich soon describes
a phone conversation in which he expresses discomfort
over what to call his longtime friend. Instead of saying,
"Call me Bill," Clinton says, "Yeah.
It's strange, isn't it?" For the rest of the book,
Reich refers to "B," since he lacks sanction
to use "Bill" and somehow cannot make himself
say "the president." (I have a hard time with
this one myself, but my political situation is rather
different.) The explanation for Clinton's failures to
measure up to Reich's hopes is a standard one: The king
has good instincts but is misled by his advisers.
Some
come out all right. Ron Brown, it turns out, was really
a champion of the nation's downtrodden all along. (So
that's who went along on those foreign trips!) Hillary
is treated with respectful sycophancy as she is persecuted
unfairly for such things as her commodity trading. Reich,
the corporate expert, seems unaware of something known
to all financial experts, that her investment coup was
simply not possible within the bounds of the trading
rules.
There
is another reason for likening the book to fictional
forms: Much of it is not believable. I knew Reich 20
years ago in the Federal Trade Commission. He is an
intelligent, able, sophisticated, and ambitious man.
Exceedingly so, on all counts. He was politically active
for the Democrats throughout the 1980s. Given this,
the roster of improbable statements grows rapidly. His
initial reluctance to come to Washington is dubious.
The repeated claim of his own naiveté is laughable;
Reich is about as naive as Machiavelli. Throughout the
book, he puts little speeches explaining the realities
of Washington and politics into the mouths of others
while he sits and says, "Golly gee!" At one
point he forgets, and within a few pages he puts identical
words into the mouths of two different staffers, which
gives you a pretty good fix on the name of the ventriloquist.
He says, with no trace of a grin, that the AFL-CIO throws
major resources into lobbying for an increase in the
minimum wage because it is a big symbolic issue. Not
a word about its effect in removing competition for
union members from lower-skilled workers, while at the
same time making the losers think you are helping them--a
perfect two-fer of modern politics.
Nor
do I believe that Reich was hu-miliated at a Washington
dinner party by reaching for the mint jelly at the wrong
time. He makes much of his own plebian origins and even
plebian behavior, but in fact he is safely on the sunny
side of that chasm between rich and poor, with assets
that put him comfortably in the millionaire class. When
the government shuts down in late 1995, he talks of
his pain in laying off 17,000 people and wondering if
the Department of Labor will ever reopen. He must have
been the only person in D.C. who did not know that the
government employees would wind up with pay for their
time off and an extra vacation. A lot of people got
hurt by the shutdown, but not one of them was actually
on the federal payroll.
It
goes on. Most of the book is taken up with this sort
of thing, stories of dubious authenticity and mild interest
portraying Reich at less than full worth, or misleading
you about government realities. (Indeed, writing in
Slate, journalist Jonathan Rauch documented numerous
fabrications among Reich's allegedly true accounts.)
Occasionally
the real Reich, insightful and subtle, breaks loose,
but only for a page or two at a time. A paragraph on
spin, and on the way in which an effort not to spin
is treated as particularly subtle spin, is amusing,
true, and a perfect potential lead-in to a discussion
of the press. A couple of pages on the multiple levels
of the 1996 Democratic Convention come close to art,
and could have paved the way for extended insights into
the party. A page of musing on the true masters of each
Cabinet department is shrewd and useful, as are a few
paragraphs on the social incestuousness of the capital.
References to bipartisan support for corporate welfare
could serve as the springboard for a probe of this phenomenon.
Each time, Reich quickly reins himself in and returns
to froth and propaganda.
In
the end, it is not the froth that is the most irritating,
but the propaganda. The issues that worry Reich are
real: the gaps between rich and poor, between skilled
and unskilled; the proper role of government in education
and training; the impact of the global economy; the
nature of community and the meaning of the concept of
a nation.
These
are worth serious attention, and Reich is superbly equipped
to deal with them. And he cops out, treating everything
at a stunning level of triviality. Democrats, insofar
as they want to spend money on education and training,
are good. Other Democrats need education. Republicans
are evil, the tools of business, who enjoy grinding
the workers and are blind or indifferent to the real
forces at work. Reich's universe does not allow for
the possibility that one could start with the same list
of concerns and come to wildly different conclusions
about the proper responses. He accepts as faith that
federal "investment" in education and training
will have a payoff. If you want to know whether past
or current federal programs have been helpful or harmful,
if you want to even think about the issue, do not look
here. And do not look at other federal "investments,"
such as housing or business development.
Do
you think there might be conflicts between the interests
of unions and those of other workers, or that the growth
of public-sector unionism is unsettling? Well, do not
look here for illumination; these possibilities go unmentioned.
In
bemoaning the chasm between rich and poor, Reich harps
on high CEO salaries but ignores how rapidly corporate
pay tails off below this level. He also avoids mentioning
that many of the best-off people in America have their
pay fixed by political means, or otherwise batten on
government largess--civil servants, doctors, lawyers,
foundation executives, and academics, for example. Could
it be that the government is actually causing some of
the disparity by subjecting the lower ranks to the market
while insulating the rich? Or by sopping up investment
funds? Or by a vast regulatory apparatus that raises
the need for paper pushers? Don't ask Reich. But you
can ask "B," who, as you will not learn in
the book, looked out over a recent fundraiser of fat
cats and joked about how many people have gotten so
rich helping the poor.
The
government described by Reich is also wildly incompetent
at every level. A modest reform in the administration
of unemployment compensation finally gets through, more
or less by accident, but it takes 20 years. At one point
Department of Labor regulators are hell-bent to zap
a minor-league baseball team for child labor law violations
because it used a bat boy. Reich stops this, but solely
because of the bad press it generated for his department
and without a thought that strict enforcement of the
law is flawed in other, less eye-catching areas. The
White House is a pediacracy, without structure or coherence,
lurching from one position to another, consumed by politics,
swallowed up by concern over the deficit and then by
the values of Morrisism. The cynicism of the good Democrats
in Congress is exceeded only by the cynicism of the
bad Republicans.
Nonetheless,
this is the government that Reich wants to endow with
even more power to tax, micromanage, spend, and regulate.
On the basis of the evidence he presents, you wonder
how he avoids becoming a libertarian. He avoids it easily,
though, largely by exhibiting the most irritating characteristic
of modern liberalism--self-righteousness. He shows no
awareness that any opponent could possibly be his moral
equal, acting on principle. He jumps from facile analysis
to policy prescription (more power and money for DOL
programs), then elevates the conclusion into a moral
imperative which automatically converts opposition into
immorality.
In
end, you are left with puzzles. If anyone is qualified
to make a coherent case for liberalism, it is Reich.
So why does he completely shun the attempt? Does he
actually believe his own propaganda? Does he care about
nothing but selling books, and political analysis does
not sell these days? Does he find the degeneration of
his party into a pirate band glued together solely by
love of loot too awful to gaze upon?
Does
he really think such a party will help the downtrodden?
Why does he focus his animus on "business,"
ignoring other targets--does he think business people
have a monopoly on avarice? Or that avarice for power
is not as deadly a sin as avarice for money? If the
propaganda portion of this book presents the best case
that one of the ablest liberals can summon up, then
the left is in sad shape indeed.
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