CAN OUR SYSTEM WORK WITHOUT AN OVERHAUL?

Byline: Bruce Griffin Special to the Daily News

Title: ``The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point''

Author: Haynes Johnson and David S. Broder 

Data: 668 pages, Little Brown; $24.95

Our rating: Four Stars.

In a virtuoso performance before Congress early in his administration, President Bill Clinton rolled out a hastily considered health-care program that promised to ``fix everything without raising taxes.'' It was, said one senator, one of the better policy speeches ever made by an American president. In hindsight, the president played directly into Newt Gingrich's strength.

The Republican leader sat quietly among his colleagues listening to the president that night. He was confident he could ambush the rush to national health care. More importantly, he saw the president's speech as a pivot point he could use to change the flux of political discourse for a whole new generation of lawmakers.

When the Democratic Congress adjourned without even a roll call on health reform and the voters in '94 went eagerly into the voting booths to repudiate the president and put Republicans in power at every level of government, Gingrich looked like a master.

In ``The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point,'' Haynes Johnson and David S. Broder acknowledge Gingrich's political acuity but question if our system of government is capable of producing the kind of fundamental change the president called for.

Though our system is a system of checks and balances, people pull the levers and people ran the reform campaign. The story of the campaign is a story of human foibles. Johnson and Broder quote a close observer: ``It is a story of compromises that never happened, deals that never closed, Republicans, moderate Democrats and key interest groups that backpedaled from proposals they had earlier endorsed.''

But, yes, they say, the system failed.

It failed because one political party controlled both the executive and legislative branches and could not remedy a widely perceived problem. Furthermore, the important issues like health, personal safety and economic opportunity are not likely to be solved as long as the two parties' conflicting visions of the government's role remain unreconciled.

According to Gingrich, however, the system did work and, ironically, the book provides solid support for his thesis. Most importantly, admit Johnson and Broder, ``The complex (health-care) plan Ira Magaziner put together for the president looked to the public like a liberal Big Government scheme, secretly concocted, that would dictate how people got their health care.''

The whole thing with Magaziner was crazy anyway, Health Secretary Donna Shalala told the authors. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, Leon Panetta, Robert Rubin, Laura Tyson, Alice Rivlin and Shalala herself all expressed the gravest reservations about his health-care plan. The president seemed unperturbed.

Then Hillary Clinton's task force, toiling hard for months and up against a deadline, had to write a plan for Clinton to take to Congress with numbers that Magaziner was - if not actually fudging - ``squeezing very hard to fit his precast conclusions.'' Yet the numbers remained in the plan.

Johnson and Broder portray Magaziner as the ultimate ``idea guy.'' He could imagine no social problem - however complex - resisting his solution. This plan, produced under severe time constraints, was perhaps nothing so much as a prodigious feat of self-mastery.

After the president launched the reform campaign, Hillary Clinton returned to Capitol Hill to testify to the plan's merit. The New York Times said: ``Hillary Rodham Clinton dazzled five congressional committees last week.''

Unfortunately, that testimony was a watershed moment for the reform effort.

World events, including problems in Somalia, Haiti, Russia and the NAFTA vote in Congress distracted the president from health care. Without his energy, the campaign fizzled.

The Clintons, hoping to resuscitate the campaign a month after its launch, staged a media event in august Statuary Hall in the Capitol. Although the plan lay unfinished on Magaziner's desk, they called the event to formally present it to Congress. Naturally enough, their performance - though polished - was empty.

Moreover, House Minority Leader Bob Michel of Illinois attacked the very premise of the Clinton plan and promised all-out Republican opposition. Perhaps following Gingrich's lead, he turned the debate away from health care toward big government. The coming debate was about much more than health care, he said. It was about the threat of expanding bureaucracies, taxes and mandates.

His words found an appreciative audience. Although two-thirds of Americans were dissatisfied with the ``health-care system,'' they were satisfied with their own plans. Here was the heart of the problem for the Clintons, say Johnson and Broder: ``The public wanted reform, and for most Americans, that meant relief from the costs of medical care. But people were not willing to take on many additional burdens just to support those without insurance.

``In the end, the public began to see the Clinton reform as threatening the security of the middle class, not benefiting it.''

Readers of ``The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point'' - absent the authors' bias - are unlikely to believe that health-care reform proved the system doesn't work. But health care is certainly an example of the kinds of problems that may live on unsolved, and the authors provide a thoughtful appraisal of why that is so.

Each cause - starting with a Congress atomized by special-interest money, public policy made by spin doctors and focus groups, and political parties polarized by irreconcilable philosophical differences - adds another stress to the system we happily assume will carry us far beyond the century's close.

Step lightly.

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Photo: President Clinton, with Vice President Al Gore, left , and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, pushed a controversial health-care reform program early in his administration that the GOP's Gingrich was eager to oppose.