Gang of three; meet the real Democratic Party bosses: teachers' unions, government employees and the AARP.

Just before Bill Clinton's speech at the AFSCME convention last summer, the inside word was that the candidate would give a gloves-off, fire-in-the-belly performance. He'd speak the hard truths about cutting government payrolls; he'd talk about unpadding pensions; he'd talk about responsibility and sacrifice and biting the bullet. Clinton, it appeared, was going to lecture a government union, one of the most powerful of the country's special interests, on issues vital to its members, and grab your belts with both hands folks because he wasn't going to blink.

Clinton didn't blink--he winked. He told the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees that he planned to shrink the country's distended bureaucracy by cutting 100,000 unnecessary souls from--wait for it--the federal payroll. And even those cuts would be by attrition. The audience was euphoric and party officials lauded Clinton's plan as an act of political bravery.

Of course, Clinton's proposal was as gutsy as telling a convention of yacht owners that he planned to impose a tax on private airplanes. And while that sort of pandering is nothing new for politicians, Clinton--like Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and thousands of state and 10cal Democrats throughout the country-- has been especially careful to kow-tow to three particular special interest groups: government unions, teachers' unions, and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).

With the unions, the candidate's obeisance, like that of his party, brings easy dollars and a reliable voting bloc squarely into the Democrat's corner, while the spoils of the elderly lobby must be shared with the Republicans. But the Democrats' efforts to woo all three groups stifles productive debate on several Democratic articles of faith--like making government work, reforming public schools, and getting a fair shake for the poor.

These interest groups should be rapped for their failure to compromise on common-sense reforms and for trying to make their parochial desires sound like a national consensus. But the real blame belongs to Democrats who, like Clinton at the AFSCME convention, are mainlining on interest group cash and clout and lack the wherewithal to just say no.

If you still believe the old saw that no army is strong enough to stop an idea whose time has come, you're probably not familiar with these three interest groups. Their power was made possible by 1968 reforms to the Democrats' nomination process. The current primary- and caucus-based system curtails the role of the party bosses and greatly enhances that of special interests. Today these groups are strong enough to straitjacket ideas they oppose.

Take education reform. On some issues teachers' unions like the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have gotten behind long overdue reforms. Leaders have called for increased funding for Head Start and opposed private tuition tax credits. But what about teacher competency testing and merit pay raises?

Forget it. Teachers, according to these unions, shouldn't be judged by theft performance or that of their pupils. And challenges to this thinking by Democratic politicians have been rare and perilous. In 1988, Dukakis helped scuttle competency testing for Massachusetts' veteran teachers, a move that helped him win NEA's support in his presidential bid. Even more discouraging has been Clinton's abandonment of the issue. In 1983, he helped push through the Arkansas state legislature a one-time-only teacher competency test requirement. Ten percent of the state's instructors promptly failed their first bout with the eighth-grade-level exam, and some 3.5 percent eventually skulked from the classroom. Despite this record, don't expect much from Clinton on national education reform: His campaign headquarters spews out the same rhetoric about teacher testing that you're likely to get about pot smoking--the candidate had a youthful experiment with it in the past, but he'd rather not discuss it now.

Why is Clinton so wary? Because the NEA's clout in selecting the Democratic nominee is legendary. The group's early endorsement of Jimmy Carter in 1976 helped convince the rest of organized labor that Carter was worthy of its support. Four years later, the NEA sent 481 delegates to the Democratic National Convention to scream theft thanks to Carter for delivering a record increase in education funding and, in what was perhaps the biggest political payoff in American history, a new Cabinet-level Department of Education.

At this year's Democratic convention, one in ten delegates on the floor of Madison Square Garden was an NEA member, and each represented just a fraction of the support the union has lavished on Clinton and other Democratic candidates across the nation in campaign mailings, phone banks, and event organization. And then there's the loot. NEA's $2.5 million in gifts made it the Democrats' top donor in the 1990 congressional elections; affiliates contributed roughly twice that amount to state legislative races.

Many of us already pay a price for the unseemly courtship of the Democrats by these teachers' unions. Today, as always, a New York teacher can be a convicted felon and still be guaranteed a place on the public payroll until the case is referred to a disciplinary hearing. In Massachusetts, one local school district has spent half a million dollars on legal fees trying to fire one teacher defended by the union, while another arbitration case in Boston has dragged on for five years. Still, Republican Governor William Weld found himself nearly alone when he proposed abolishing teacher tenure and absolute seniority protections. "We're getting killed on this," said one Weld administration aide who watched 12,000 angry teachers gather on the governor's lawn in June while a barrage of union-funded radio ads assailed the reform proposals.

And in New Jersey, where an alternative certification program allows bright, recent college graduates to bypass teachers' colleges and move straight into the classroom, unions convinced politicians to hassle non-degree teachers with night and summer courses, a requirement that detracts from the time they can spend teaching students and preparing lessons.

What Democratic politicians haven't figured out is that when it comes to winning the support of teachers' unions, they have a natural advantage: Republicans couldn't give a damn about public schools-- they'd rather exit them via vouchers or replace them with a private scheme like Chris Whittle's Edison Project. And the public school teachers know it. To fight for public school students, Democrats need only muster the nerve.

Party poopers

Like the NEA, government unions like AFSCME, the American Federation of Government Employees, the Postal Workers Union, and the National Treasury Employees Union are all fixtures of Democratic politics. For a case study in how they operate, look at AFSCME. The union boasts 1.4 million members who are twice as likely to vote as the average American and who pull along "solidarity" votes from their families. Its PAC, with $1.5 million in contributions to congressional candidates in the 1990 election cycle and $323,000 in soft money, ranked fourth among Democratic party benefactors. And no statistic captures the impact of its most powerful political weapon: hands-on campaigning through union hall phone banks, union-produced mailings, and armies of committed campaign volunteers.

So when AFSCME talks, politicians pander. "There are too many people out there who act as if they were elected by AFSCME rather than the voters," says Wendell Cox, a veteran adviser on government efficiency who's worked with both liberal and conservative administrations throughout the country.

AFSCME banks its political clout most by stymieinS common-sense reforms like making government more efficient. It's obvious that local and federal bureaucracies at every level are swollen. Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch believes that if he had been able to suspend a single civil service requirement just once--the one establishing seniority as the sole factor in determining who survives layoffs --the city could have sustained a 20 percent reduction in its work force and provided better service to its citizens. But such reforms are non-starters at all levels, because unions and their Democratic toadies oppose them.

Pruning the bureaucracy would be a sensible beginning, but to hold on to the good performers the government should eliminate "bumping," the reduction-in-force practice by which a tenured employee, when his slot is cut, can simply shove out a younger, perhaps better, worker and swipe his job. Such reforms would allow enough career, nonpolitical workers to carry the institutional memory forward from one administration to the next.

If increased efficiency is a low priority for unions, saving money doesn't even make the list. Nationwide, state and local public employee compensation grew four times faster than comparable private sector wages during the eighties, while state government was growing at twice the rate of the national population.

Despite the disturbing arithmetic, when politicians address the public employees' unions, they're more inclined to bone up on the new math than say something unpopular. Clinton tends to limit himself to gaseous platitudes like his recent remark to AFSCME: "It's time for a revolution in the American workplace that will raise the status of the American worker and tear down the Berlin Wall between labor and management." While Clinton utters vagaries about "reinventing government," he's never endorsed the reform movement's basic message: that good government must allow its managers to hire, promote, transfer, and fire employees.

Pension for trouble

The Democrats are no better at standing up to AARP, but here the party's behavior is heretical as well as spineless. After all, you might expect Republicans to side with the greedy geezers who have made the mere mention of Social Security reform off-limits. But the Democrats? Blessing AARP's refusal to bend on trimming entitlements for the elderly belies the party's "little guy" rhetoric.

Social Security, Medicare, and federal and military pensions account for half of a 1992 federal budget that will boast a record $400 billion deficit. Even with the modest cost-cutting measures now being proposed by the White House, such entitlements will still grow to nearly 60 percent of the budget by 1997. Because Social Security benefits are largely insulated from taxation, income taxes paid by an upper-middle-class elderly family amount to less than half those paid by a working family with the same income.

Before Clinton became a household name, he showed some spleen on this issue. Back in 1986, when the deficit was much smaller but a more popular concern, he endorsed the idea of a cap on entitlement spending. But while campaigning in Florida's gray belt last fall, he attacked truth-teller Paul Tsongas for suggesting--it wasn't even a proposal-- that cost-of-living adjustments could be limited for Social Security recipients whose income is more than $125,000. This bit of demagoguery put the fear of Tsongas in retirees and helped Clinton win the primary.

Though an evenly divided membership forces the AARP to remain party-neutral, its information network presents both political parties with a formidable obstacle to rationally downsizing elderly benefits. With a mailing list that reaches nearly half of all Americans over 50, a group that happens to vote more regularly that its younger counterparts, AARP has helped seniors safeguard their due and then some. Politicians like Clinton balk at elderly entitlements issues while running, so that once in office, they lack the mandate to address them.

Unholy trinity

The Democrats' aversion to battling the combined might of government unions, teachers' unions, and AARP protects a range of thorny issues from serious scrutiny. After all, if Democrats won't question the millions in Social Security benefits now slated to line the pockets of the wealthy, or demand greater excellence in our government and public schools, no one will. And though cowering to these three groups for alms and votes is by now a sort of family tradition, Clinton's acquiescence is a bitter disappointment. After all, seven years ago he looked ready to rise to the fight when he rounded the centfist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in an effort to take the Democratic Party beyond traditional liberal remedies.

Overweight, brain-dead unions and grasping entitlement seekers had been on notice for the first time. But while Clinton has continued to push for many of the DLC's goals--such as a national service plan--as a presidential candidate he sounds more like another concubine than the man who's come to close down the harem. Having fought his way onto the party's bully pulpit, he has so far been unwilling to use it. He has between now and November to find some courage and lead.

Chris Mitchell is a New Yourk writer.