I like Mike; but I'd like Michael Kinsley even better if he'd wear his heart on his sleeve more often.

I Like Mike

I first encountered Michael Kinsley when I went to work for Ralph Nader in the early '70s. In an impulsive moment, and intrigued by the obscurity of the subject, I had volunteered to work on the issue of local property taxes, which had aroused Nader's interest at the time. (This was seven years before California's Proposition 13.) Nader gave me a stack of memos that a young Harvard student named Kinsley had written for him the summer before.

Up to then, I had vaguely supposed there was a regulation someplace requiring that memos be as magisterial and deadpan as the news pages of The New York Times. And my early reading on property taxes--reports from Brookings and the like--had led me to believe that the subject deserved every bit of obscurity that had come its way.

But Kinsley's memos were something else. With precocious insight and an infectious elan, they detailed a world of crooked assessors, bizarre local assessment practices, and cranky, eccentric tax protesters. The memos were well-reported yet irreverent. Most of all, they were fun.

Since then, Kinsley has become the best read in Washington, and a new collection of his columns and essays demonstrates why.* They show a playful yet deadly wit and a presence that leaves no nuance unattended. There are few things I await eagerly out of Washington every week. Kinsley's TRB column in The New Republic is one.

* Curse of the Giant Muffins and Other Washington Maladies. Michael Kinsley. Summit Books, $17.95.

For those who have somehow missed him, Kinsley is The New Republic's 36-year-old editor and something of a "wunderkind' on the Washington journalism scene. After studying in England as a Rhodes Scholar, he became The New Republic's managing editor at the age of 25 while still in law school. (Earlier he had been an editor of this magazine.) In 1981, he took two years off to turn Harper's magazine from staid to sassy and win a National Magazine Award. He returned to The New Republic after a tiff with the board of directors of Harper's, a fairly regular occurence in his career.

Kinsley writes a column for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal (in which he often twits that paper's editors) and appears from time to time on TV's "The McLaughlin Group.' He just signed on to write essays for Time magazine. How he cranks out all this is a wonder to plodders like me. And somehow, after ten years of this, he still seems precocious.

Kinsley's subjects range from weighty legal and economic issues to high-spirited piques: the media's hyping of the Schroeder heart surgery story, for example, and the way Bernadine Dohrn, former leader of the violent "Weatherman' faction of SDS, emerged from ten years of hiding to land a job at a prestigious Chicago law firm, thanks to her big shot father-in-law. "Dohrn Again,' this one was called.

Kinsley's speciality is the pretense and hypocrisy beat, which he walks in a state of perpetual red alert. Those he catches will think twice about repeating the offense.

An example is Mary Cunningham, mentoree, girlfriend, and later wife of William Agee, the former Bendix president, who portrays herself as a media martyr and a "latter-day Joan of Arc.'

"Her only ambition was to do good,' Kinsley writes, mocking Cunningham's melodramatic tone. "Her saintly impulse has inclined her toward a career in investment banking. . . .'

Kinsley has a gift for catching the pompous with their pants down. To determine whether Washingtonians actually read those weighty tomes they discuss so knowledgeably on the talk shows, Kinsley stuck little notes in the back pages of bookstore copies, offering a reward for anyone who found the notes and responded. No one did.

And take those unnamed "thoughtful observers' that populate the high-minded papers, rejecting "simplistic arguments' and demanding "careful thinking on the part of policy makers.' By searching through Nexus, a computerized clip file, Kinsley found that 67 of these sages had so spoken since 1977. Actually, that's nothing compared to the things that "remain to be seen,' of which there were 1,223 in 1985 alone.

Kinsley takes it as a personal challenge to voice the forbidden thought. In "Let 'Em Rot in the Sun' he admits that economic hardship in the Texas oilfields doesn't move him all that much. A few years earlier, after all, those same folks were sporting bumper stickers that read "Freeze a Yankee--Drive 75.'

"It's not a very attractive emotion,' he says of his glee, "and in due course perhaps I'll seek professional help. But first I'm going to enjoy it for a while.'

There are no shortages of potential highlight clips in these spirited sorties. Regular readers of the Monthly are familiar with what the editor in chief calls the "Don't Say Anything Bad About the Good Guys' syndrome. This describes the way liberal thought has stagnated by refusing to acknowledge the shortcomings of liberal causes and groups. It doesn't describe Kinsley. Unlike ideological axe-grinders, with which Washington abounds, Kinsley takes special delight in routing the totems and phonies from his own liberal camp.

Here's Kinsley on antiwar physicians, who think they can dispel the nuclear boogie via stern health warnings: "How is this medical education campaign to be conducted in the Soviet Union, let alone Libya, Pakistan, South Africa, and so on?' On the ACLU's annual yuletide crusade against the creche menace: "People who want to go through life with nothing to remind them of their minority status ask too much.' On the Democratic National Committee's Platform: "Is this liberalism or is it social hypochondria?'

As to his spoof of the DNC's effort to balance its Fairness Commission according to sexual preference, I won't spoil the fun.

Well, okay. But just a peek. "Twenty-seven on top, 21 underneath, and two standing up. What? You're kidding. Well, if Yankelovich says so, eight on top, 29 underneath, 13 standing up.'

It is hard to think of a more revered liberal tract of the '80s than Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth, on the threat of nuclear war. Kinsley calls it "apocalyptic bigthink' and "one of the most pretentious things I've ever read.' ""Gosh, is this profound,' is about all that many sonorous passages convey.'

I think Schell deserves more points than Kinsley gives him for at least being on the right side. But Schell does serve up a tempting setup line with his earnest pronouncement that he is leaving to others the taks of working out the practical solutions to the nuclear mess. "Good heavens,' Kinsley exclaims. "Is he just going to head off on a book tour and leave us stranded?'

What makes Kinsley so good--aside from being uncommonly bright--is that he is resolutely un-Washington. The preoccupation of most of Kinsley's peers is to be seen as being on the inside. Every time I see Fred Barnes, Kinsley's amiable colleague at The New Republic, in print or on "The McLaughlin Group,' he manages to make known that he, Fred Barnes, has talked to important people at the White House that week.

Kinsley, by contrast, writes entirely from the public record. His primary "sources' are the clip file and his wit. Not caring what potential sources may think, he can say what he thinks. (At times he's burned bridges while still standing on them, as when he resigned from The New Republic-- later to return--over the owner's refusal to print an article criticizing Ted Kennedy's amorous appetite.)

Though Kinsley avoids the pretense of profundity, his flip style can be deceiving. He writes so engagingly about law and economics--his fortes--because he understands them so well. Unlike most journalists, he is not buffaloed by the lingo.

It took Kinsley, for example, to blow the whistle on the Nobel prize that went to James Buchanan, the conservative economist. Buchanan got the prize for his supposedly earth-shattering theory--which he calls "public choice'--that legislators tend to act in their self-interest. This theory greatly pleased the business world since it made government regulation seem suspect. Kinsley skewered this debunking view of government by turning its cynicism back upon the debunker. He conjured up an "academic choice' theory of scholarship to explain Buchanan's views:

"By coming up with a lot of fancy theories to justify the self-interested desires of the business community--for lower taxes, less regulation, etc.--[Buchanan] may find himself earning a six figure salary (one-third subsidized by corporations) as head of his own center, and winning all sorts of awards to boot.'

All this is a high-wire act that few can pull off but it is also an irresistible example for young writers. I suspect Kinsley will have as much influence upon the next generation of political writers as any practitioner of the craft.

At times, though, Kinsley permits his logic and wit to run ahead of him. It's an occupational hazard of the really bright. The fact is that underneath the deft and delightful argumentation is a fairly traditional liberal, who thinks the wealthly should pay taxes to support programs for the poor, and so forth. Nobody is better at routing the forces of reaction. And no one chastises liberals more adeptly for the constituency-mongering and other errors of their own camp. But somehow Kinsley missed some of the more constructive enthusiasms of his generation--environmental and natural resource concerns, for example. He also missed the idea of a qualitative economics, which looks beyond the mere quantity of production, consumption, and so forth, to the quality of work and life resulting from these.

Kinsley shrugs his shoulders, for example, at such problems as the displacement of workers and communities due to the regional shift of industry. It's sad, he says. But earlier in the century, people moaned about the mass exodus from the farm, and it all worked out fine (Granted, his glee over hardship in the sunbelt was partly tongue in cheek. Still, the joke sours a bit when you discover that emergency food requests in Texas have doubled since 1983.)

More significantly, though he has rightly criticized the "paper economy' of corporate takeover was and the like, he dismisses worries about the export of American industry and the growth of a service economy in its place. "The shift of labor and capital from manufacturing to services clearly increases their productivity,' he argues. "It wouldn't be happening if the payoff weren't better.'

This is the parlane of conventional economics, talking about "labor' and "productivity' in general as though it makes no difference what in particular is being accomplished, or by whom, and as though maximum production-- wherever it occurs--is the only thing that matters. A million dollars worth of Nautilus memberships or corporate management seminars is not the same as a like output of shoes or tractors or energy conservation devices, in terms of who is employed, the social impacts of that production, and even in terms of our ability to sustain the growth we seek.

Kinsley's liberalism is that of a utilitarian and a skeptic. We need benevolent government, he says, because it's a hard world out there, and will remain so, not because folks are so nice. Skepticism keeps one's feet on the ground. It protects against faddish enthusiasms and schemers of all kinds. It also provides great leverage for wit. But its limitations appear in pieces like "Waiting for Lenny,' about Lenny Skutnick, the $14,000 a year federal employee who dived into the icy Potomac to save a woman who had been thrown from a plane crash.

Kinsley regards as "fatuous' the suggestion that this kind of spirit might be mobilized across the land to disminish the need for government welfare programs. This is a fairly standard liberal view. It's not that he's against voluntarism; it's just that he has a dim view of its prospects.

To be sure, Reaganites indulge a cynicism of their own when they talk as though voluntarism could reduce the federal government to the Pentagon and the CIA (with sugar and dairy subsidies thrown in on election years). But that doesn't discredit the idea of voluntarism itself. When people criticize liberals for thinking all benevolence must be routed through the Federal Triangle, it is exactly such attitudes they have in mind.

Or take "St. Ralph,' Kinsley's backhanded defense of Ralph Nader (which concludes his section on "Influence Peddlers'). Nader comes off as a public pill with a neurotic aversion to material possessions, who is nevertheless to be praised because of seat belt laws and other lifesaving enactments we owe to him. This utilitarian approach to Nader gets him exactly wrong, I think. More important than seat belt laws is the life example of the man who devoted his every energy to their enactment, who doesn't weigh his life activities upon the "rational man' calculus of personal loss and gain that haunts our economic models.

One can indeed appear fatuous advancing such views. That's especially the case in Washington, where people strive to avoid even the appearance of innocence. But equally fatuous is the notion that society can becomes collectively bettter without becoming individually so. (The political right stokes this chord expertly among the populace and liberals continue to concede the field.) Of course we need social programs. But bureaucratized well-doing ought to be minimized; and the individual kind won't flourish until opinion leaders encourage it.

Why do liberals generally feel uncomfortable with this idea? I do not think it is simply a desire for more jobs on the public payroll or pandering to constituency groups, as "public choice' cynics would hold. I think the idea of voluntary well-doing seems naive and even a little vulgar in some liberal circles; people don't go to the Kennedy School to learn to run PTA meetings. For all of us it also raises the uncomfortable question of how much we ourselves are doing.

Kinsley doesn't reveal much about himself, except in caricature. But when he talks about the ACLU's anti-creche crusade, there's a moment in which the cards are on the table and words carry genuine conviction.

"This child had better learn early on to question his identity with the American culture,' he says of the supposed non-Christian beneficiary of the group's yuletide litigiousness, "because its a tough question that will follow him all his life no matter how successful the ACLU is at banning nativity scenes.'

There are not many such moments however. And there are not many things that Kinsley really likes. Of the 63 essays collected here, I count only one on someone of whom Kinsley basically approves (leaving aside a partial defense of Yuppies). That's Nader. The only other such effort I can recall--though surely there are others--was the sketch that appeared in this magazine 16 years or so ago of an eccentric dentist named Ben Yellin in California's Imperial Valley, who waged a one-man crusade against water subsidies for big growers there. In both cases, Kinsley keeps a bemused and ironic distance. He's never really in with both feet.

Granted, piques are generally more entertaining than praise. And it must be said that Kinsley is wicked rather than mean.

Nevertheless, the put-down is only the first test of wit, and the easiest. The second, and more demanding, is the raise-up, the enlisting of wit in the service of advocacy and priase--of worthy causes overlooked, of individuals unjustly ignored or slighted. Sometimes simply the expression of admiration.

Journalism of this kind is risky in its own way. The guy you laud this week could go to jail the next, leaving you looking foolish. It is hard to pull off without appearing unsophisticated, fawning, or sappy. Which is why it requires the talents of our best.