The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office.

The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office.

Now that the ideological fervor of the Reagan years has given way to the gentlemanly pragmatism of the Bush era, political analysts are turning their attention from large questions about the purpose of government to smaller ones about its mechanics. Ten years ago, the two seemed one and the same. Hadn't voters chosen the unmistakably conservative Ronald Reagan because they though the federal government was too liberal? To serve the apparent will of the people, the federal government slashed taxes, boosted defense spending, and funnelled cash (legally and otherwise) to the Nicaraguan contras. But even before the presidency passed from Ronald Reagan to George Bush, these causes lost their momentum, and the notion of a popular mandate to do any of those things became less compelling. If voters were not determining the course of our democracy, what was?

Ambition was, according to Alan Ehrenhalt, a respected former political reporter for Congressional Quarterly who is now executive editor of Governing magazine. Ehrenhalt's thesis is that the quirky path of recent political history, from Vietnam to Watergate to Operation Desert Storm, is best understood not by trying to figure out elusive electoral mood swings but by scrutinizing the unsubtle egos of American politicians. The country lacks political direction, he argues, not because voters are ambivalent but because politicians with various political beliefs are tugging it in a hundred different directions at once.

Ehrenhalt lays out his argument through a series of tightly written, chapter-length case studies, beginning at the small-town level and working his way up to Congress and the White House. In each instance, Ehrenhalt shows how a powerful (usually business-dominated) elite that once called the political shots lost its influence as politicians became more independent and assertive.

In Concord, California, a sleepy city govenment that previously rubber-stamped decisions made by an unelected city manager suddenly turned activist in the eighties with the election of a city council dedicated to instituting "comparable worth" pay. In Greenville, South Carolina, a county government that was formerly the rural fiefdom of a state senator was taken over by fundamentalist Christians bent on restricting sinful development. In Connecticut, the power of state party bosses like Republican J. Henry Roraback and Democrat John Bailey, who at one time exerted absolute control over state legislators, gave way to a statehouse full of independent agents collectively wreaking fiscal chaos. In Congress and the White House, politicians once bound together by loyalty to national political parties went their separate ways, bequething to the nation an out-of-control federal deficit.

In every instance, Ehrenhalt argues, change resulted from politicians shedding their status as part-timers and embracing politics as a profession. City and state governments once run by moonlighting lawyers, farmers, and merchants became year-round enterprises, requiring an officeholder's full attention. Ehrenhalt reminds us that, as recently as the fifties, Congress ran from January to July, allowing members "to practice law or sell insurance or do whatever they had done before they were elected." Compare that to last fall, when Congress was kept in session until little more than a week before election day.

Back in the old days, when politicians were distracted by legal briefs or cotton crops, they were more likely to defer to others. But today, the full-time profession of politics attracts ambitious people prepared to give the business of government their full attention. This new breed grew up in a culture less inclined to respect authority; they are also shrewder about using the press, especially TV, to sell their agendas to voters (though Ehrenhalt wisely avoids this subject, which has been discussed to death by others).

Ehrenhalt attributes any number of recent crices to the professionalization of politics, sometimes carrying his argument a bit too far. He contends that the phenomenon is a reason Jim Wright was driven from office, since no countervailing sense of party unity existed to rally unbeholden congressional Democrats behind their speaker. (Actually, I'm inclined to believe the decisive factor was a more aggressive press, which is less inclined than it used to be to ignore ethical lapses in politicians, in part because reporters, too, have less reverence for authority than they once did.) Ehrenhalt also blames the new professionalization for the implosion of Gary Hart's 1988 presidential campaign. Hart, he argues, was encouraged to stray so far from any identifiable constituency that the public ended up wondering who this man really was and developed an unwholesome curiosity about his sex life. "Where's the Beef?" thus led inexorably to "Where's the Salami?"

Well, maybe yes, maybe no. But Ehrenhalt is surely right that the newly professionalized and independent breed of politican has made it difficult to steer the government in any one direction for very long.

What can be done to regain the rudder? Efrenhalt occasionally comes close to suggesting that we should return to the old days of smoke-filled rooms, but deep down he seems to understand that their time is gone. (He's also sufficiently rigorous in reporting about the way these feudal arrangement worked that the discerning reader isn't likely to wish them back.)

Reformers often suggest that American government could reestablish party loyalty if it were restructured along more parliamentary lines, a change I would certainly support--but which is unlikely to occur any time soon. Short of such major constitutional surgery, governmental torpor can be shed only through an appeal to the idealism, or at least common sense, of the group whose influence on the political process Ehrenhalt chooses not to discuss: the voters.