What Comes Next: The End of Big Government - And the New Paradigm Ahead.

• Author: Hayward, Steven

By James P. Pinkerton, New York: Hyperion, $21.95, 386 pages

Jim Pinkerton endeared himself to right-thinking people a few years back by annoying Richard Darman, the Rasputin of the Bush administration. Pinkerton's advocacy of the "new paradigm" embarrassed the Bush administration by exposing its blindness toward historic political opportunities. Even more egregious by Washington standards, Pinkerton's themes pricked the intellectual vanity of the Darmans and Sununus of the Republican establishment, who always tremble at the idea of straying from the line-of-sight of the conventional wisdom of The Washington Post or New York Times.

Upon reading What Comes Next, however, Pinkerton's admirers may wonder whether he didn't pick up some mild mutant strain of the Darman disease. While Pinkerton offers a clear-eyed and vividly illustrated account of the failure of big government in our time, his "new paradigm" for the future contains inexplicable nods toward the direction of frothy dogoodism, including a few downright statist ideas such as a revived Civilian Conservation Corps government jobs program. It would be a mistake, though, to judge What Comes Next as a wonkish tome. Pinkerton is up to something more mischievous than mere policy prescriptions. What Comes Next is really intended to be a manifesto for a third-party candidacy for president, probably by Colin Powell, though Pinkerton barely mentions Powell in his narrative.

What Comes Next lays out five clear themes in the sprightly prose that readers of Pinkerton's newspaper columns have come to relish. After opening the book with a brief memoir explaining the myopia of the Bush administration (comparing it to the old movie The Big Sleep), Pinkerton discusses the two-edged sword of the "cyber future." Technology holds out great promise, but many are likely to be left behind--"fiscally challenged, expectationally diminished neo-deadheads" he calls them. "We are disuniting into a society of program traders, Think Pads, and the Internet at one extreme--and crack, Uzis, and three-strikes-you're-out on the other.... [W]e can e-mail across the planet but are afraid to cross the street."

Pinkerton uses cyberthink to construct his second main point, which is to explain the failure of the "old paradigm" of big government with the metaphor of a computer operating system. In this case, big government has operated on BOS--Bureaucratic Operating System--for several generations, including several upgrades...