GOVERNMENT'S END: Why Washington Stopped Working.

• Author: Bennet, James
• Position: Review

GOVERNMENT'S END: Why Washington Stopped Working

By Jonathan Rauch Public Affairs, $12.00

A thouthful author's pessimism about special interests

IN EARLY MARCH, AS JOHN MCCAIN'S BANGING of the "iron triangle" reached fever pitch, a poignant little ceremony took place at the National Press Club in downtown Washington. In a windowless room, officers of the American League of Lobbyists (ALL), gathered to unveil their spanking new code of ethics, and to share their pain.

Two lobbyists told of how their mothers burst into tears at the news that their offspring had joined the profession. Another said sadly that his son did not know what he did and did not care to learn. Another recalled a family gathering where he was snickered at by some, yelled at by the rest.

It has never been easy to tell your loved ones--or, for that matter, complete strangers--that you are a lobbyist. And it is only getting harder as the term "special interest" gathers the kind of totemic, repulsive force that "Mason" once held in American politics. Presidential candidates fell all over each other this year in the scramble to declare their hatred of these sinister influences. But Al Gore sometimes gave the emptiness of this talk away, when in reeling off the list of interests he has opposed he stretched for a word to encompass the scope of his belligerence and declared that he has fought against "everyone."

Everyone is, of course, who the special interests add up to. At the press club, Kenneth E. Feltman, the president of the aptly-acronymed ALL, made much the same point as Gore, if more intentionally and plaintively. "You know, all of us have a lobbyist," he told the tiny assemblage of reporters. "If you have a credit card, you have a lobbyist. Are you a member of a frequent flier club? You have a lobbyist." Do you read books? Then whether you buy them or check them out of a library, you have a lobbyist. "Are you married? Well, you have a lobbyist. Single? Yes. Separated? Yes." That we are all players in the lobbying game is a fact that Jonathan Rauch documents, with a relentlessness bordering on cruelty, in Government's End. Bear with me while I summarize:

Mature democracies, Rauch argues, inevitably are larded with associations of narrow interests competing to redistribute to their clients the wealth created by others. Hence the National Paint Varnish and Lacquer Association, the Frozen Pizza Institute, the Possum Growers and Breeders Association. Each new federal...