Eternal life: why government programs won't die.

• Author: Rauch, Jonathan

Consider two risible objects, Woody Allen and the National Sheep Industry Improvement Center. One is risible because it is mortal. "It's not that I'm afraid to die," Allen once said, "it's just that I don't want to be there when it happens." The other is risible because it is immortal. It is living proof that, four years after Bill Clinton came to office promising a new day and two years after Newt Gingrich did the same thing, Washington is still in deep trouble.

Back in 1954, when wool was a vital strategic commodity (for military uniforms), the government set up a subsidy for wool producers. Then Dacron happened, and by 1960 synthetics had knocked wool from the Pentagon's must-have list. Nonetheless, three decades later the subsidy for wool and mohair (the fleece of Angora goats - don't ask) was still amiably handing out $100 million or more each year to ranchers, 1 percent of whom got almost half the payments. Finally, in 1993, a Democratic Congress, embarrassed by what The New York Times mocked as the "mohair toilet seat," killed the thing. The wool program died that year alongside the equally bizarre honey subsidy, the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor program, and the Superconducting Super Collider. Requiescat.

Well, it looked dead. But killing a program is not the same as killing a lobby. After a decent interval and a switch on Capitol Hill from old-style Democrats to newfangled Republicans, the wool people stuck their head up again, and last April their persistence paid off. Thanks to Sen. Larry Craig - a Republican from Idaho and supposedly a conservative - Newt Gingrich's Congress tossed the wool lobby a new National Sheep Industry Improvement Center, empowered with up to $50 million in federal funds to "enhance production and marketing of sheep or goat products in the United States."

Has nothing changed in Washington, then? On the contrary, practically everything has changed - politically. Congress went from Democratic to Republican, from Hillaryism in 1994 to Gingrichism in 1995. The presidency passed from Bill Clinton I, tribune of Renaissance Weekend activism, to Bill Clinton II, soldier of the center and prime snatcher of Republican real estate. The public gave Clinton a mandate against Bushian do-nothingism, then gave Gingrich a mandate against Clintonian activism, and now seems about to give somebody - Clinton II or Bob Dole, it scarcely matters which - a mandate against Gingrichite activism.

Through it all, the public is as disenchanted as ever with its government. Now, though, it is equally disenchanted with government's would-be reformers, the Gingrichites. So now everybody has a problem. Conservatives and libertarians find that the ramshackle, rolling accumulation of stuff known as the federal government pauses for a moment when faced with an outbreak of anti-government zeal - and then brushes it aside. Liberals and other friends of government find that Washington is still too bogged down in its own past to do anything well.

And government-friendly reformers - people like me, who think government should do less to do it better - have a problem, maybe the biggest problem. I think government needs a thorough housecleaning, not so much to make it smaller (it will never be very small) as to make it more focused and flexible. It needs to stop trying to do everything for everybody at once. A housecleaning, ultimately, would probably please the public. But, presented with such a reform in a political context, the public resolutely blocks it.

So do the people want reform, or don't they? The answer is: yes. The lesson of the Year of Newt is, I think, fairly depressing, and not just for Gingrich's sympathizers. Between comprehensive disaffection with government and comprehensive reform of government lies a vast chasm, and no bridge. The public despises government and it desires reform, at least in principle. Yet there appears, at least at present, to be no path from here to there.

"Nonsense," say grumbling populists, "the problem is that Washington isn't listening to The American People. It's too busy with its partisan bickering to get anything done. It's out of touch and gridlocked - that's the problem."

Actually, that's not the problem. Neither out-of-touchness nor gridlock is anything like the real problem. To think of Washington's mess in those terms, as most of the public does, is to rush straight off in the wrong direction.

American politics has never been more responsive, indeed more capricious, than it is now. Washington has never been more eager to react to every passing electoral mood. Angry this week about immigrants? Wages? Gas prices? Beef prices? A bomb? A recidivist child molester? You can be sure a bill will be on the floor of Congress tomorrow, if not sooner. Those who say Washington doesn't listen have...