Megatraumas: America at the year 2000.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

MEGATRAUMAS

Politicians almost never allow us a glimpse into what's really going on in their minds. So when Dick Lamm, Colorado's "Governor Gloom,' does, it's hard to resist the urge to perform armchair psychoanalyis. This book* is about the major problems facing the United States today, but it is elaborately set up as a work of quasi-fiction, taking place 15 years in the future--two different futures, actually, featuring two different presidents. For the first two-thirds of the book, the president is Susan J. Hesperus (elected 1996). The blizzard of memos she requests from her cabinet officers gives Lamm a chance to lay out in full the predictions that earned him his nickname. Then, in the last third, Lamm invents an alternative future, without Hesperus but with a Maine senator named Martin Morgenstern, who is elected president in 1992 and heroically averts all the crises that earlier in the book (but later chronologically--it's confusing) faced Hesperus. A history of the Morgenstern administration is Lamm's way of giving his solutions to all the woes he has described. Hesperus, the first woman president, never appears onstage, though it's worth noting that her name means "evening star,' as in Lamm's idea that it's evening in America. Morgenstern, on the other hand, is praised lavishly in a way that suggests it's how Lamm sees himself: "Leadership is a matter of asking the big questions . . . what he was offering was a very sophisticated set of assumptions . . . his intense and eloquent style could move many people, even when the message was like Cassandra's.'

* Megatraumas: America at the Year 2000. Governor Richard D. Lamm. Houghton Mifflin, $16.95.

Also, though Lamm doesn't say so, Morgenstern is, judging by his name, the first Jewish president; Lamm himself is a Unitarian. What can this mean? Either a) that Lamm, knowing where the political money is for a skeptical-of-unions Democrat, is thinking ahead to his next campaign or b) that, while Lamm isn't Jewish, his fantasy-self is, probably because he thinks of Jewishness as meaning super-braininess. What he's most vain about is his tough-minded intelligence.

Indeed, Lamm is what liberals spent last year accusing Gary Hart and neoliberalism of being --very smart but unsentimentally analytical and prone to use the phrase "new ideas' as code for an agenda of dismantling the social welfare state. Some of Lamm's causes will be familiar to readers of this magazine: the overgenerosity of...