P.C. corps.

• Author: Kaufman, Leslie
• Position: Clinton's national service program

Standing before a hand-painted banner of a huge glowing sun and sliding easily into the talk-show format that has become his trademark, President Clinton was in his element as he addressed the hundreds of college-age students who had just completed the "Summer of Service," his first national service initiative. Mutual congratulations and youthful optimism filled the air. "We could revolutionize our country. There are no problems we cannot solve, there is no future we cannot have," he told them to wild cheers.

National service for youth is at the heart of Clinton's vision of a revitalized America and a new Democratic Party, and it is on the verge of becoming a reality. In August, Congress obliged the President by enacting the National Service Act of 1993, which will provide scholarships to students who perform community service. The effusive bipartisan rhetoric that surrounded the legislation's passage conjured up images of a youthful army marching into poor communities to vaccinate children and clean streets. But the reality of national service may turn out to be something quite different. If the Summer of Service is any indication, national service under Clinton will be short on civic responsibility and actual service, long on racial politics and therapeutic self-esteem training, and hard on the taxpayer's pocketbook.

The Summer of Service (Sos), a ten-week program that ran from mid-June to mid-August, gave 1,400 students from around the country $1,000 education vouchers in return for working eight-hour days at a subsistance wage on community projects. While substantially smaller than the National Service Act - which will give 100,000 participants school vouchers worth close to $10,000 in return for two years of service (participants are also eligible for child care, health care, and salary supplements from private matching funds) - the SoS was billed by the Clinton administration as a prototype for the more ambitious endeavor.

That is a real cause for concern. The Commission on National and Community Service, which ran SoS and will become a corporation and administer the National Service Act, placed diversity high on its list of criteria for groups applying for SoS funds. Applicants were expected to recruit participants from "diverse racial, economic and educational backgrounds." The students ultimately chosen for SoS, however, were anything but a portrait of America. According to Jennifer Eblett Reilly, the national director of the...