Patron saints; how honest political machines can humanize government.

• Author: Forer, Lois

When Rosie was wheeled into my courtroom, I was horrified. Here was an elderly, one-legged, unemployed woman who had been in jail for more than five months awaiting trial. Her crimes-arson, recklessly endangering others, and risking a catastrophe-sounded serious, but still, she should have been released on nominal bond. The purpose of bail is simply to secure the appearance of the accused at trial. Where and how could Rosie flee?

I asked the public defender, who had received Rosie's case file the previous evening, why Rosie had been held. He said that wasn't his concern. Such decisions were made by the bail project, which, like the public defender's office, is a publicly funded, nonpolitical agency. The employee who had recommended that Rosie be denied bail explained that she did not meet the criteria for release: She had no job, no family, no telephone. She had lived in her residence for only a month. He had followed the guidelines, discharged his obligation. He had no special responsibility to Rosie.

Why had Rosie turned to crime? I discovered that she had moved to an unapproved apartment after the redevelopment authority condemned her house. The lock on her apartment door had jammed, and Rosie was trapped inside, without a telephone. She opened the window and shouted to her neighbors for help. But amid the din of television sets, playing children, domestic fights, and the first-floor bar, no one heard her. In desperation she placed a wastebasket on the window sill, put a piece of old newspaper in it, and set it on fire. That got her some attention. Although the fire was out by the time the fire-fighters broke down her door, Rosie was arrested.

The whole fiasco could have been avoided, of course, if Rosie had been moved into a proper home. I asked the civil service social worker who was supposed to relocate Rosie to an approved dwelling why she hadn't done her job. "She was not polite to me," the worker explained. And where was the $6,000 the city owed Rosie for her condemned house? That had not been paid to her because she had not come to the office to request it. No one went looking for her.

What had gone wrong? Conservatives might say Rosie's story demonstrates yet again what happens when the government bureaucracy tries to deliver services that the private sector should provide. Liberals might argue that only the government can ensure that people like Rosie don't fall through the cracks-but that in this case, the civil servants were probably overworked, underpaid, and given too little respect by the government they tried to serve. Both groups would be partly right. Yes, the community should be more involved in providing services. And yes, you still need an activist government to pick up the inevitable slack. How can we bring the two together?

By bringing back machine politics. Now, I realize that when most people think of big-city political machines, they think of sleek fat men smoking cigars and striking deals-of governments that were even less responsive to the people, not more. But as a young lawyer and volunteer committee person in Philadelphia, I saw how a patronage system benefited ordinary citizens. Today, politicians campaign against the bureaucrats, but once elected they can do little to compel the city hall drones to work for the people who pay their salaries. Those bureaucrats, after all, are protected by civil service rules that were intended to end the abuses of the machines but instead have come to insulate public employees from both the politicians and the public.

Civil service reforms have also drastically increased the cost of political campaigns. Because politicians are less able to barter services to constituents for their votes or jobs to campaign workers for their voluntary services, they have become much more dependent on big fundraisers (in particular the political action committees) to cover the costs of their advertising and professional campaign staffs-a change that has further insulated them from the public.

By contrast, a generation or two ago, when politicians were able to hire and fire public employees more freely, those politicians were directly accountable for their subordinates' performance. That meant committee people, as party representatives elected from various neighborhoods, had to act as advocates for their communities, making sure constituents received fair treatment from government agencies and...