America: a repair guide; sixteen steps to national sanity that won't cost a cent.

• Author: Peters, Charles

As I read the Monthly month after month," writes B. J. Luberoff of Summit, New Jersey, "I'm beginning to get the same reaction I have to '60 Minutes': All I hear is 'Ain't it awful that. . . . 'I admire your investigative reporting, which calls my attention to all sorts of terrible things happening inside my government and other big organizations. But the more I read, the more powerless I feel. How about giving some recommendations on what we can do? Otherwise, you just end up with a lot of people with ulcers and possibly canceled subscriptions."

Well, Mr. Luberoff, upon reading your words, longtime subscribers are probably already diving for cover. Since our second issue in 1969, which featured an article on "How the Pentagon Can Save $9 Billion," the Monthly has tried to break the journalistic mold by not just carping but coming up with solutions to the problems plaguing society's most important institutions-indeed, even reformulating and repeating those solutions when they go ignored. These solutions were summarized first in "A Platform for the Seventies," then in "A Platform for the Eighties," again in "A Neoliberal's Manifesto," and most recently in our Twentieth Anniversary Issue. In fact, we've always assumed this barrage of solutions was the real source of our readers' ulcers.

It has been a couple of years since we cobbled together one of these lists, less out of deference to our readers' innards than out of a sense of government's financial limits. But, Mr. Luberoff, you got us thinking: Many of the Monthly solutions wouldn't cost a dime-in fact, many of them would make money. So here we go again, because while we share your sense of frustration about these terrible times, we're alarmed by your sense of powerlessness. As Franklin Roosevelt declared, in times of crisis, "Above all, do something." This is a time of crisis. Here are some things we can do-at absolutely no cost to Uncle Sam. How to save politics

Barely one in three eligible Americans voted in the last round of national elections. It's hard to know which is more alarming: the fact in itself, or how bored we feel on hearing it. There's nothing surprising in the litany of pollsters' reasons for the low turnout-frustration with shallow, negative campaigns; a feeling that big money controls all the outcomes; a Luberoffian sense of powerlessness, that there's no way to make those bureaucrats give a damn. What is astonishing is that we're not doing anything about it. We all know that Americans, like Czechs, Poles, and Lithuanians, can be excited about democracy; we all know that dynamic young people can be drawn to government work. We at the Monthly think we know how to get from here to there. 1. Make politicians accountable to the

voters.

These days, on average, 60 percent of a Senate candidate's campaign budget goes for broadcast advertising; overall, the cost of TV advertising in congressional campaigns climbed 169 percent between 1976 and 1990. It's become a cliche to point out that those ads are doing precious little to meaningfully differentiate candidates or to draw more Americans into the political process. This isn't just the product of a few unscrupulous political consultants; it's the inevitable result of a system that combines high ambition with high technology and low accountability. So let's change the system. Mandate that, in exchange for free air time before an election, all political ads feature the candidate-and only the candidate-addressing the viewers at home. Sure, these ads might be dull: no uplifting music or girls in Laura Ashley dresses, no wind-blown flags or glowering rapists. But just imagine George Bush trying to woo voters by declaring, "Mike Dukakis let a scruffy black guy out of prison so he could rape a nice white lady . . . and you get some idea of how much good this change would promote.

Cutting down the costs of advertising will help wean politicians from the influence of the PACs and their other big funders. A further reform-forbidding politicians running for state office to raise money out of state-would force them to quit cold turkey. During the last round of congressional campaigns, more than half the senators running for reelection received most of their funds from outside their states. Can Al Gore really be considered the representative of the average Tennessean when a whopping 96.5 percent of his ticket to Washington was covered by New Yorkers, Californians, and other nonresidents? [See "The Keating 535," Andrew Bates, April 1991.] 2. Open up government.

The reformers who broke the political machines had legitimate points: When patronage drove politics, government workers were often lazy and corrupt. Today, they tend to be lazy and unhelpful. Now that we've discovered that civil service rules can be as deadly to good government as smoke-filled rooms, it's time to put our lessons together. Turn 50 percent of civil servants into political appointees-not hacks, but talented people who can pass civil service merit tests. Of course, in getting rid of half the bureaucrats, we should be careful to hold on to the good ones-which means we must eliminate bumping," the reduction-in-force practice by which a tenured employee, when his slot is cut, can simply shove out a younger, even though better, worker and swipe his job. Once these cuts are made, we'd still have enough career, nonpolitical workers to carry the institutional memory from one administration to the next. We'd also have public servants who are not merely competent but also committed to the ideas of each new administration and directly accountable to the voters for their performance. Other important benefits of this reform are less immediately apparent. Ambitious, capable young Americans, instead of rolling their eyes at the notion of serving in the bureaucracy, would see a future in signing up with an exciting candidate and sweeping into office with him. Furthermore, cycling more citizens through government...