Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics.

• Author: Williams, Marjorie

Pity the politician, beset by sharks and vultures, fanatical reformers and a moralistic press. For at least a decade, it's been open season on anyone foolish enough to run for office or serve in government--an age of "mindless cannibalism," in the words of former speaker of the House and onetime entree Jim Wright.

Or so say Suzanne Garment and Larry J. Sabato, (*1) lending their very different voices to the chorus of analysts who have lately specialized in second thoughts about the cloud of scandal that enshrouded the Reagan administration and then drifted down Pennsylvania Avenue to engulf the House leadership and the Keating Five. Their books both argue that the ethical, financial, political, and sexual scandals of recent years represent a kind of hysteria, and that Americans in general and journalists in particular need to reevaluate how far they are willing to go in judging the human creatures elected to govern us.

But the books offer very different explanations. Sabato's, devoted almost exclusively to press coverage of political scandal, simply argues that the press has become too prosecutorial, too herd-like, and insufficiently respectful of politicians' private lives: "The press has become obsessed with gossip rather than governance; it prefers to employ titillation rather than scrunity; as a result, its political coverage produces trivialization rather than enlightenment."

Garment makes a more sophisticated, more provocative argument that the entire political culture of America has shifted so that its components perpetually collude to produce scandals--among other things, as a distraction from having to produce intelligible policy. It's not that politicians have become more corrupt, she writes; it's that we have become a nation of goody-goodies. "Today's myriad scandals come in much larger part from the increased enthusiasm with which the political system now hunts evil in politics and the ever-growing efficiency with which our modern scandal production machine operates."

She details this apparatus at length, including the investigative and prosecutory machinery within the government: the Office of the Independent Counsel, the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, the ever-swelling oversight committee staffs on Capitol Hill, and the agencies' inspectors general. Outside, the public advocacy groups have grown adept at feeding journalists leads and information; the post-Watergate rules and regulations police everything from political contributions to revolving-door employment to financial disclosure. New mores allow reporters to cover issues and events formerly off limits--or to cover familiar areas of politicians' lives with a new kind of skepticism.

Days of the jackals

The crux of Garment's argument is that each of these new inventions or developments feeds the others to create a vicious cycle of perceived corruption, voter mistrust, and ever-closer regulation:

Out of distate with the grubby realities of democratic politics, recent reformers managed to weaken those centers of power, like political parties, where much of the fundraising and favor-giving in politics once took place. Today, such activities must be more closely attended to by individual officeholders themselves. At the same time as this change was taking place, the same anti-political distaste brought about new rules making all the wheeling and dealing much more visible than ever before. We are now given a more detailed view of our officials doing decreasingly exalted things. The distate thus increases, as does the pressure for more reform.

It is, of course, possible to point to reforms that boomeranged. The story hegemony of PACs, which was the result of post-Watergate campaign fundraising reforms, stands as the best testament to the law of unintended consequences. And yes, there have been examples of officials abused or mistreated in the course of ethics investigations. Garment is also on the mark in arguing that we are too quick to criminalize anything that smacks of political scandal. We don't always serve ourselves best by trying to nail a problem's creators: Once the logic and rules of criminal procedure are put in place, they can crowd out attempts to address what is more fundamentally a program flaw or a policy question.

But Garment goes far, far beyond where her evidence takes her into a realm where there seem to be no public misdeeds alarming enough to justify vigilance. Officials are never responsible for their acts; they are driven to them by prosecutorial do-gooders, or they are being held to preposterous new ethical standards. As an example, Garment writes that "even Clark Clifford, whose political perspicacity and survival skills were admired in Washington for some 40 years, has had the end of his career marred by a post-Watergate scandal," as if this were...