The volunteer state.

• Position: Presidential summit on volunteerism

The Presidential summit on volunteerism was the feel-good hit of the spring.

The media gushed all over it. Volunteerism got two thumbs up on the covers of all the major newsweek-lies. Colin Powell, the star of the show, was everywhere: dressed as Uncle Sam (he wants YOU!) on the cover of Newsweek, schmoozing with John Kennedy in George magazine, heaped with praise on the television talk shows.

Americans were encouraged to drop our disagreements, suspend our disbelief, and join the bipartisan love-fest in Philadelphia during the Presidential Summit on America's Future.

We got to watch President Clinton and former Presidents Carter, Ford, and Bush pose for photographers as they cleaned up graffiti. We got to watch Bill and Hillary make another treacly pitch for reading to tots, and then subject five Philadelphia children to their rendition of The Giving Tree. We got to hear Nancy Reagan exhort us to "Just Say Yes" to helping children.

And if all that wasn't enough, we got to hear Democrats and Republicans agree that "big government" can't help the needy. "The answers to our kids' problems -- illiteracy, fatherless families, teenage pregnancy, drugs, whatever," as George Bush so artfully put it, "lie not in Washington, but in our own neighborhoods."

Here were the most powerful government leaders of the last three decades assembled to discuss the needs of the poor in America. And here is what they came up with: There's nothing government can do. It's up to all you volunteers to fix the major problems of our nation. Rather than spend public funds to rebuild schools, reduce infant mortality, feed the hungry, or provide health insurance to some forty million uninsured Americans, President Clinton announced a new $27 million government initiative to encourage volunteering.

The President just struck a budget deal with Republicans in Congress that cuts $68 billion from existing domestic programs. On the eve of his election, Clinton signed a welfare bill that his own Administration estimates will plunge at least a million more American children into poverty.

Now he says it's up to private charities and volunteers to pick up the pieces. But the problems discussed at the Presidential Summit on America's Future are not private problems. Many of them are, in fact, uniquely government's to solve. The sorry state of our public schools and the health-care crisis are problems volunteers can't fix.

The people who do the serious work of running America's food...