It appears to be composed, in equal parts, of a wing and a prayer. One part would encourage defense companies to develop technologies that could also have commercial uses: the V-22 Osprey, if it ever stops crashing in tests, may prove an effective short-haul commercial aircraft (if a market exists for short-haul commercial aircraft, a topic of some debate among those who care). Another part was a beefed-up worker-retraining program which, skeptics say, is only marginally more effective than distributing lottery tickets to those who’ve been laid off.
Which is not to say defense conversion shouldn’t be tried. Even if all $20 billion is wasted, it’s a more hopeful, creative use of the money than tossing people out of work and spending a significant fraction thereof on unemployment insurance. And it won’t ail be wasted: no doubt, some defense contractors will come up with products even more useful than Tang (NASA’s gift to breakfast, you may recall). And, given a chance to experiment in the retraining area, Labor Secretary Robert Reich-who is refreshingly honest about current prospects-may well find some strategies that work. But this is all risky business. It will have to be watched carefully. The plug will have to be pulled quickly on ideas that don’t work; ideas that do must be left free to thrive. The trouble is, government is awful at this: plugs never get pulled. The few ideas that thrive tend to be regulated rather than replicated. Inertia rules.
Unfortunately, Bill Clinton seems blithely unconcerned about process. He rolls out concepts, rather than fully gestated programs-national service, high tech, universal vaccinations, billions tossed about for housing (even though his own department of housing admitted last week that it can’t manage the programs it has) and, coming soon, Yeltsin relief-any and all of which could be brilliant, transcendent feats of governance … or utter disasters, depending on how they’re designed. But the president is too obsessed with the big picture to sweat the small stuff. He is hooked on projects. In this respect, he’s a lot like the private sector: for the past quarter century, American business has been great at R(esearch), but too impatient to be very good at D(evelopment). It’s been left to the Japanese, and others, to take bright American ideas-like VCRs-and figure out how to manufacture them. Clinton doesn’t have that luxury. He can’t subcontract with Sony to run HUD (although it might not be a bad idea).
As it is, several recently announced Clinton initiatives are foundering, victims of politics as usual and sloppy-think. To name three: national service is being picked apart by lobbyists (especially bankers who make money on student loans). The chances for a real managed-competition health-care system were crippled last week when Hillary Clinton announced that health benefits, no matter how plush, wouldn’t be taxed-a favor to unions who’ve gone easy on salary demands in recent years to maintain solid-gold health plans. And the mass-vaccination plan may be overkill engendered by ideological myopia-parental irresponsibility has as much to do with the problem as the price of vaccine (which may be kept high by the threat of lawsuits).
A great deal is at stake here. The public is profoundly skeptical of government activism-but, in 1992, its skepticism was overcome by the fear America was unprepared for the new, cold, high-tech globalism. If Clinton doesn’t run his government with rigor and a neo-Asian emphasis on “process technologies” (that is, the way the products are made), his tentative mandate could evaporate. If it does, creative governance could be mothballed for a generation.
There are those, of course, who argue this wouldn’t be awful. But national service, if well executed, could be as important to the next generation as the GI Bill was to the last-and shake up the nation’s stagnant, cynical, unionized civil service in the process. And high-tech infrastructure ideas like “smart highways” could propel the next economic growth spurt, just as Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate highways helped sustain the last. And a carefully crafted aid program for Russia could have as much impact on future tranquillity and economic growth as did the Marshall Plan. Indeed, the president might do well to follow Bob Dole’s recent advice: chill out, take the weekend off, have a diet Coke-and then take a closer look at the programs you’ve already offered before you try anything new.
