Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/060892/0608510.000

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                _t                                                        ╚INTERVIEW, Page 64

Mr. Smith Leaves Washington


Three members of Congress who decided not to seek re-election
explain why they grew disillusioned -- and how to change a
stalemated system

BY STANLEY W. CLOUD and NANCY TRAVER/WASHINGTON and Tim Wirth,
Kent Conrad and Vin Weber


    So far this year, 56 members of Congress have announced
that they will not seek re-election in November, the largest
voluntary departure since World War II. Among those who have
decided not to return are Democratic Senators Tim Wirth of
Colorado and Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Republican
Congressman Vin Weber of Minnesota. At a round-table session,
Wirth, Conrad and Weber discussed their reasons for leaving and
how their attitudes toward government and public service were
changed by their experiences in Washington. Excerpts:


    Q. How can Congress be strengthened so it functions in
ways that make sense to people like you and the people who will
succeed you?

    WIRTH: Let me start with campaign-finance reform. Congress
is awash in money. Interests have emerged that have enormous
amounts of cash and that stand between the Congress and its
constituency. In my 18 years in the Congress, I have seen the
denominator of debate get lower and lower, and I think much of
that is explained by fear -- fear that you will be unable to
raise money from a certain group; or worse, that the interest
group will give the money to the other guy; or worse still, that
the money will go to a third party as a so-called independent
expenditure. We need reform that would do three things: provide
shared public-private funding, similar to the current system for
presidential campaigns; second, limit how much a candidate can
spend; and third, ensure nonincumbents of enough money to be
competitive -- which would, by the way, ensure better members
of Congress.

    WEBER: I question the impact of special-interest money on
policy. The contribution limit for a special-interest group
[$5,000] has not changed in the 12 years that I've been here.
That means the value of each contribution has eroded
considerably. So how can we argue it's an increasing problem?

    WIRTH: I just came from a discussion on product-liability
reform. The room was filled with trial lawyers -- and with fear
of them. The problem isn't just that trial lawyers donate
campaign money, but they can give a maximum of $5,000 in the
primary and $5,000 in the general, and they're a phalanx that
can have an effect on every candidate who's out there. And it
isn't just money. It's also all the emoluments and
blandishments.

    WEBER: But I think the impact of special-interest groups
is greater when they're organizing voters in your district.
Take, for example, [groups like] the American Association of
Retired Persons or the National Federation of Independent
Businesses. Their ability to organize makes them more of a power
than the amount of a check they might write. Yet I'm sure none
of us want to curtail the ability of people to organize and
express themselves.

    CONRAD: Perhaps it's because I come from a state in which
we have relatively modest demands for [political] money, but I
don't feel this pressure from groups. As far as I'm concerned,
the real problem here is time or the lack of it. As I left for
home the other evening at 7 o'clock, which is usually the case, I
looked back on the day and decided it was typical: meetings with
constituents from home, fund raising, committee meetings. I'm
on four committees. Three of the committees met at the same time
that particular day. I never did get to the Senate floor because
of meetings with constituents literally every 15 minutes. I came
to Washington because I was deeply concerned about the budget
deficit. I thought it was wrecking the country. I still do. I'm
also very concerned about education and health care. But none
of those things got a moment of thought or attention that day.
People ask me why the Senate seems to always come out at night
to vote . . .

    WIRTH: Like bats.

    CONRAD: Yes, and the answer is because nobody's got time
during the day. You have endless meetings and endless demands:
speeches, appearances, getting your picture taken with the kids
from back home.

    WEBER: Ironically, technology puts us closer to our
constituents than earlier Congresses were. It used to be that
not many groups could just pick up and come to Washington. Now
every organized group comes at least once a year. There was a
time when members of Congress couldn't get back to their
districts every weekend, and that was probably a good thing. Now
you're expected to be back very often. Technology and
transportation have made it possible for us to be much closer
to our constituents, and I'm not sure it's doing us any good.


    Q. To what extent is the problem a lack of leadership in
Congress?

    WIRTH: In the 1986 election, 80% of my time was spent
raising money -- not talking to constituents, not thinking, not
going to seminars. All of us are entrepreneurs. The leadership
has no handle on us. They can't really do anything for us or to
us. So the place gets more and more horizontally structured, and
every time we have a vote, [Senate majority leader] George
Mitchell's got to get out on his horse and try to round up 57
heifers, who are in pastures all over the place. The leadership
has no power anymore.

    WEBER: I think the erosion of the political parties is to
blame for much of what's wrong. Certainly, parties were once
corrupt and needed reform. But now they are unable to play the
role they should play -- as filters between special-interest
groups and individual officeholders. I think you need to try to
strengthen the parties.

    CONRAD: There are four things that create weakened
leadership. I'd start with finances. We are separate operators.
We raise our own money. So that creates a dynamic. Second, the
advent of the 30-second ad, which I think has a very real impact
on how things work up here. We're having many more votes -- at
least that's true in the Senate -- partly because people want to
get out there on some narrow issue and turn it into a 30-second
ad. We've spent hours and hours on legislation, amendments, that
are really designed to create 30-second ads. Third is the
Balkanization of Congress. When you've got to refer a bill to
nine separate committees on the House side -- the energy bill is
going to seven or nine committees -- I mean, how do you ever get
through the process? And finally, we are suffering from a lack
of presidential leadership as well. The Congress is not the
Executive. In our system there is only one person able to get
TV network attention, go to the country, describe the condition
of our nation, have a plan of action, persuade people of the
need for change. That's the President.


    Q. Would it help if we didn't have divided government, if
the presidency and Congress were controlled by the same party?

    CONRAD: Maybe, but I think it depends on the kind of
President you have. Today I think we have a leadership failure
of substantial proportions.

    WEBER: As a Republican, I obviously disagree. Divided
government is one of the central problems of our time. I know
exactly what goes into the Bush Administration's thinking
processes when they decide not to take a strong leadership role
on something -- economic growth, say, or welfare. They look at
the numbers in Congress and correctly decide that they are
unlikely to get a legislative product they can live with. I
would like to see them get into the fight anyway. I think it
would probably be helpful, both to the country and to my party.
But I can't disagree with their decision. The impact of 12 years
of both parties blaming each other and of both ends of
Pennsylvania Avenue blaming each other is debilitating to the
country and to the process, to the institution of the
presidency, to the institution of the Congress. Yet I don't
think the public is ready to give the entire government to one
party. They like divided government. They don't trust either
political party. I am frightened by the prospect of four more
years of gridlock if we have four more years of a Republican
President and a Democratic Congress.

    WIRTH: Our system was set up as a reflection of the
Founders' deep suspicion of central government. But there have
been leaders in modern times and in the past who have been able
to mobilize this awkward and very difficult system. Much as I
disagreed with Ronald Reagan, he was, in the first three or four
years of his term, able to move things. He believed in something
and he got it done. A President can set an agenda, can be a
rudder. Without such a rudder, each of us in Congress maneuvers
for narrow personal or partisan advantage. There's no common
cause.

    WEBER: Let me make clear that even though I think divided
government is a very serious problem, we desperately need an
agenda-setting campaign. The Bush people ought to resist the
temptation to have just a symbolic or gimmicky campaign --
Willie Horton or something like that.

    CONRAD: I think the media also bear substantial
responsibility for the frustrations people feel about
government. Reporters are chasing every rabbit of scandal, and
it's not healthy. Journalists have gone from a healthy
skepticism to a destructive cynicism. The House bank story has
got far more attention that it deserved. Meantime, virtually no
attention is being paid to the $400 billion worth of hot checks
being written by the Federal Government. I think the media fail
to deal with substance in favor of any minor scandal that comes
along.


    Q. Why is that?

    WIRTH: You tell us.

    WEBER: We are in a decaying spiral of public confidence.
The public does not trust the institutions; they don't trust
the political parties. It used to be, "I hate the Congress, but I
love my Congressman." Now they've decided they hate their
Congressman, too. Having fully discredited the parties and the
institution, now we're discrediting the individuals. I'm not by
nature a pessimist. I like to think that our system works and
is going to right itself. But I see it decaying. I don't know
what comes next after we have this tremendous cleaning-out
election, mainly driven by discrediting people as individuals,
and then the Congress gets together next year and people find we
still are not going to reduce the deficit, we still are not
going to reform health care.

    WIRTH: When Kent decided not to run again, he said to me,
"I just didn't enjoy the idea of coming to work every morning."
Later I repeated that to my wife, and she said, "You've been
saying the same thing for months." There is a common pact we all
make -- that there is a role for government and that each of us
can make a difference. Now that's missing. What's happened? It
seems to me that many journalists feel they are somehow a
culture unto themselves. It's as if they can't have any
patriotism, they can't have any friends in Congress, they can't
be committed to an idea or make a judgment that one idea is
better than another idea. They're detached, very little involved
in the process. There's enormous economic pressure put on
reporters to do the short, USA Today-style piece, and that does
not serve the hard work of government that we're all talking
about.

    WEBER: If we vote to raise congressional pay, the press
galleries are filled. Have a serious debate about the deficit
or defense, and we're lucky if two or three reporters cover it.

    WIRTH: The massive scramble to get the list of who bounced
checks, that corridor full of reporters. It was ya-hoo! It was
like we were feeding all these people into a chute, and at the
end of the chute was the list, and everybody was dashing to get
it. Reporters were lusting after it. They know more about how
the House bank works than how campaign-finance reform works.

    CONRAD: I've been in public life for 18 years, and the
change in the attitudes of people in the news business is
dramatic. In the past three years, maybe a little bit longer
than that, there has developed an attitude that everybody in
public life is not honorable, that they are all corrupt, and
it's just a matter of confirming it.


    Q. Each of you has mentioned the problem of the federal
deficit. How many of you have gone back to your constituents and
said, The only way to cut the deficit is to cut either
entitlements or defense?

    [All three raise their hands.]

    CONRAD: I have made a hundred presentations in my state.
I show charts that illustrate the dimensions of the problem. It
actually rivets people. But it's not the only way. It isn't just
entitlements or defense or revenue or domestic programs. This
thing is so big, everything has got to be on the plate, and when
you explain that, it leads people to interesting conclusions.

    WEBER: I had a reporter ask me the other day if I wasn't
optimistic on the budget problem, because more and more
candidates are talking about restraining entitlement growth. And
I said, "Maybe in a very small way, but, unfortunately, that's
what the candidates say -- `entitlement growth.' " When they
speak at the Chamber of Commerce and the Kiwanis, very few of
them translate those abstract words into "freezing Social
Security" or "restricting Medicare eligibility." In Congress we
don't get to vote on the abstraction. We have to vote for or
against actual programs.

    I still don't think there is agreement on the economic
impact of the deficit. But we have come to the point where we
can see that the one debilitating effect is that it has
absolutely hamstrung our government.

    WIRTH: There are some very interesting debates that should
be conducted on this subject. One is, What do you use tax
policy for -- growth or fairness? It's an enormously important
question, but we never get to it. Another thing we should be
debating is, What are we going to tax? We now tax investment and
production. We tax labor, we tax capital. But the world out
there is changing, and we probably should be looking at a
value-added tax or a consumption tax. We ought to be looking at
taxing environmental evils -- a carbon tax or something like
that. But because we say, "Read my lips, no new taxes," you
don't get into any of this, either. And such things are the
stuff of government. We decide what's important to us by putting
programs in the budget and raising taxes -- these steps reflect
our values. But we never talk about these things.

    WEBER: Part of the reason these issues are so
hypersensitive is the underlying assumption that nothing will
happen. You can give a speech about freezing Social Security
benefits, and be convinced it's a good thing, and be fully aware
that it's going to cost you a lot politically. But then you
realize, Gee, we've got a Republican President and a Democratic
Congress; it's not going to happen anyway. So should I go out
and put myself at political risk to do something good for the
country even when it's not even going to happen? It's the same
for Democrats on raising taxes. Why campaign for an increase
when the President will veto it?


    Q. Would we be better off with a parliamentary system?

    WEBER: I think some things need to be changed, but we
can't and probably shouldn't go to a full-fledged parliamentary
system. We set up this system of checks and balances and
separation of powers partially to protect against the growth of
government. But we now have a big government. So that argument
is settled. The question is, Can we change our very large
government that affects people in so many ways? We're preventing
government from getting more responsive because we can't change
the institutions that we built up over 200 years.

    CONRAD: Talking about a parliamentary solution is falling
into a distinctly American trap -- that there is a magic
formula and if we just find it we can solve this problem. Canada
has a parliamentary system, and Canada has a much higher
debt-to-GNP than we do. We need leadership with vision. That
could create a bipartisan response.


    Q. If leadership is the problem, why don't the three of
you stay and provide it?

    CONRAD: In my case, I made a foolish promise [that he
would not seek a second term if the deficit wasn't reduced].
And in our part of the country, people keep their word.


    Q. Let's talk a bit more about the role of money and how
it provides an advantage to incumbents.

    CONRAD: I don't know that it does. I ran against an
incumbent who had three times as much money as I did, and I
defeated him. Incumbents have a record, and challengers often
have a significant advantage in being able to go after that
record.

    WEBER: The best reform you can have is to say nobody can
contribute to a candidate except an individual or a political
party.

    CONRAD: I think if you limit [campaign contributions] to
just individuals and political parties, you have played into
the hands of the wealthy. Frankly, I'd rather get money from
PACS than wealthy individuals. With PACS you know the agenda.
It's the homebuilders, it's the wheat growers, it's the
sugar-beet people. With individual donors, in many cases you
have no idea what the agenda is.

    WEBER: I can't imagine that an individual thinks, when he
gives $1,000 to my half-million-dollar campaign, that he's going
to buy any influence.

    CONRAD: Here's an example. In my last campaign, I ran
against the incumbent, who had three times as much money as I
had. I got $5,000 from the PAC of a specific group and got more
than $20,000 in individual contributions from people who were
family members and board members of that company. Now, to
suggest that PACS are the problem stands everything on its head.
The problem is the amount of money in campaigns.

    WIRTH: The reason why these people get entrenched in the
House is that the disparities of money are so huge. You have
people in the House going into elections with $750,000 in the
bank. And where is a nonincumbent going to raise any money,
except through public financing?


    Q. Do you see yourselves ever running for elective office
again?

    WEBER: Maybe. I turn 40 this summer. It's foolish to rule
it out. I don't have any plan to run, but if I do, the only
office that really intrigues me is Governor.


    Q. You've had it with the legislative process. You want to
be an executive?

    WEBER: The legislative process is important. But it would
be pretty hard to talk me into running for a Legislative Branch
office again. I've become a born-again believer in term
limitations, for the opposite reasons from [those of] most of
the voters. I think term limitations are probably not good for
the country, not good for the institution, but they are good for
the individual members.

    WIRTH: You never say never, but I can't imagine myself
going through this process again. You get here with a certain
enthusiasm, and then you don't want to do it anymore. But I
could see being in some part of the Executive Branch at some
point.

    CONRAD: I just got off the phone with Ross Perot before
coming here, and there will be an announcement on Friday.
[Laughter.] No, I've told people back home I don't rule
anything in or anything out. I'm 44 years old, so I'm too young
to make Shermanesque statements.

    WIRTH: I made a list, after I made my announcement, of the
things I most dislike about the Senate, so that if I ever had
doubts, I would have the list to go back to. Now I don't know
where the list is. There are things I'll miss. I think most of
the people here, on both sides, are honorable, hardworking,
decent. I'll miss them, and I'll miss those times when we were
able to make a difference.