The Power Game: How Washington Works. - book reviews

National Review, June 10, 1988 by Joseph Sobran

The Power Game: How Washington Works, by Hedrick Smith (Random House, 793 pp., $22.50)

When a journalist writes an eight-hundred-page book that isn't straight narrative, you expect muddle. Hedrick Smith's The Power Game: How Washington Works provides it. It's well organized but ill conceived, covering very little of Washington's real terrain (only sparse mention of the Supreme Court, for example). It focusses mostly on Congress and the Presidency.

About these Smith knows a lot. Until the other day he was the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, and he has enough connections--access, as they say--to garner plenty of gossip. Maybe inevitably, most of his sources seem to be Democrats and disaffected former Reaganites. But on his limited turf, he's a sharp observer.

Smith understands how the informal rules of the game have changed lately; how Congress's power has grown; how staff power has grown too; how the old congressional barons' power has declined; how the media figure into it; the uses and pitfalls of secrecy, leaking, and stage management; the tactics of limiting or enlarging access and publicity; 88the role of money and PACs; the ways incumbents maximize their incumbency; the ways of building coalitions; the value of being prickly once you've amassed power.

Along the way, he says a good deal about how the Reagan Administration, though skillful at selling its message in its first years, has failed to grasp and use the new modes of power. It's interesting, but I think it fails to pinpoint the real problem, because Smith doesn't understand the real problem to be a problem.

Here is Smith at his sharpest:

In short, the most vital ingredients of power are often the intangibles. Information and knowledge are power. Visibility is power. A sense of timing is power. Trust and integrity are power. Personal energy is power; so is self-confidence. Showmanship is power. Likability is power. Access to the inner sanctum is power. Obstruction and delay are power. Winning is power. Sometimes, the illusion of power is power.

Very good, though it verges on equating any helpful trait with power. Smith also notes that "network news coverage actually reinforces the established leadership," though "Washington is surprisingly open to newcomers." Becoming a newcomer is something else again: "Since the mid 1960s, 91 per cent of the House incumbents who sought re-election were successful.... The built-in resources of congressional office are so great that they scare off potential challengers." "On Wall Street," Smith notes, "passing insider information to others is an indictable offense. In Washingon, it is the regular stuff of the power game."

Power in Washington is far more dispersed than it used to be, and Smith sees this simply as an unfortunate condition. That's where things get rocky for his book. At times you're not sure whether he's complaining that there are too many powerful people in town, or what. He doesn't seem at all disturbed by the power of the Federal Government itself. Just the opposite, it turns out: government isn't "working," it seems, unless it's churning out laws with maximum efficiency, as the mint stamps out pennies.

He complains that partisan divisions produce "stalemate." We are "doomed" to "inconclusive quarrels; no struggle, however great, settles policy permanently. Year in, year out, we are burdened with endless ventilation of the same spent themes," among which he mentions abortion, military intervention abroad, and the role and size of government. He approvingly quotes Howard Baker: "Issues are like snakes--they just refuse to die! They keep coming back time after time."

So they do; and Smith's solution for this supposed problem is to return to the good old days, when a few insiders ran things according to their own consensus. He wants to "bring back the pros," give the parties a bigger say in the selection of candidates, and require voters to choose between "team tickets," with President, Vice President, senator, and House member on a singel slate.

It doesn't even occur to him that voters may prefer and deserve the option of splitting the ticket and dividing power, or that it may be unhealthy, when the electorate is divided over basic principles, to lock government into a single policy. Issues recur because differences persist. Ours isn't a winner-take-all system, and it wasn't meant to be. Smith gives a cursory nod to James Madison, then sets out to offer ways of circumventing his plan.

The people whose power Smith wants to curb are Washington's minor potentates and the voters themselves. Washington itself would "work" better if power were more concentrated. Any impediment to such a concentration is simply inefficiency, obstruction--bad.

No doubt this is how it seems to those who are most at home inside the Beltway and who find their plans constantly frustrated by meddling outside forces, such as the American people. To Smith it's the plainest common sense. He doesn't argue, he just assumes, because the alternative, for him, doesn't exist. Should the role and size of government be limited? That's just one of those "same spent themes" that annoyingly refuse to expire.