You Won--Now What?: How Americans Can Make Democracy Work from City Hall to the White House - Softcover

Riback, Christopher D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684852039 ISBN 13: 9780684852034

Verlag: Scribner, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

A COMMONSENSE ROAD MAP FOR MAKING OUR GOVERNMENT WORK
As public officials fail to deliver their campaign promises -- and voter cynicism skyrockets -- a simple explanation has become widely accepted: Government is broken. If only we could fix this system, voters hope, our democracy would work the way it was designed. But is government broken, or are the people we hire each Election Day not up to the job?
You Won -- Now What? turns the tables on the government-reform debate. The answer is not to reinvent government but to reinvent government officials.
Taegan D. Goddard and Christopher Riback use real-life stories to analyze the failures and successes of politicians from every level of government. Drawing on these examples, the authors identify the eight traits of effective public officials. These commonsense solutions prove that government is personal: good people can make a difficult system work. You Won -- Now What? explains to politicians and voters alike how government works -- and how it can work better.

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Taegan D. Goddard is the author of You Won--Now What?, a Simon & Schuster book.

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As public officials fail to deliver their campaign promises -- and voter cynicism skyrockets -- a simple explanation has become widely accepted: Government is broken. If only we could fix this system, voters hope, our democracy would work the way it was designed. But is government broken, or are the people we hire each Election Day not up to the job?

You Won -- Now What? turns the tables on the government-reform debate. The answer is not to reinvent government but to reinvent government officials.

Taegan D. Goddard and Christopher Riback use real-life stories to analyze the failures and successes of politicians from every level of government. Drawing on these examples, the authors identify the eight traits of effective public officials. These commonsense solutions prove that government is personal: good people can make a difficult system work. You Won -- Now What? explains to politicians and voters alike how government works -- and how it can work better.

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Reinventing Government Again (and Again)

When I walked the state 25 years ago, an old cracker told me the walk would get me elected senator -- but he wanted me to always remember that "Government don't work." I've puzzled this over the years. Now I know he was right. Government don't work. Government can't work. People work. Government is the framework through which people work.

-- Lawton Chiles, U.S. senator and later governor of Florida

Hail to the Chief

The warm September day welcomed several dozen congressmen and nearly every cabinet secretary to the manicured White House Rose Garden. "Hail to the Chief" sounded in the background as President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore stepped briskly onto the White House lawn and stood behind a dark blue podium embossed with the presidential seal. The setting was regal -- except for two large yellow forklifts piled high with reams of government paperwork.

"Mr. President, if you want to know why government doesn't work, look behind you. The answer is at least partly on those forklifts," Gore said in introductory remarks. "Those forklifts hold copies of budget rules, procurement rules, and the personnel code. The personnel code alone weighs in at over 1,000 pounds. That code and those regulations stacked up there no longer help government work, they hurt it; they hurt it badly. And we recommend getting rid of it."

After a shaky nine months in office, a time of failed presidential nominations and unsatisfying policy victories like "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the new administration declared the federal government broken. Now they wanted to fix it, and the unveiling of the National Performance Review was their attempt. The project's nickname was "Reinventing Government," or "ReGo" for short. To emphasize its importance, Clinton tapped the vice president to lead the effort in drafting 168 pages of recommendations to make government "work better and cost less."

"For too long government has been an obstacle to change," Gore said. "But if government is powerful enough to block change, then it is powerful enough to bring change."

The Clinton agenda was on the line. Although the president had promised to "focus on the economy like a laser beam," his budget passed the Democratic-controlled Congress by only one vote and an economic stimulus package failed. As a candidate, Clinton also pledged to change the welfare system, revamp health insurance, and reduce crime by putting more police on the streets. None of these had yet occurred. In his inaugural address, the word change appeared eleven times. Yet little had changed except the faces at cabinet meetings. The "Putting People First" program he ran on was stuck in first gear.

"To accomplish any of these goals, we have to revolutionize the government itself so that the American people trust the decisions that are made and trust us to do the work that government has to do," Clinton remarked. "The entire agenda of change depends upon our ability to change the way we do our own business with the people's money. That is the only way we can restore the faith of our citizens."

Government would be remade: agencies reorganized, bureaucrats cut, and red tape slashed. More important to Clinton, the review promised to "rebuild the confidence of the American people in this great public enterprise."

It was a direct attack on cynicism. America's government, at long last, would do the people's work in an efficient and businesslike manner.

Obstructed by the glow of that sunny September afternoon but discernible to anyone willing to look closely was evidence that Clinton's plan to fix government was doomed. The president's team ignored the chief reason government doesn't work well: Many new officials taking over their government do not understand how to make it work. Indeed, it was much less painful for Gore to argue that these new officials weren't the problem.

"We have excellent, hardworking, imaginative workers trapped in bad systems," Gore told the president at the unveiling ceremony. "We need to help get them free of those systems."

One could almost hear the collective "whew!" from the dozens of administration officials in the audience relieved to know that "I'm OK; you're OK." To continuous applause, Gore threw jabs at "the government," blaming it, and not themselves, for the cynicism swelling across the nation.

"It's old-fashioned, outdated government," Gore said of the government he led. "It's government using a quill pen in the age of WordPerfect."

However, the vice president's comment itself was outdated, not an effective attack on government. For it was already the age of Microsoft Word, which had recently topped WordPerfect as the bestselling word processing software package.

Gore's remark symbolizes the problem facing any new administration, whether at the federal, state, or local level. Citizens' views change frequently, often as quickly as new software packages are introduced. At election time, and sometimes before, they demand that their public officials "upgrade" their government with new features or eliminate the "bugs" that cause the system to crash.

How Americans vote to "manage" government reflects their changing and often inconsistent views on precisely what their government should or should not do. Governing successfully starts with accomplishing what citizens ask for in elections. When new public officials fail, they typically do what Clinton and Gore did -- blame "the government" and promise to reinvent it. Once again, it's the system's fault, not the fault of people who run the system. This stokes cynicism, because the people keep changing, but the results remain the same. No one is accountable.

Another way the National Performance Review fueled cynicism was the way it portrayed citizens.

"We can treat taxpayers like customers," Gore said at its unveiling.

Citizens, however, are not customers of government. They are its owners. And as government's shareholders, they had received no dividends.

The difference is great. Customers look first at what they can reap from government. If citizens think of themselves as consumers, they will shop for candidates who give them the most services now for what they spend. In contrast, owners tend to take a longer-term view. They look to make government work better, hiring public officials who can achieve the common goals expressed during the elections. Citizens were frustrated not with the government but with the management they put in place to run it. The Gore report tried to shift the focus. Yet it was an unsustainable strategy.

The National Performance Review also missed its mark by overstating claims of making government more efficient. The General Accounting Office didn't believe the effort would save the $118 billion Gore claimed. In fact, the administration's budget director, Leon Panetta, reportedly found the announced savings so questionable that he refused to sign off on them.

For all his talk of streamlining government, the vice president's own office looked like a textbook example of government excess. Gore had five taxpayer-financed offices: one in the West Wing of the White House; one nearby in the Old Executive Office Building; one in the Capitol; one in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, and even one in his home state of Tennessee, although he served a national constituency. In contrast, the president had only one.

Peter Drucker ridiculed the Gore effort in an Atlantic Monthly article: "In any institution other than the federal government, the changes being trumpeted as reinventions would not even be announced, except perhaps on the bulletin board in the hallway. They are the kinds of things a hospital expects floor nurses to do on their own; that a bank expects branch managers to do on their own; that even a poorly run...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Scribner
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0684852039
• ISBN 13: 9780684852034
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande