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The 1988 presidential campaign shows absolutely no symptoms of turning into a discussion of national issues. But that might not be a cause for despair. Thanks to Ronald Reagan's laid-back style of management, we've enjoyed almost eight years of vigorous public discussion.
Most presidents enforce a strict discipline on their appointees. In public anyway, they're all rowing in unison toward the same goal. Anyone who rocked the boat was made to walk the plank -- recall how quickly, back in the Nixon era, that Interior Secretary Wally Hickel became an unperson after he questioned Nixon's Vietnam policy?
But Reagan seems content to let his appointees act on their own. Once he hires them, he leaves them alone.
Granted, that has its bad points. In Edwin Meese, we have an attorney general who, among his other defects, apparently cannot tell the Bill of Rights from a roll of toilet paper. Oliver North, William Poindexter and others ran covert operations across two hemispheres, violating all manner of federal laws and administration policies.
But look at the bright side. James Gaius Watt was hardly my idea of a perfect interior secretary. However, he generated a great deal of useful controversy during his early days on the job.
Federal lands and their management became a national issue, taken seriously by eastern journals of public enlightenment. Before Watt, no one on the other side of the 100th Meridian knew or cared about the Taylor Grazing Act, the Mining Law of 1872, the Colorado Doctrine of Prior Appropriation, Payment In Lieu of Taxes, multiple use, etc.
After Watt started spouting, Americans all over America began to worry about what was, after all, their land. They worried so much that the Sierra Club and the Wildlife Federation saw huge increases in membership and donations.
Watt had his flaws. But he did focus public discussion on some significant issues that had been largely ignored.
He is up in Wyoming now, but other Reagan appointees continue to define the national agenda, all on their own.
You just got an AIDS pamphlet in the mail from C. Everett Koop, the surgeon general. Koop has also been more than outspoken about the hazards of tobacco. He has brought the concerns of public health before the nation, so that we might more easily discuss those issues. The more talk about them, the more we think about them, and the more we think, the more likely we are to come up with some answers.
The most shining example here is William J. Bennett, secretary of education. The Reagan platform of 1980 promised to abolish the department; if there was ever a dead-end job for some time-serving hack, it should be secretary of education.
But Bennett hasn't hesitated to speak out. He rails at the low standards of most school districts and at the appalling ignorance of American students. He proposed a model curriculum, and risked the wrath of the National Education Association.
Because Bennett was willing to step forward, thoughtful books like Cultural Literacy and The Closing of the American Mind became best-sellers. He has made us think about what kind of schools we want, about what should be formally conveyed from one generation to the next.
Theodore Roosevelt called the presidency a bully
pulpit.
Ronald Reagan has freely shared that pulpit.
Perhaps we've received sermons from a few scoundrels who
should be unfrocked, but during the past seven years, we
have also benefited from a lively national discourse about
a wide variety of issues that might otherwise have been
ignored.
The next president, whoever he is, could do a lot worse.
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