From owner-china-nt@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Wed Sep 21 23:44:24 1994 Date: Wed, 21 Sep 1994 20:24:45 PDT Reply-To: ccf-editor@ifcss.org Sender: China-Net From: ccf-editor@ifcss.org Subject: Chinese Community Forum (#9449) Comments: To: china-nt@uga.cc.uga.edu To: Multiple recipients of list CHINA-NT ==+==+==+== C h i n e s e C o m m u n i t y F o r u m ==+==+==+=== Wednesday, September 21, 1994 (Issue No. 9449) +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= Chinese Community Forum (CCF) is an e-journal published on China-Net. CCF is dedicated to the discussion on the issues related to the Chinese community. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the Editorial Board of CCF. Contributions to the discussions and suggestions of new topics are very much appreciated. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= # of Table of Contents Author | Lines ===========***==========***==========**==========***==========***=========== 1. How Washington Really Works AN INSIDER'S VIEW (part 1/2) .................... Charles Peters 336 2. Rough start calls for adjustment ................... Kangcong Zhang 101 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- From The Editor -- We all know that in theory, the CCP officials in Beijing are supposed to "Serve the People", and we all know the reality is very often otherwise. Is there such a similar gap between theory and reality in Washington, which is operating under very different rules of games? The answer is yes, according to Charles Peters, in his article "How Washington Really Works", filled with many interesting personal stories to show the readers that what the American public see on the TV are "make-believe", or in other words, staged events, for the outsiders to watch, and that the inside show is another game, a rather cynical one. We are going to present Peters' article to you in two parts. The first part in this issue of CCF is about the News Media and the lobbyists in Washington. The second part to be posted in the next CCF issue is about the bureaucracy. As many CSSes are settling down in America, we hope our readers would agree that it is to the benefits of this community to learn more about American politics. ===========***==========***==========**==========***==========***=========== 1. How Washington Really Works AN INSIDER'S VIEW (part 1/2) .................... Charles Peters 336 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A few days after Bill Clinton's victory in November, I happened to be on a television talk show with one of the bright young members of the president-elect's transition staff. His excitement and dedication were transparent and touching. But I was troubled by his confidence, bordering on arrogance, and the sense he conveyed that he and his colleagues were too smart to be taken in by Washington. I remembered that I had the same way when I came to Washington to work under John Kennedy in 1961. One reason for this article is to warn other similarly innocent and overconfident newcomers of the things I hadn't known and later wished I had known when I started out in this city. There are some other members of the Clinton team for whom excessive innocence is clearly not the problem. But even seasoned veterans of the Washington scene usually know only the trade secrets of life in the branch in which they serve. Mutual ignorance of one another's world is often embarrassingly obvious, as when an executive branch witness testifies before Congress. So this article is intended to help the congressman understand the questions he should ask the executive branch, to give the witness an understanding of the pressures on the congressman, and to make each side aware of the games the other is playing. Lastly, this is intended to help the permanent outsider -- the Mr. Smith who never comes to Washington -- understand that most of what our government appears to do is make-believe carried on for the benefit of those in office. The present system is designed to protect those within it, not to serve those outside. I hope this article will make the Mr. Smiths want to change it. Even if Bill Clinton has the best intentions in the world, he is going to need the strong support of the people to bring about genuine change. Although this piece may sound cynical to many, I sincerely believe that the system can be changed. For anybody of my generation, it's necessary only to think back to the early months of our involvement in World War II to realize how dramatically government's performance can improve. Our triumph at Midway in 1942, one of the greatest naval victories in the history of the world, came just six months after the disaster at Pearl Harbor, a tragedy that demonstrated how abysmally inefficient and oblivious to reality government at its worst can be. Unfortunately, in recent years our system has too often functioned as it did at Pearl Harbor. I want to see more Midways in the wars against hunger, disease, ignorance, injustice and war itself, as well as in the military battles we may be unable to avoid. And I know the Midways will happen only if we learn the lessons of the Pearl Harbors. MEDIA BOTCH The first key to understanding Washington is "make-believe." Washington is like the Winter Palace under Nicholas and Alexandra[CCF Note: the last Czar and his wife], where earnest discussion about the lot of the poor went on continually but was seldom accompanied by effective action. In Washington, bureaucrats confer, the president proclaims, and Congress legislates, but the effect on reality is usually negligible if evident at all. The nation's problems don't disappear, and all the activity that is supposedly dedicated to their solution turns out to be make-believe. All too often the press, instead of exposing this make-believe, is part of the show. It dutifully covers the apparent action--the announcement of programs, the enactment of legislation--rather than finding out how the programs are executed and the legislation is implemented or what the government is not doing about crucial problems. Suppose, for example, a mine safety bill is being considered by Congress. There is little possibility that the press, even C-Span, will cover the committee hearings. What will probably happen is there will be little or no coverage until the bill's passage is near, when there might be a story briefly summarizing the positions of the bill's advocates and opponents and appraising the likelihood of passage. When the bill is passed, a reporter may appear on the evening news, standing on the steps of the Capitol and solemnly intoning, "Today, Congress passed the Mine Safety Act of 1992." But all this denotes is the appearance of action. Nothing has yet happened in the mines. And it is almost certain that no reporter will go down into the mines to find out if anything ever does. Thus, the reality of what happened, whether the bill made the mines more or less safe, will not be investigated or reported -- until there is a major mine disaster somewhere in Appalachia. Readers who doubt this scenario might consider what happened when the savings and loans were deregulated during the eighties. Can they recall any of the national press visiting individual S&Ls to find out what was going on? There is no better example of journalism as part of the show than the press conference. The appearance is adversarial -- tough reporters asking tough questions. The reality is far different. "We tried to identify people to ask softball questions," writes Ronald Reagan's press aide, Larry Speakes, in his book, Speaking Out. And Reagan, instead of giving spontaneous answers to those questions, was preped by his staff to reply in the way least likely to give political offense. Until 1992, when the recession could no longer be ignored, George Bush was very successful at keeping the topics raised at his press conferences confined to foreign policy -- a subject he felt far more comfortable with than domestic issues. According to a study conducted by The Washington Monthly's James Bennet, fully two thirds of the questions asked at presidential press conferences between January 1989 and September 1991 were about foreign affairs. Amazingly, this tally excluded conferences devoted to the Gulf war where questions about foreign policy would have been expected to dominate. During the same period, Bush answered only four questions about AIDS and only two questions about the dozens of bank failures. One reason press conferences are so tame is the "beat" system, under which reporters are assigned regularly to the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department, and other agencies. Preoccupied with keeping up with the daily flow of news provided by officials, and anxious not to offend these sources lest he be cut out of the stories given to his competitors, the average beat reporter seldom has the time or inclination to delve into what's really going on behind the scenes. Every high official has a press secretary or public information officer, who, in turn, often has his own platoon -- and sometimes army -- of assistants. All these people constantly feed reporters the news they want them to get. They issue a press release almost every day to make sure reporters are aware of whatever their bosses have said or done that can be made to look good. And they coddle reporters in a warm cocoon of perquisites. The White House even arranges for reporters' families to tag along on presidential trips -- at one third to one half the cost of ordinary fares -- to places like Santa Babara and Kennebunkport. The reporters' part of the bargain is to participate in the make-believe that real news is being made in these places rather than just routine statements between rounds of golf. During the Gulf war, reporters were housed in luxury hotels like the five-star Dharan International, where the poolside area near the TV cameras was called "Little Hollywood." (Those blue domes you saw in the background were not mosques but cabanas.) Some tried to break out of their pleasant prison but most were willing to settle into the comfortable routine of being spoon-fed at daily briefings. BEATEN REPORTERS People who have reached the top levels of government have usually attained their positions at least partly through their skill in handling journalists. They know how to make themselves look good and they also know how to divert attention from the less flattering stories. Reporters who become dependent on those officials, as most do, simply don't get the truth about what is wrong. The most spectacular example is the case of the White House press corps during the unfolding of the Watergate and Iran-contra scandals. Not one of the scores of journalists assigned to fulltime coverage of the White House played any part in breaking these stories. They had been spoon-fed for so long that they had lost the habit of independent inquiry. The men who got the Watergate story, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post, did so not by asking questions of the White House press office, but of personal secretaries and middle-level executives, like Hugh Sloan, the treasurer of the Committee to Re-elect the President. Similarly, in the case of the Challenger disaster, the people who could have blown the whistle if reporters had asked were middle-level officials, like Richard Cook at NASA and Allan McDonald of Thiokol, who saw the dangers but were ignored by both their bosses and the press. Just as guilty as beat reporters are the powerful syndicated columnists, who are particularly susceptible to being conned by their important sources. Because they have to turn out several columns a week, they have little time to piece together stories from dozens of interviews. Talking to a few top officials who supposedly know the whole story is therefore irresistibly appealing. (When Tom Braden was embarking on his career as a Washington columnist, one of the reigning journalistic eminence of the era, Stewart Alsop, advised him to be sure to talk to three important people each day.) The trap of a journalist is that he becomes obligated to protect his source. The more access he is given, the harder it is to criticize -- at least until the source's star begins to decline. As a veteran Washington journalist once put it, "We will give immunity to a very good source as long as the information he offers us is better than we have on him." Michael Deaver is a prime example of how this works. While he was in the Reagan White House and regularly leaking stories to his favorite reporters -- namely Lou Cannon of The Washington Post and Laurence Barrett of Time -- scarcely a bad word was said about him in either publication. But once he resigned and went into public relations, he became fair game and many unfavorable stories about him appeared in both. James Baker's protected status as a favorite source was illustrated by the story of the $2.9million worth of stock he held in the Chemical National Bank, which he did not disclose while, as secretary of the Treasury in Reagan's second term, he was making decisions favoring major banks like Chemical. If a Bert Lance or Ed Meese had been guilty of the same thing, editorials demanding his head would have appeared, followed by a congressional investigation and the appointment of a special prosecutor. But when word of Baker's holdings finally got out in early 1989, there was hardly a murmur from the reporters, who were so dependent on him that they could not face losing the leaks he provided. Reporters have good reason to fear the anger of good sources. When larry Speakes was upset by an item in a Washington Times gossip column alleging that Nancy Reagan wanted to get rid of him, he ostracized Jeremiah O'Leary, the paper's White House correspondent, until the editor of the Times informed him that the columnist's contract was not being renewed. By 1985, a historic development in the Washington press corps was clear enough for Charlotte Hays and Jonathan Rowe to describe in an article in [The Washington Monthly] called "Reporters: The New Washington Elite." Woodward and Bernstein had already given journalism glamour and status with the Watergate story. Then television conferred superstardom on "60 Minutes" reporters and on the panelists on various discussion shows. There was something good about the recognition accorded the hard digging that Woodward and Bernstein and the "60 Minutes" people had done. But when the panel show pontificators became celebrities, commanding huge fees on the lecture circuit, something very bad happened to journalism. As John Herbers, and editor at Governing magazine and for many years a Washington correspondent for the New York Times put it, "The prevailing orientation of Washington journalists began to change from populist, working middle class to moneyed elite." The result of this change, says Hodding Carter, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, is that: "The top journalists move in packs with the affluent and powerful in Washington. They swarm with them in the summer to every agreeable spot on the Eastern seaboard. When any three or four of them sit down together on a television talk show, it is not difficult to remember that the least well paid of these pontificators make at least six times more each year that the average American family. The truth is that there is not a hell of a lot of tolerance or empathy among the leading figures of national journalism for outsiders, losers, nonconformists, or seriously provocative political figures or causes." The thinking done by today's journalists is thus unlikely to err on the side of originality. There is, in fact, a considerable amount of intellectual insecurity in the press room. Reporters are often reluctant to examine substantive issues. If they do, they instinctively embrace the conventional wisdom. But they really prefer reporting the horse-race aspects of politics to dealing with candidates' positions. If forced to deal with issues, they will quote experts. The discipline that journalists have been most diffident about is economics. Their ignorance of economics is so great that even one of the more intelligent TV reporters, Ted Koppel, devoted only six out of 1,850 of his shows to the deficit during the eighties when it was growing by $1.6 trillion. But even when reporters understand an issue, they often look in the wrong place; that is, they look for scandalous illegality when they should be looking into why government doesn't work. What's wrong with government today seldom has much to do with lawbreaking, but lies instead in the cultures of the bureaucracy, Congress, the White House, and the judiciary -- that is, in the customs and rituals and pressures that govern conduct in these institutions. The average reporters is remarkable ignorant of these cultures. ACCESS TO GRIND One culture that the press has paid more attention to in recent years, but which still remains woefully under-covered, is that of lobbyists. The popular conception of a lobbyist is someone who passes money under the table, arranges for the clandestine midnight assignments, or holds the threat of blackmail not very high over an official's head. In fact, much of the activity that falls within the broad definition of lobbying is not evil or even underhanded. For example, the simplest and most obvious of lobbying techniques is personal friendship. Consider Philip Morris, which shrewdly hires lobbyists from the hometowns of congressmen. The Philip Morris lobbyist in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, happens to be a longtime friend of South Dakota Senator Thomas Daschle, who, as a member of the Senate Finance Committee, could vote against taxes on tobacco. Lobbying friendships can also stem from mutual membership in Washington clubs like Burning Tree (golf) or the Metropolitan (lunch). Burning Tree forbids lobbying on its premises, but the friendships formed there have been central to many a lobbyist's success. Charls (yes, that is how he spells it) Walker, one of the most successful corporate lobbyists of the seventies and eighties, plays a lot of golf at Burning Tree. If you are a former congressman, belonging to the club of present and former Members gives you an actual physical advantage in the access race: The floor of the House and Senate and legislators' private dining rooms are open to former Members and no other lobbyists. Why is access so vital? Mostly because it ensures survival. And that is what almost everyone in government is primarily concerned with, whether he works on Capitol Hill or in the bureaucracy. He wants to remain here or in what the city symbolizes -- some form of public power. So, from the day he arrives in Washington he is busy building networks of people who will ensure his survival in power. The smart lobbyist knows he must build networks not only for himself but for those officials he tries to influence. Every time the lobbyist meets an official whose help he needs, he tries to let him know -- in the most subtle ways possible -- that he can be an important part of that official's survival network. Most of the best lobbyists are former high government officials -- ex-congressmen, ex-White House staff members, ex-Cabinet officers, and ex-assistant secretaries. They usually entered public service with no thought of later turning it to their own advantage, and most at first probably planned to return home after their government service ended. But when actually faced with the prospect of going back, they discover that they now think of Washington as home. Their friends are here; their children are in local schools; they own houses in the area. Above all, they are hooked on the sense of excitement, of being at the center of events. They want to stay in that world, but have only one really marketable skill that can allow them to remain -- their knowledge of government. So they become lobbyists. Their friends who are still in government realize that the same thing may eventually happen to them, and they take care to be considerate when the lobbyists come calling. Although it is a by-product of the survival instinct, this empathy is genuine. It tightens and reinforces the bonds of everyone's network so that, as Nicholas Lemann observed in [The Washington Monthly], "although Washington is supposed to be a city where power is carefully balanced between groups with contradictory interests, in fact it's a place with a strong sense of shared enterprise, a place where every person you deal with is someone who is either helping you survive now or might conceivably later on." Access and friendship are also effective because government officials are basically decent people who want to be nice and to be liked. Faced with a living, breathing fellow human being who wants something very much, and with perhaps only an abstract argument on the other side, the natural is to be obliging. Of course, the occasional favor doesn't hurt, either, While most are innocent enough -- say, taking someone to lunch -- others are more insidious. Common examples of not-so-innocent favors include free trips to hunting lodges and conventions in places like Honolulu. During the eighties, for example, Senator Robert Dole paid the equivalent of only one first-class airfare each time he used chartered corporate jets belonging to General Mills, Warner-Lambert, and Metropolitan Life. There may have been no quid pro quo but Dole did appear to repay U.S. Tobacco Corporation for the use of its Gulfstream jet by supporting the tobacco subsidy program and opposing higher taxes on tobacco products. There is another way of obtaining gratitude. Tommy Boggs, a Washington lawyer -- who has lobbied on behalf of such clients as Chrysler, General Motors, and BCCI and who until recently, employed the new Commerce secretary, Ron Brown -- did some free lobbying for the Carter administration on the Panama Canal treaty and SALT II. Such activity, needless to say, created a receptive climate for Boggs when his paying clients needed help at the White House. "I work with him all the time," said Anne Wexler when she was an assistant to President Carter. "If he comes in on behalf of a client, it's my responsibility to put him [in touch] with someone he needs." (Wexler herself later became a lobbyist.) (from The Washington Monthly, Jan./Feb. 1993, page 43-51, forwarded by zfliu@leea.cchem.berkeley.edu. Part 2/2 will be posted in the next issue of CCF.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Rough start calls for adjustment ................... Kangcong Zhang 105 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- As the 6th-term Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars administration inches close the 45-day mark after taking office, every sign coming out of IFCSS's headquarters indicates that it has been off a rough start. If things don't start looking up soon, we can expect the new leadership to admit in public that it had not anticipated running the institution to be nearly as unpalatable as it is. But then, after the tumultuous and strife-stricken 5th-term, anybody who entertained the thought that running IFCSS would be easy was a wishful-thinker. And when all of the fellows seeking IFCSS's leadership positions were either holders of advanced degrees, or in earnest pursuit of them, one has to concede: Their chance of being wishful-thinkers is no greater than the probability of their flunking an introductory course in their major research fileds. Thus, this puzzling question: exactly what went wrong? Well, that question, many may say, is probably better left unasked, at least for the time being. And they have a good reason for holding back: This is not a time for finger-pointing, after all. To every single soul who had pitched in to ensure IFCSS's survival through an eventful year that culminated in IFCSS's narrow-escape from going under at the 6th IFCSS Congress, we owe a good will to make the 6th-term IFCSS work better. Yet problems are problems, whatever one chooses to call them. And problems call for real, genuine efforts to address them before they snowball into disasters and catastrophes. Under the circumstances, it is imperative that all of us who care about the institution come together and cooperate in the interest of the institution. But let nobody be mistaken: The leading role in tackling the problems is the administration's. Before another 45 days passes it by, the administration needs to solve three major problems. In order of decreasing urgency, they are: 1) fill administrative vacancies; 2) build a working relationship with the "opposition"; and 3) reevaluate the programs the new leadership promised on its campaign trail. During the past one and a half months, that the new administration did not have a functioning team in place hurt it badly. When constituents called the IFCSS's headquareters during office hours only to find out that nobody was there to answer the phone, the "empty-office" show did not reflect well on the new leadership's campaign promise to engage wider grassroots participation. And when Council members tried to call IFCSS presidents to discuss official business only to speak to someone temporarily hired to man the office who could not even tell where the presidents were, the hard-working Council members had a legitimate complaint. As it turned out, the presidents were not vacationing on some exotic tropical island; they were touring local schools to solicit support. That, of course, is well within the presidents' justified official business under the normal circumstances. What made it problematic was its timing. They did it at a time when their precious hours would have been much better spent on filling administrative vacancies and preparing budgetary paper work. Should they have set their priorities straight from the beginning, they would have had a complete functioning team in place and an approved budget bankrolling its programs by the time the first Council teleconference adjourned. And that the situation did not get worse should be partially credited to those who could have easily played the role of an opposition camp yet refrained from doing it. So far, most of those who had exchanged more than a few rounds of barbed remarks with the current IFCSS leadership during the election campaign have held on their fire in honor of a grace period after a new administration takes office. Now that the grace period is up, every move the administration makes, or lack thereof, will be subjected to close scrutiny. To the extent that such scrutiny is inevitable, the IFCSS leadership may as well make conscientious efforts to turn the table around by rendering opposition scrutiny into healthy cooperation. Given that both the incumbents and the opposition pledge to uphold IFCSS's principles, that kind of cooperation is not only possible but highly probable. What it takes is some genuine gesture from the administration of inviting the "opposition" to work with it. If and when it does that, the new administration is well on its wayto running the institution maturely and professionally. The third and last major problem the new administration faces is not as urgent as the first and second ones, but that does not mean it will be long before it poses serious threat to whatever chance of success the new IFCSS leadership has. During the election campaign, the new leadership promised programs that were plainly beyond the institution's abilities to accommodate. Some of them might have already been jettisoned because of their downright infeasibility (such as setting up a toll-free number to collect "public opinion"), while others are, for priority reasons, becoming less and less likely with each passing day to get implemented (for instance, promises to work on issues concerning the so-called "newcomers"). At this point, what the new administration needs to do is reevaluate the promised programs, make it unmistakably clear which programs it is going to follow through and which ones it simply has to abandon for reasons of resource constraints. In doing that, it not only brings down the constituency's expectations to the realistic level, it will eventually help the administration account for its performance. But most importantly, such reevaluation is necessary so that the 6th-term can stay focused on the doable programs and actually achieve something. All said, although a rough start does not bode well for the new administration, it does not have to spell its doom. In fact, if the Council's work in the first 45 days is any indication of the 6th-term Council, the new administration may rest assured that it has gotten some much-needed cooperation there. With proper operational adjustments, a successful 6th-term IFCSS administration is still within reach. (from KCZHANG@macc.wisc.edu) +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=++ + Executive Editor: Dave Sheng + + Executive Moderator: Huang Tang + +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + For subscription: mail "SUB CHINA-NT Your-First-Name Your-Last-Name" + + to LISTSERV@UGA (bitnet) or listserv@uga.cc.uga.edu (internet) + + For unsubscription: mail "UNSUB CHINA-NT" to the above e-address + + For back issues of CCF: + + anonymous ftp to: cnd.org[132.249.229.100]: pub/community/CCF + + gopher to cnd.org: 2. English Menu --> 14. Community --> 1. ccf + + For contribution and inquiry: mail to ccf-editor@ifcss.org + +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=++