THE POST-ELECTION, BETTER-LUCK-NEXT-TIME REPORT : Where Is Mr. Smith Now That We Need Him? : Ten Americans Who Should Run for Public Office

Break out the champagne.

That’s the way many Americans feel now that they have two years to recover before the President, members of Congress and hordes of state legislators next ask for their votes. And why not? This was a year filled with dreary campaigns between candidates who seemed incapable of rising above the muck of trivial personal attacks. Just weeks before the election in Texas, after both gubernatorial contenders had spent millions selling themselves and disparaging each other, nearly half of those surveyed told Gallup that they wished they could vote for “none of the above.”

So it was in many states. Millions of Americans ignored the campaign, and those who tuned in seemed to spend much of the fall shaking their fists at TV screens. Their anger broke through the initial inertia in unpredictable geysers of discontent, propelling everything from efforts in some states to limit the terms of legislators--a populist shiver likely to reach seismic force in 1992--to the quicksilver candidacies of outsiders as diverse and unlikely as Boston University president John R. Silber in Massachusetts and Louisiana state Rep. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Klu Klux Klan.

Why are people so turned off by government? Pick a reason: Corruption, incompetence, paralysis and vituperative campaigns all have taken their toll. But conversations with voters suggest that, out of the multitude of reasons for alienation, none is more powerful than the growing conviction that government is controlled by a professional class of politicians isolated and distant from the concerns of ordinary Americans.

That characterization is unfair to many of the men and women serving in Washington, but it contains a unnerving kernel of truth. Congress is distressingly homogenous, a club with members who don’t need mirrors to see their reflection every day.

That doesn’t have to be. Before another dispiriting election commences, it may be time for everyone involved in American politics--the parties that recruit candidates, the fund-raisers who bankroll them, the voters who decide their fates--to open their imaginations and support new leaders who don’t fit the traditional definition of a politician.

Economists and sociologists often argue that America’s greatest strength is its diversity. Yet we deny that diversity in our political leadership: More than half the population are women, and yet only two women serve in the current U.S. Senate. Blacks make up more than 11% of the population, Latinos and Asians another 10%, and yet no state but Hawaii sends minorities to the Senate. For the past 40 years, about 60% of Senate members have been lawyers; that means lawyers, who comprise only 0.6% of working Americans, are represented in the Senate at 100 times their concentration in the general public.

“You’re talking about the political leadership of our national government coming from less than 1% of the population (in income) and in only two categories--lawyers and businessmen,” complains activist Ralph Nader (himself a lawyer). From the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, Burton Yale Pines, senior vice president of the conservative Washington-based Heritage Foundation, agrees: “I’ve got nothing against lawyers, but we shouldn’t be governed by a cabal of lawyers.”

We could certainly draw inspiration from the emerging Eastern European democracies: In Poland, the prime minister is a journalist, and the head of the Solidarity caucus in Parliament is a physicist. In Lithuania, the president is a musicologist and the prime minister an economist. Writers Vaclav Havel and Arpad Goncz are the presidents of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, respectively. In Bulgaria, the president is a philosopher, and not the kind who quotes the Farmer’s Almanac or Yogi Berra, either.

What follows is a first step toward envisioning a comparable renewal in American democracy: a list of 10 people who could energize our public life if elected to the Senate, our best forum short of the White House for advancing ideas and shaping the national agenda. None are politicians by profession. But each of these women and men--and others like them in the arts, science, community organizations, business and academia--has the skills to shake up Congress. Unlikely as it may be that any of them would run for public office, they all illustrate our potential for reaching outside the usual political channels for leaders that more accurately reflect the nation’s kaleidoscope of talents.

There is no intrinsic reason why, for example, lawyers should be predominant. Senators and representatives don’t literally write laws; they barely have time to read them. Certainly the Founding Fathers, who respected broad and eclectic learning, did not consciously choose to hand over their creation to a pack of pettifoggers, as attorneys were derisively known in Colonial America. “To the best of my knowledge,” says Cornell University historian Michael Kammen, an expert on the constitutional period, “no one ever mentioned the notion that one ought to have training in the law as a qualification for high public office.”

The narrowness of experience that afflicts Congress is compounded by a political careerism that makes surviving in office the highest priority. Today, American politics often seems open only to people prepared to devote their lives to the long climb from legislative staffer to the state legislature, the House or the Senate. But it is only recently that politics has become a lifetime career. During the 19th Century, the average tenure of a senator was about five years, one-third of what it is now. After World War II, when Washington quickened with the pulse of new domestic and international powers and responsibilities, “there is a rise in careerism among members,” says Senate historian Richard A. Baker.

At the constitutional convention, in fact, the delegates debated this very subject, advancing contrary proposals: from requiring House members to face election every year--as a way of preventing them from losing touch with the voters--to giving senators lifetime terms to insulate them from the electorate’s fleeting passions. Many Colonial leaders, from George Washington to George Mason, revered the concept of the citizen legislator, who gave a certain amount of his time, fulfilled his duties and returned to his farm. “The idea,” says historian Forrest McDonald, of the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa), “was that you served and then got the hell out.”

In this era of the permanent Congress, we need to find ways to revive that notion of the citizen politician. That means seeking out not our most ambitious politicians but our most accomplished citizens. As Brookings Institution scholar Stephen Hess puts it, “It would be a marvelous thing if our political parties gave an awful lot of thought to bringing along these quite interesting, quite unexpected kinds of candidates.”

Admittedly, political outsiders have not always been successful: Remember S. I. Hayakawa, the California linguist-turned-university-president-turned-flop-as-senator? But today some of our most creative leaders are those with the most unusual backgrounds: for example, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who came to Congress after stints in the executive branch and at Harvard, and Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), who did his graduate work with Oxford University and the New York Knicks.

Are they exceptions? Unlikely. Imagine the possibilities through the 20th Century. Would our national debates have been enriched with Walter Lippmann in the Senate? Or Reinhold Niebuhr? Or William O. Douglas and Lewis Mumford?

The people profiled on the following pages would challenge our political gridlock. Among them: consumer activist Ralph Nader, Wall Street Journal editor Robert L. Bartley, children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman, community organizer Ernesto Cortes, environmentalist Jessica Tuchman Mathews and iconoclastic Southern California businessman Yvon Chouinard.

These men and women share no ideological agenda; what links them are experiences and perspectives unrepresented in the halls of power. Not all of them would help Congress achieve consensus. But sometimes our problems are deepened by people too anxious to compromise. Congress has no shortage of skilled technicians who know how to count votes and cut deals; what it needs is more members committed to fundamental re-examinations of the country’s direction. We have come to see Congress as an assembly line where interchangeable workers process grievances into laws; it would be better to begin thinking of it as an orchestra that needs an array of talents to reach its common purpose.

None of this is to suggest these are the 10 Americans who are best suited to sit in the Senate, or that those who now serve there have nothing to offer. Once you quit shopping from only the front shelf, possibilities appear everywhere. Who has shown more willingness to confront the causes of declining economic competitiveness than industrialist H. Ross Perot? Or a more piercing sense of the price of social polarization than novelist Tom Wolfe? And wouldn’t all those lawyers in the Senate be kept more vigilant by the presence of enfante terrible Steven Brill, publisher of the muckraking American Lawyer?

Could people like these make a difference? Many sophisticated political observers doubt that they could have any impact without substantial institutional reform. And reforms are needed, particularly in the campaign finance laws that force legislators to spend so much time pleading for checks. But to say that we cannot change the institutions by changing the people who control them is fundamentally to admit defeat. If that’s really true, why bother holding elections at all?

Could people like these get elected? Reforms surely would help here too: Term limitations would open new seats for the people on this list to contest, and new campaign rules, such as providing all serious candidates with free television time, would improve their prospects. But even unsuccessful campaigns--if innovative and energetic enough--can shift the political agenda. (Remember Eugene McCarthy?)

Just as important may be a shift in the attitude of our leaders in the arts, academia and business. Without exception, the people on this list disavow any political ambition; several say they have never even considered the prospect. Many of them maintain it is impossible to seriously discuss issues in campaigns so reliant on 30-second ads. All believe that Congress is stalemated, frustrated and ineffectual, a swamp that any sensible person would avoid. They say that with the greater freedom of the private sector, they can accomplish more for the nation.

But their selflessness is in a way selfish, for Congress will remain stalemated, frustrated and ineffectual until more people with the skill and vision to find new approaches devote at least part of their careers to draining the swamp. In the end, we do get the government we deserve.

DEBORAH MEIER, School Principal

Today’s political leaders hold up education as the panacea of the 1990s: Reform the public schools, it is said, and the United States will regain its competitive edge, stagnant wages will rebound, and inner city crime and drug problems will solve themselves. But these policy makers rarely demonstrate a realistic grasp of the problems facing schools. Not surprising, considering that most lack hands-on experience and, as often as not, send their own children to private schools.

Deborah Meier, 60, recipient of a 1987 MacArthur “genius” grant, has a pretty good idea of what works. She taught elementary school in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York before going into Harlem in 1974, to start the alternative Central Park East Elementary School based on this principle: “People need to know each other well to have a good school--parents, teachers, kids. There needs to be a coherent viewpoint.”

Subsequently, Meier started two more elementary schools and one secondary school--where she is currently principal--all in East Harlem. All four public schools are much smaller than the average New York City school and are structured very differently--a teacher team has the kids for two hours of humanities, for example, then another teaches two hours of math and science. No bells go off hourly, and the children have the same teachers for two years. “It’s a simple structure so great complexity can take place,” Meier explains. The emphasis is on active, rather than passive, learning.

This alternative style has been so successful that there is a long list of angry white parents who cannot get their children into these 80% minority schools, located in the heart of one of New York’s toughest neighborhoods. When asked about dropout rates at her Central Park East Secondary School--which will see its first full-term class graduate next spring--Meier lists two students in the 150-member senior class and then quickly adds that she hopes one of them will rejoin before graduation day. The average dropout rate in New York City is 50%.

Meier is a firm believer that individual communities must shape their own alternatives within the public school system. But she sees a distinct role for the federal government: to ensure that schools have adequate funding for teachers, buildings and supplies; to encourage corporations to give adequate leave policies to parents whose children are sick or get into trouble, and to streamline the distribution process so that schools--not administrators--get the bulk of the federal money that does exist.

“It’s a darn sight easier to make changes (with adequate funding),” Meier says. “Resources do matter. That’s where the federal government can play a role.”

JESSICA TUCHMAN MATHEWS, Scientist

The overwhelming scale and complexity of the Earth’s environmental ills are enough to make even the most idealistic politicians and voters buckle with feelings of helplessness. Jessica Tuchman Mathews does something that other scientists sounding the global-warming alarm don’t: Through a flurry of editorial columns and speeches, she puts forward workable policies that could make the difference.

The 44-year-old biochemist/biophysicist is vice president of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental think tank. Mathews, says James Maddy, executive director of the League of Conservation Voters, a leading environmental group, considers global environmental concerns with “vision and reach and perspective--then comes quickly back to practical steps. This is somebody who can take you from soup to nuts.”

Her plans are not popular with Detroit (she supports much higher mileage standards) or voters (she calls for a phased-in gas tax to curb usage). Nor is her overall message a comforting one: “We’re nearing the end of the fossil-fuel era. . . . What the Persian Gulf crisis says to us in banner headlines is that the energy crisis we thought was over in the 1970s was not. It was only in remission.” As U.S. oil supplies dwindle, she says, dependency on foreign sources will continue to grow.

Mathews, the daughter of historian Barbara Tuchman, is politically savvy enough to know that “doing more with less does not fit our frontier mentality.” But she’s also confident that the public will respond to a simple message: The United States must take the lead in reducing the emissions that are a primary cause of global warming, or in only 75 years the world will be unlivable.

Congress debates scientific issues the way most of us discuss opera or modern art: with appreciation, not expertise. At a time when the intertwined problems of energy and the environment are growing more complex and dangerous, that’s not enough. Mathews not only can perform the calculations, she can translate them into language the public understands.

YVON CHOUINARD, Entrepreneur

Yvon Chouinard would probably rather be surfing than doing anything else. But the founder of Patagonia Inc., the spectacularly successful Ventura-based manufacturer of rugged outdoor clothing and gear, offers more than perspective on what makes for a good time. The 51-year-old Chouinard articulates--and embodies--a belief that has no voice in Washington, either among elected officials or the lobbying arms of the business community itself: that a company can be a vehicle not only for making money but also for expressing values.

That’s apparent in Patagonia’s support for environmental causes (including Proposition 130 on the ballot this year) as well as its attitude toward business (it donates 10% of its pretax profits to conservation groups and highlights environmental dangers in its slick catalogues). Chouinard has always driven Patagonia to develop new and better products (from sturdier rock-climbing tools to blizzard-proof jackets)--an American tradition that much of industry seems to have forgotten.

To Chouinard--part of a loose-knit network of new-age California business tycoons that includes Paul Hawken of Smith & Hawken and Doug Tompkins of Esprit--that failure is symptomatic of a widespread institutional myopia. In its obsession with jockeying for advantage with tax breaks and trade protection, he says, business has lost sight of how to build lasting prosperity.

“If you are going to be in business for the long term,” Chouinard says, “you have to embrace change--constantly. We need to start making decisions as if we are going to be here for 100 years.”

ROBERT L. BARTLEY, Editor

If last month’s bewildering debate over the federal budget deficit demonstrated anything, it is that conservatives are now as intellectually confused as liberals have been for the past decade. For the right, as much as the left, the preeminent task of the 1990s is to adapt its old principles to a dizzying new post-Cold War world that daily undermines the certitudes of the past 40 years.

Among conservatives, no one is better equipped to advance that transformation than Robert L. Bartley, the incisive editor of the Wall Street Journal. Starting in 1972, Bartley, 53, has converted the Journal’s editorial page into the bulletin board of the right--he provided the initial platform for supply-side economics and now is nurturing the movement to provide parents greater choice in selecting their children’s schools, whether public or private. “Bartley has presided over the arsenal of conservative intellectual thought through the 1980s and the 1990s,” says Republican political consultant John Buckley.

Bartley’s agenda--individual initiative, limited government, decentralization, less regulation and lower taxes--may be a nightmare for liberals, but his thinking represents a dissatisfaction with easy answers and a desire to snap the congressional cycle of timidity and deadlock.

Before Washington can confront the nation’s problems, he says, it must face up to its own institutional paralysis. “You don’t have anybody in Washington with sufficient powers to implement any kind of coherent policy,” he says. “The whole institutional framework pushes you into these kinds of mushy compromises.”

So does an absence of clear priorities--something Bartley would bring in abundance to an institution searching for them. “If you had a few people there who were coherent in what they believed,” he says, “they could make quite a little difference.”

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN, Children’s Advocate

It is often said that in Congress the future has no voice. Marian Wright Edelman provides just that--she is a passionate, relentless, often frustratingly uncompromising champion of a better life for the nation’s children.

Seventeen years ago, Edelman founded the Washington-based Children’s Defense Fund to lobby for legislation that helps children. People may disagree on the merits of policies supported by CDF, such as the multibillion-dollar national child-care plan Congress passed last month. But Edelman’s message is so compelling, so obvious, that she makes candidates who argue about flag-burning laws look like political dwarfs.

“There are a lot of things going wrong with America in terms of our families and our kids,” says the 51-year-old former NAACP lawyer. “The crumbling of our human and physical infrastructures is not an act of God. They are conscious choices that we can do something about. But it’s going to take time and leadership and sacrifice. We don’t want to hear it. But somebody has to say it.”

Edelman has derived widespread support despite the polarizing currents of race and class. A black child has a 4 in 9 chance of living in poverty; for a Latino child it is 3 in 8; for a white child it is 1 in 7. White support may erode when the debate turns to helping welfare mothers, but few would deny children proper nutrition and health care.

At every turn, Edelman reminds legislators that each dollar spent on children today saves taxpayers money in the long run. In office, she could use the same curriculum. “Polls show that the American public is willing to invest in children when they think it makes a difference,” Edelman says.

RALPH NADER, Consumer Advocate

Ralph Nader has been around Washington so long it seems like he’s already part of the Senate. But his actions--fighting to stop the congressional pay raise, reform campaign finance laws and tighten environmental regulations, and dueling the bureaucracy on a dozen other fronts--make him, in reality, a resolute outsider.

Moving inside, though, could offer Nader, 56, entirely new opportunities. Entering public life as a recognized leader of a loose national network of consumer, neighborhood and public interest groups, he could diminish the artificial boundary between “politics” (which leaves most people cold) and issues that are immediate to their lives--environmental protection, occupational health, affordable housing.

Nader’s persistence (he fought for air bags nearly 20 years before they became available in some American cars), his understanding of Capitol Hill and his skill at debating and framing issues would all be assets to the Senate. But far more important is his expansive vision of the purpose of politics. To most politicians, politics is defined as the things you do to pass the bills you favor and ascend to higher office. To Nader, politics is the servant to a much larger goal: creating institutions that encourage people to exercise their rights.

As an independent advocate, Nader has built many such institutions--including the Health Research Group, Congress Watch and the Center for Auto Safety--in the past 25 years. As a senator, he could demonstrate how those groups address the daily concerns of their members, using them as models for national legislative programs. He would force his colleagues to explore innovative ways to reconnect citizens to the political system.

The way to find better leaders, Nader says, is to invigorate local organizations. Congress will be improved, he argues, “only if diverse sources of candidates spring out of movements. . . . They would bring with them to Washington an ability not to be isolated, even if big money was hurled against them.”

JILL HALVERSON, Caretaker to the Homeless

There’s plenty of talk in Washington about the ills of the nation: the plight of the working poor, the disintegration of inner cities, the growing numbers of homeless. Jill Halverson is tired of hearing it.

“I’m ‘meetinged’ out,” she says wearily. That frustration is natural for a woman who, in 1978, took the $12,000 she had saved to buy a house and opened a shelter for homeless women in downtown Los Angeles simply because she saw a need.

To many members of Congress, a homeless person is a statistic at a hearing. Halverson would continually remind them that behind those numbers are people like Rose, a shopping-cart lady who once shared with Halverson her humiliation at having no place to relieve herself but a parking lot.

The 49-year-old Halverson is also the embodiment of public frustration over homelessness, a problem that should be at least as solvable as linking the nation by telecommunications. The difference is that while much of the public is losing patience with the poor, Halverson is losing patience with government inaction. “We’ve all gone to enough hearings,” she says. “It’s no longer a question of understanding the problem. There are plenty of models (that work).”

It takes someone like Halverson, whose Downtown Women’s Center shelters nearly 50 women a night, to force the nation to overcome its greatest shame: our inability (or is it unwillingness?) to care for those who fall through the holes in the safety net.

MICHAEL NOVAK, Philosopher, Social Critic

What could be worse than a capital dominated by lawyers? How about a Senate stuffed with philosophers? Just imagine trying to limit debate in a chamber full of people shouting about natural law and arguing about Rousseau. Yet all public policy is ultimately shaped by the tension between pragmatism and ideals, and with our national leadership so reliant on constrictively practical men and women, the Senate needs at least a single voice with the reasoned conviction that public acts have moral consequences.

Few would be better suited to illuminate the moral implications of public policy than Michael Novak, a 57-year-old social critic at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington. Novak first came to public attention as a left-wing Catholic scholar in the 1960s. But his intellectual restiveness and curiosity have since transformed him into a neo-conservative critic of slipping American values, trends he has explored in a torrent of books, articles and manifestoes. Unifying his work is the insight that policies that do not reinforce the social values most Americans respect--among them personal responsibility, self-reliance and family--are doomed to failure.

That is a controversial position (though now growing less so) as thinkers in both parties search for new approaches to such dilemmas as welfare dependency and teen-age pregnancy. “We have to introduce the questions of morals and values because no one is forcing young people to get pregnant,” Novak says. “So it’s a matter of persuasion--and that is a fundamentally moral enterprise.”

In his writing, Novak has dealt with such basic questions as the morality of capitalism and the conflicts between individual liberty and the public good, but he has never isolated himself from temporal political debates. To the Senate he would bring his philosophical understanding that “to be practical you have to have large ideas, because the world is a large one.”

ERNESTO CORTES JR., Community Organizer

Ernesto Cortes understands that democracy, like a sturdy home, is built brick by brick. He has devoted his career--first with the United Farm Workers and, for the past 20 years, with the Industrial Areas Foundation in Texas--to curing the political ailment of our era: the feelings of helplessness that prevent people from uniting to demand change.

A disciple of the legendary Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky, Cortes, 47, has nurtured powerful citizen action groups, including UNO (United Neighborhoods Organization) in Los Angeles. These lobbies have allowed thousands of low-income, mostly Latino, people to demand better police protection, more money for neighborhood redevelopment and a more equitable distribution of educational spending between rich and poor school districts.

“We think it’s real important that people be empowered to shape the solutions to problems,” he says. “By so doing, you tend to inculcate the idea that they not only have rights, they have responsibilities.” In a nation in which Latinos are the fastest-growing major population group, no task is more pressing than giving these new Americans a real stake in the society. That means improving education, job training and health insurance, and revivifying community, labor and religious institutions that can “teach people how to be confident, how to be effective” in moving the political system.

The Austin-based Cortes speaks for a group unrepresented in the Senate. But more important, he speaks for an ideal of participation that, in this age of debilitating alienation, desperately needs a champion.

DAVID A. HAMBURG, Scientist

In these hypermodern times, changes in technology, environment, economics and culture hurtle by so fast that Washington’s leaders often can do no more than call out after them, their voices drowned by the roar of each new upheaval.

David A. Hamburg, president of the philanthropic Carnegie Corp. of New York, would offer a more forward-thinking view. “While by and large we have terrific people (in office),” Hamburg says, “it is rare to find people who look ahead more than one year. We need not only individual efforts to keep probing, searching and pushing at the limits of what’s known, we also need to make better use of institutions,” especially, he says, Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment.

The current crisis in the Persian Gulf is, Hamburg says, a “wake-up call” that should force the increase of international efforts to control weapons proliferation, collect and disseminate intelligence on violent regimes and arbitrate regional conflicts.

The 65-year-old Hamburg has focused the attention of the $909-million-asset Carnegie Corp. on the future in other ways as well: funding innovative programs on early childhood and adolescent development, technology and the economy, and emerging problems in developing nations.

A nonpracticing psychiatrist, Hamburg also carries with him a scientific understanding of behavior and aggression. His commitment to conflict resolution was reinforced in 1975, when he spent months successfully negotiating the release of four students who had been kidnaped by Zairian rebels while studying with Jane Goodall.

As America approaches the 21st Century, Hamburg believes our leaders need to face their obligations. “The off-loading of responsibility to states, to cities, to one-thousand points of light is not the answer,” he says. “Major issues require a great deal of presidential leadership.”