Why We Don’t Love Them Like We Used To : SCANDAL: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics, <i> By Suzanne Garment (Times Books: $23; 336 pp.)</i> : FEEDING FRENZY: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics, <i> By Larry Sabato (The Free Press: $22.95; 336 pp.)</i>

Politicians these days seem to occupy a position in public esteem only slightly above Middle Eastern terrorists, who at least have the defense of anonymity. One recent study of American attitudes for the Kettering Foundation concluded that most of us view politicians as remote, motivated primarily by self-interest, and inaccessible to the concerns of ordinary citizens. “People talk as though our political system had been taken over by alien beings,” the report lamented.

Both Suzanne Garment, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, and Larry Sabato, a professor of government at the University of Virginia, believe one key reason for this estrangement is that the entire political system, from Congress to the press, has become obsessed with personal scandal. This focus on ethical peccadilloes, both argue, has created what Garment calls a “culture of mistrust” that discourages talented people from entering government and inhibits those in it from winning the consent of the governed.

Of the two books, Garment’s is the more ambitious, well-written, and overwrought. Her central thesis is that the political scandals of the 1980s and 1990s are a continuation of the cultural wars of the 1960s by other means. To her eyes, the past decade’s proliferating array of accusations against high federal officials are being manufactured by “new crusaders” in the press, Congress and public interest groups who are driven “not simply by an aversion to crime but (by) the same radical opposition to conventional authority, the same denial of its legitimacy, and the same sort of drive for political power that we saw in the streets of Chicago more than two decades ago.”

Though Garment feints at bipartisanship with passing laments over the fate of former House Speaker Jim Wright, and the Democratic Senators caught in the web of savings-and-loan executive Charles H. Keating Jr., her heart is really in defending scandal-tarred Reagan Administration officials such as Edwin Meese III and Oliver L. North. She attributes the cascade of scandals swirling around Reagan appointments (near the Administration’s end, a House subcommittee counted 261 officials who had been accused of ethical missteps) to a cultural clash between a conservative President and the defiant remnant of a 1960s counterculture that had insinuated itself in Washington, “not only contemptuous of wealthy people but convinced of their immorality and even criminality.”

Well, here’s another explantion for the Reagan Administration’s ethical problems: President Reagan distractedly filled his government with people contemptuous of government, many of whom came from pampered positions in the business world where they were inured to accommodations entirely inappropriate for public life. The problem was not rigid ideology, just slack attitudes: President Bush, who set a stern ethical tone from the outset, has pursued a conservative agenda without encountering remotely the same problems.

When Garment finally stops refighting the 1960s, she makes the important point that the pursuit of scandal has become a tool in the larger Washington political wars between left and right, Congress and the executive. As she suggests, Congressional Democrats have pushed ethics reforms in part to constrain an executive branch controlled, seemingly in perpetuity, by the GOP. More recently, the right has counterattacked by using the same ethics laws to pursue liberals in Congress.

Larry Sabato, the author of a well-respected history of political consulting, covers much the same history of Washington turpitude in his book, though through a narrower lens: the role of the press. His central thesis is that the press is diminishing both the political process and its own standing through a kind of concentrated pack journalism he calls a “feeding frenzy.” Anyone who watches the evening news would recognize a media feeding frenzy from its characteristic image: a besieged Senator or bureaucrat tries to step out from his porch to pick up the morning paper and is surrounded by a pack of baying reporters yelling leading questions and trampling the gardenias.

Sabato is correct to conclude such spectacles give the press a bad name, and offer little enlightenment besides. Sabato also has some important and cautionary things to say about the danger that reporters will become so focused on personal problems that they miss larger, systemic scandals, like the collapse of the savings-and-loan industry. But his insights are obscured by his confusion about the most basic issues under consideration in the book.

For one thing, his definition of a media feeding frenzy is so elastic as to be virtually meaningless. It includes everything from campaign gaffes (President Gerald Ford’s declaration in a 1976 debate that “There is no Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe”), personal scandals (Gary Hart’s relationship with Donna Rice during the 1988 presidential campaign, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s behavior at Chappaquiddick) and public scandals (the fall of former House Speaker Jim Wright, Watergate). By casting his net so widely, Sabato has hopelessly tangled his argument: There’s not a lot that can be said about such disparate events except that they all involved a large number of reporters covering the same news simultaneously, and that’s not saying much.

More important, Sabato never entirely sorts out his thinking about the larger trend under consideration here, what he calls “the gradual erasure of the lines protecting a public person’s purely private life.” Generally, like Garment, he’s discomfited by the evolution toward greater disclosure.

But to a greater extent than Garment, Sabato acknowledges that concentrated media focus has ended “some questionable candidacies and some regrettable government practices” and “attracted the public’s attention to certain abuses as nothing else could have.” Sabato is too smart to suggest that the press devoted too much space to Watergate or the Iran-Contra scandal. And he chides the press for failing to more aggressively pursue some other personal scandals, such as the allegations surrounding Sen. Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) (Sabato worked closely with producers of a recent NBC broadcast that featured a former beauty queen who claimed she had had an affair with Robb several years ago.)

In the book’s most vivid section, Sabato also disapprovingly recounts the way a virtually all-male press corps--and a pliant editorial management--winked at behavior by both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson that fits any definition of reckless. Though all of the precise details of Kennedy’s compulsive womanizing were not available at the time, Sabato observes, “virtually every major journalist had heard and suspected plenty.” Virtually without exception, they kept their suspicions private.

But Sabato only obliquely mentions what is probably the single most important reason for the change in press attitudes since those days. A generation ago, our politics was rooted in parties, which produced and screened candidates; today our politics are atomized, with candidates offering themselves solely as individuals. In that circumstance--when virtual unknowns such as Jimmy Carter and Gary Hart suddenly emerge as front-tier contenders for the nation’s highest office--it’s not surprising that people are going to want to know something more about them than their position on FIFRA, RCRA and START.

Garment more keenly understands this basic shift, which, as she notes, has been propelled in part by financial reforms that limited the role of the national parties. To her mind, that’s evidence of the futility of regulating government morals through tighter laws.

Garment is right that perfection is no more likely to be reached in government ethics than any other human endeavor. But her answers--eliminating independent prosecutors, looking more charitably on the relations between politicians and their contributors, finding ways to make government service more attractive to individuals in private business--represent not so much an attempt to find a new balance as a yearning to leap backwards to the days when the public knew better than to question their betters in government and the board room.

Is government service difficult in this era of heightened scrutiny? The answer is, Compared to what? Working at the top level of the federal government or serving in Congress certainly affords a life more comfortable than that available to the vast majority of the governed. That doesn’t mean public officials should lose all of their privacy, or face trial in the headlines, and both authors are correct to caution the press against overzealousness.

But at all levels of government, thousands of men and women with a passion for public service still perform it, despite financial disclosure rules and an aggressive press. What Garment, in particular, forgets is that the opportunity to serve the public in government is a privilege, not an entitlement. Those accused of abusing that privilege deserve the presumption of innocence, common decency from the press, and human sympathy when appropriate. But the public governed by their decisions deserves that they be held to the highest standards.