FIRST AIDE : The Power Behind the Pols, or Getting By With a Little Help From Your Staff

Relax. That’s always good advice on a weekend, but I’m offering you a very specific kind of reassurance. See, some people are concerned about the condition of the country. Legal authorities argue that the vast majority of recent Supreme Court appointees have been mediocre (Former Sen. Roman Hruska once said mediocre people were entitled to representation on the court, but he never said they should dominate it). Nor does it take a genius to know that congressmen and senators (Bill Bradley excepted) aren’t exactly Rhodes scholars either. The suspicion that the nation is in the hands of less than the best and the brightest might give a sensitive person cause for concern. Thus, my advice: Relax.

Anyone who remembers the Kennedy years knows what can happen when the brainy bunch gets to be in charge. Great minds love a theory. Nation-building, counter-insurgency, dominoes--a lot of fascinating theories took root in Washington in those days, and the people who grew them from seedlings were no more inclined to embrace facts that contradicted their theories than were the less-credentialed ideologues of the Reagan era. Pride of authorship blinds an expert to an amazing number of body bags.

And even if the people at the top are intellectually unprepared for anything more demanding than the opening slot on “Face the Nation,” we are in good hands. While the famous fumble through their offices on their way to the day’s real business, that night’s parties, Washington’s work is getting done by the staff.

I used to work on the California legislative staff. My boss was a distinguished Member, and he did nothing more objectionable than equip the office with an extra secretary whose major assets were neither typing nor dictation. He was, as a matter of fact, a pretty conscientious legislator and, in the behind-the-scenes mud wrestling, he ran his own show. But the public person was not always his own creation. During my brief tenure, I was given a set of committee hearings to supervise. The members asked most of the questions I gave them and propped up the damning charts when they were supposed to. I watched the news coverage of these hearings each night with pleased surprise: I was getting more of my stuff on the air than most sitcom writers.

Even when Supreme Court justices haven’t known Marbury from Madison, they’ve employeed as clerks some high-caliber legal minds, people who’ve gone on to stellar careers in the nation’s most despised profession. The questions that Sen. Howard Metzenbaum struggled through during recent hearings (he didn’t have dyslexia; he had no lexia at all) were clearly written by someone on his staff. (Incidentally, how did Metzenbaum get on both the Bob Gates and the Clarence Thomas shows? Have the Democrats turned into the Washington Generals, figuring out ever more amusing ways to look like chumps?) And the conventional wisdom since John Tower had a commission is that a recent presidency ran almost entirely on staff power, with but the faintest of cheerful, clueless input from the top.

Actually, when people in any walk of life get to the top, they are largely the creations of their staffs. Bob Hope’s writers script his ad-libs for airport arrivals. Once network anchors leave the comfort of the studio for the chaos of a news event, they’re more dependent on their handlers than huskies in the Iditarod. And, if we learned anything last year, it was that pop singers not only don’t write their own songs anymore; we’re lucky if they still sing them.

So if Clarence Thomas’ knowledge of the law is on a par with Corbin Bernsen’s, no problem. If George Bush doesn’t care about the economy, he has assistants who talk to people who do. And if term limits mean an influx of new and inexperienced people into the government, we don’t need to worry; it’s just more power for the people who know what’s going on and how to continue it or stop it--the staff.

The flip side of all this might not be so reassuring. The staff is also the “permanent government” that politicians always attack. In the executive branch, staffers are the bureaucrats whose inertia and dedication to routine can stifle innovative policy and interesting new ideas. If anybody in government had such policies or ideas, staff power might be cause for real concern.

As I said before, we can relax.