It’s Not Enough to Throw the Bums Out : Politics: The ‘little rebellion’ against Washington must be joined by a big commitment to a change of course for the nation.

Miscreant extirpation, or throwing the bums out, seems likely to become the political equivalent of an Olympic event this year. Most signals point to the 1992 election as an occasion for the “little rebellion” that Thomas Jefferson maintained was “a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Just how good a thing that rebellion will be, however, depends less on how many bums get rushed than on the impetus that both their departure and their replacement provide for a thoroughgoing renewal of American governmental institutions and attitudes. So far, it is much easier to imagine changes in personnel than policy.

As a “Watergate baby” who rode a somewhat similar wave of protest in 1974, I welcome the prospect of a new generation of officeholders coming to the capital. But as a premature elder statesman--I decided this spring not to run for reelection--I worry that the winning candidates will campaign against the wrong mess in Washington. Eighteen years ago, Richard Nixon’s duplicity and contempt of Congress invited a fairly straightforward corrective: restoration of public integrity and reassertion of the Constitution’s checks and balances. Among the logical products of the 1974 election were reform of the seniority system in the House and of the freewheeling conduct of the FBI and the CIA.

Honesty is still the best politics, but in 1992 it is only the admission ticket to a much more demanding confrontation of ideas, issues and interests than the ones I and my congressional classmates initially encountered. This election year should begin to define the course that a great nation, its Cold War mission accomplished, will take to redeem unkept promises at home and to renew its role as a world leader. While it may be easy to run against misuse of the House bank or mistreatment of Anita Hill, victories based only on those quarrels with the past will build too weak a foundation for effective action in the future.

The women and men who take the oath of office for the first time next January had better make their majorities substantive mandates. Not only do they need to know what they are getting into; their constituents also need to understand what it will take to change direction.

Personal financial probity won’t do much to diminish the federal deficit. A firm stand against subsidized gyms for Washington officials won’t prepare a new legislator (or President) to decide the merits of proposals to control health-care costs. Concern for racial and sexual equality won’t translate automatically into sensible measures to deal with the devastating income gap between rich and poor or the destructive opportunity gap between the inner cities and the suburbs.

Posture is not policy, although posturing--”Message: I care” is a good example--has become a full-time occupation in Washington and on the campaign trail. As much as any other factor, it was my frustration with the superficiality of many Senate deliberations that made me choose retirement after one term. Education and environmental policy, both of them crucial and complicated subjects that are also special concerns of mine, are good examples of issues that deserve sustained attention and only sporadically get it.

Driven by a corrupting campaign finance system to spend inordinate amounts of time raising funds, unguided by the Administration, which is itself unable to set legislative priorities and at the mercy of a constantly shifting schedule of committee sessions, constituent meetings and floor debates, members of Congress skitter like water bugs across a murky pond. For a moment, we may manage to capture our colleagues’ attention or that of the nation for a serious discussion. But the moment passes. A new crisis arises. Coherence evaporates.

The contests that voters will decide this November could bring some order out of this muddle, but only if the candidates and their constituents and the press, as the intermediary, insist on a high standard of seriousness and a minimum of sloganeering on the hustings. To pass the political sobriety test, office-seekers need not itemize every budget category they would cut or every tax they would raise, or explain in detail how, in their first 100 days, they would reduce global warming, school dropout rates and drug abuse or revitalize our cities and try to bring the races together. But they must at the least show that they recognize the urgency of the problems and the complexity of finding real remedies for them.

An excellent starting point for all--candidates, constituents and the press--would be the federal budget and the $400-billion deficit. The enormity of the problem requires that candidates pledge to do more than end honey subsidies and refuse a pay raise, and that the press follow up with tough questions about the office-seekers’ plans for the budget. Together politicians and the press must join hands to illustrate the magnitude of the problem, the severity of the choices and the unpleasant votes that will have to be cast.

Candidates who fudge on these questions or whose only promise is that they will drive the perk-takers from the public trough will not only lower the level of civic discourse; they will also handicap themselves as future agents of change. Adlai Stevenson had a good description of such leaders and of the followers who tolerated them. “Your public servants,” he once said, “serve you right.”

The public interest requires an interested public, candidates who treat voters as responsible adults and a press, as the fourth branch of government, that gives the substance of campaigns the same scrutiny as the contestants’ private lives and finances. That should not be too much to ask of the world’s oldest democracy.