Reinvention: Contradiction or Purge? : The reforms proposed would get rid of all fair-minded bureaucrats and replace them with ideological Clintonistas.

Have you ever noticed how a child walking along after a rain can manage to get at least one foot in every puddle? President Clinton has the same knack for contradictions. None escape him.

With his latest public-relations campaign, “reinventing government,” complete with regulation-laden forklifts on the White House lawn, he has managed to splash contradiction all over himself. Government, Clinton says, is such a mess that his vice president has been able to produce in just a few months 800 reforms that would save $108 billion and get rid of a quarter of a million top-level federal employees.

This is the same government that Clinton wants to put in charge of health care. One would think that with such a “broken government” Clinton would want to make certain it was fixed before he gave it control over our health.

Clinton’s description of the federal government as a gridlocked bureaucratic labyrinth is not a good sales pitch for his plan to federalize health care. Neither are other nationalized health systems. Dr. Max Gammon, an expert on Britain’s National Health Service, recently listed the NHS’s main achievements: totally bureaucratized nursing and health-care delivery, closure of half of the country’s hospitals, a 50% reduction in the number of hospital beds per 1,000 people and a waiting list of more than 1 million people, some of whom literally die from waiting.

We should take our cue from the cuts Clinton plans in Medicare and Medicaid: Once health is on the budget, it has to compete for funds with all the other programs. Governments always find new “pressing needs” to address. Health becomes old hat, just another budget item to be squeezed to come up with money for new needs.

Not all of Clinton’s contradictions are as worrisome as the one that puts broken government in charge of our health care. Some are positively delicious. This past Feb. 15, Clinton told us that 12 years of Reaganism was all a big mistake, because “it declared that government is the problem.” You could tell from his tone of voice and smirking smile that he had nothing but scorn for this idea.

Less than seven months later, Clinton tells us that Reagan was right. Government is such a problem that it must be reinvented. I’m sure the Gipper appreciates this extraordinary retraction from a man who had been convinced that government was the solution.

But does Clinton really mean it, or is this self-evident contradiction merely a cover for the guile of slick Willie?

Why would any Democrat--even one who didn’t believe that government is the solution--be willing to ax 252,000 federal employees?

And if reductions in work force are needed, why are they limited to decision-making levels? Are administrative law judges, prosecutors and the top-level managers who preside over the issuance of federal regulations the only inefficient federal employees?

A clue to the puzzle comes from Clinton’s unprecedented decision to turn nearly half of the Justice Department’s environmental-crime prosecutors over to Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) for inquisition. The career prosecutors are believed to have been too lenient with business people.

The British ruled the seas because they occasionally hung an admiral who ducked battle in order to encourage the others to engage the enemy. Think of career prosecutors as the admirals. Henceforth, any federal prosecutor who deals fairly with a defendant or shows mercy and does not, in the words of Lenin, “conduct a fight of extermination” against the hapless business person, will experience Dingell’s rack.

The Clintonistas are precisely that--an ideological gang intent upon remaking American society. They can’t do it legislatively or through presidential dictates. But if they can get their hands on the decision-making levels of the federal regulatory police, eliminating those with any sense of balance or fairness, they can ensure the regulatory decisions and administrative-law rulings that will push society in their preferred direction.

Clinton’s “reforms” are directed at the top-level federal jobs because these are the jobs insulated from political partisanship by civil-service rules. Clinton wants to purge the ranks to fill them with Clintonistas. If Republicans fall for this slick trick, they and their constituencies are finished.