Special Interests Vs. America’s Interests : DEMOSCLEROSIS: The Silent Killer of American Government <i> by Jonathan Rauch</i> ; Times Books $22, 260 pages

While many of us hummed to the buoyant Fleetwood Mac lyrics--”Yesterday’s gone, yeah -esterday’s gone”--that boomed during President Clinton’s victory celebration, America’s old, Watergate-inspired cynicism seems more present than ever.

Three-quarters of Americans trusted Washington to “do what’s right” in 1958, but as several polls have shown, by 1993 only one in five held that faith.

People’s classic complaint is that Washington continues to be gridlocked by do-nothing Neanderthals, jellyfish or, as George Wallace put it in the ‘60s, “pointy-headed bureaucrats who can’t park their bicycles straight.”

In his feisty book “Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government,” however, National Journal contributing editor Jonathan Rauch argues that the problem lies not in the indolence of Washington’s bureaucrats and legislators but in their frenzied activity. By coddling interest groups with reams of new legislation, he argues, they have trapped government behind an Everest-tall paper mountain of federal subsidies, public entitlements, tax loopholes and protective trade measures. The pages of statutes in the Federal Register alone, Rauch points out, soared from about 2,300 in 1947 to about 62,000 in 1992.

Thus what Rauch calls “demosclerosis”--”the gradual calcification of democratic government into a stony mass of impenetrable programs”--has set in, and “political activity has become a kind of flailing which creates frenzy but does little good, or even makes problems worse. Wheels spin and gears mesh, but the car goes nowhere, or goes everywhere at once, or shakes itself to pieces.”

The great volcanic gods ultimately responsible for spewing forth this paper mountain are, as Rauch sees it, Washington lobbyists.

He is, of course, hardly the first to rail against them. In his 1993 book “The Lobbyists,” for example, Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Birnbaum showed how an army of lobbyists, now 80,000 strong (double what it was 10 years ago), has come to “brazenly manipulate . . . both lawmakers and the public.”

But while Birnbaum sees most lobbyists as snakes “bending the political process on behalf of the richest business interests in the country,” Rauch insists that they represent us all. Ordinary senior citizens and aspiring artists, he contends, command as much clout as wily industrialists and green-eyed lawyers.

“Today, everyone is organized,” Rauch writes, “and everyone is part of an interest group. We have met the special interests, and they are us.”

Rauch offers some persuasive documentation for this counterintuitive claim. He shows, for example, how military veterans beat back the Bush Administration’s attempt to open up a half-empty VA hospital to non-vets, and how wool-and-mohair farmers managed to secure a nearly $200-million federal subsidy that outlived its initial rationale by more than 30 years. (Legislators who dared to challenge this lobby would have their heart strings yanked by letters like this: “I am 8-years-old and I want to know why the government wants to take away our living. . . .”)

The end result of all this lobbying, Rauch argues, is a government so in hock to special interests that it has little money left to meet the general interest.

Rauch shows, for instance, how the Clinton Administration’s “New Covenant”--a national service program giving “all young Americans a chance to serve their country”--was eventually whittled down to a “New Ornament,” a program that by 1997 will reach only one-quarter of 1% of eligible young Americans.

Were it not so beholden to its lobbyists, Rauch writes, America would be a far richer nation than it was after World War II, when we could “afford” the Marshall Plan, or in the Kennedy-Johnson years, when we could “afford” to send a man to the moon.

Our real problem, then, is not so much poverty as timidity. Rauch quotes a poignant speech Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming) delivered to an almost entirely empty Senate chamber about how legislators are “really . . . all impelled by a raw fear--and that raw fear is, I would guess, a fear of what the electorate will do to us.”

Unfortunately, Rauch builds his arguments on a most unsteady premise: that “all interest groups (are) morally interchangeable players in a giant game. . . . I like some lobbies, you like others, but never mind. They are all playing by the same rules in the same game. None is really special.”

Really? Is it fair to say that the Natural Resources Defense Council, for instance, is merely “digging for gold” when it struggles to save vanishing species from developers? And do advocates for, say, inner-city education programs or the homeless mentally ill really command the same resources as those for, say, public utility companies? (Not according to the Wall Steet Journal’s Birnbaum, who documents in “The Lobbyists” how the utilities doled out more than $10 million in campaign contributions to insert a provision in federal law that will end up saving them $19 billion.)

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Rauch concludes “Demosclerosis” somewhat cynically, pointing out that the kinds of fundamental changes necessary to free us from our valley of special-interest discontent usually come about only after the kind of social and economic “meltdown” that Japan and West Germany experienced after World War II. (Which is why, he points out, those national economies fared so much better after the war than politically stable countries like Britain.)

But there is in fact cause for optimism. Rauch points out that the legislation our lobbyists have essentially written “locks money in and competitiveness out.”

As the world trend toward increasingly free trade continues, America, in order to remain competitive, may soon have little choice but to free that money by reining in its lobbyists and dredging away at their paper mountain.