PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICS : Double Click on the New Paradigm : The winner in ’96 will be the candidate who proposes a user-friendly arrangement of the icons of government.

The visionary leader offered a new plan for millions of Americans, a promise to make their lives better. Some said the plan was an improvisational hodgepodge, but people were eager to try something new. And everyone agreed the plan would be good if it met the pragmatic test: Did it work?

Does this sound like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal? Maybe, but today it better fits Bill Gates’ Windows 95. And that in itself is evidence that today, unlike 60 years ago, the most practical innovation occurs in the private sector. It’s time for the public sector to close the gap. If the existing partisan apparatus can’t produce a credible candidate and platform, then a politico-entrepreneurial opportunity of Gatesian dimensions will open up. Colin Powell, have you double-clicked on this?

By the end of this year, perhaps 30 million Americans will boot up Microsoft’s user-friendly product. Windows 95 is an operating system, the software that controls the functions of a computer. For a decade, the most popular operating system has been Microsoft’s MS-DOS and its enhancement, Windows; that’s why Gates is so rich. MS-DOS worked well enough in its time; now it’s obsolete.

What’s true for computer operating systems is also true of governmental operating systems. Eventually a given technique hits the wall of diminishing returns and then plunges into the abyss of unintended consequences. Unfortunately, while computer users have Windows 95--and many other products, all continuously improved--what we might call Politics 96 seems to be the same old outdated software. As New Jersey Democrat Bill Bradley, announcing his retirement from the Senate, put it last week, “The political debate has settled into two familiar ruts.”

This vision-thinglessness opens the door for some new candidate to merge markets and choice into a new message, seeking a mandate for better politics in the 21st Century.

The operating system metaphor reminds us that government, like a computer, is a tool. We should reserve our civic idealism for the goals of government--liberty, opportunity, equality before the law--not the techniques that the government may employ at a particular time.

Long ago, the bureaucratic operating system of government downloaded New Deal-era ideas of mass-production assembly lines. Strangely, this old model of government has persisted long after the coming of the information age. While the formal federal Civil Service bureaucracy is shrinking, the essential structure--careerists administering the health, education and welfare of the population--has survived. This clash of systems between a government still trying to dictate from central mainframes and a populace trying to solve its own problems at the networked grassroots helps explain why Americans hate politics.

Consider education. In the past decade, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil has risen by one-third, and yet American students lag behind most of our major economic competitors. A decade of “reforms” proved to be the policy equivalent of failed upgrades on an antique application. Conservatives inserted Western Civ curriculums and competency testing for teachers, while liberals plugged in diversity and multiculturalism. Some ideas were thoroughly bipartisan: “America 2000” was a Republican idea that the Democrats have morphed into “Goals 2000.” Yet all these initiatives have failed to reverse the chronic downtrend of more inputs and worse outcomes. By now it is clear that the bureaucratic monopolies themselves thwart the well-intentioned efforts of both right and left.

As Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) wrote five years ago, post-industrial social problems need a post-industrial policy response. Politicians who have ignored Moynihan’s warning have not fared well. George Bush would have been a perfectly adequate domestic President in a time when the old system still functioned. But from the riotous mean streets of Los Angeles to the income-squeezed suburbs of middle America, it was obvious that the old contraption suffered system-crash. And so did Bush. Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 with a powerful critique of the “brain-dead” politics of left and right, but once in office, he lost interest in developing a post-bureaucratic operating system. Clintoncare was the equivalent of MS-DOS; consumers and providers rebelled at the attempt to install an obsolete operating system for health care.

Now the Republicans have the Big Mo. Unfortunately for them, they have yet to show the big vision. For the coming fiscal year, the Gingrichified House cut federal educational spending from $32 billion to $28 billion. But for all the talk about choice and empowerment, Uncle Sam’s money will still pulse through the same decrepit network. It’s like running old software with 10% less electricity.

And the larger outlines of the GOP agenda are clear--more for defense, less for social programs--but no transformation. Even Republican revolutionaries enjoy dredging up PAC money and doling out favors to friends; left-wing pork is slaughtered to make way for right-wing pork, if slightly less of it.

Furthermore, for all their talk, the Republicans have yet to absorb the full implications of what Newt Gingrich guru Alvin Toffler calls the Third Wave, the age of information. That is, the same technology that turned the masses into knowledge workers makes people want to make their own choices in their private lives as well. The contradiction between a GOP agenda that seeks to liberate the national economy and dominate the human body would be fatal to the Republicans were it not for one thing: the Democrats.

The Democratic Party seems terminally wedded to the old political operating system. Vice President Al Gore’s valiant-but-puny “reinventing government” effort has chipped mere flakes off the Gibraltar of bureaucratic obsolescence. Meanwhile, most Democrats seem to have no plan other than to climb to their ramparts and defend even the most egregious injustices of the old system--from departments set up as sops to big business and big labor to programs that transfer wealth from working poor to retired rich. In the words of Al From, president of the Democratic Leadership Council, “Republicans currently have the upper hand because they are offering the less expensive box of Brand X.”