tw412

          "Traditionally, an incumbant president could cut a deal with half a dozen elderly and powerful committee chairmen, and expect them to deliver the votes necessary to approve his legislative program. Today congressional committe chairmen and women can no more deliver the votes of the junior members of Congress than the AFL-CIO of the Catholic Church can deliver the votes of their followers. Unfortunate as it may seem to old-timers and hard-pressed presidents, people - including members of Congress - are doing more of their own thinking, and taking orders less submissively. All this makes it impossible, however, for Congress, as presently structured, to devote sustained attention to any issue or to respond quickly to the nation's needs.

     Referrring to the "frenetic schedule," a report by the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future summarizes the situation vividly: "Increasing complexity and the speed-of-light crises, such as votes on one week on gas derugulation, Rhodesia, the Panama Canal, a new Department of Education, food stamps, AMTRAK authorization, solid waste disposal, and endangered species, are turning Congress, once a center for careful and thoughtful debate...into the laughing stock of the nation."

    

I skipped a couple paragraphs,

     "What we confront is a new and menacing truth. The political shudders and crises we face cannot be solved by leaders - strong or weak - so long as those leaders are compelled to operate through innappropriate, broken down, overloaded institutions.
     A political system must not only be able to make and enforce decisions; it must operate on the right scale, it must be able to integrate disparate policies, it must be able to make decisions at the right speed, and it must both reflect and respond to the diversity of society. If it fails in any of these points it courts disaster. Our problems are no longer a matter of "left-wing" or "right-wing," "strong leadership" or "weak." The decisional system itself has become a menace.
     The truly astonishing fact today is that our governments continue to function at all. No corporation president would try to run a large company with a table of organization first sketched by the quill pen of some eighteenth-century ancestor whose sole managerial experience consisted of running a farm. No sane pilot would attempt to fly a supersonic jet with the antique navigation and control instruments available to Bleriot or Libdbergh. Yet, this is approximately what we are trying to do politically.
     The rapid obsolescence of our Second Wave political systems, in a world bristling with nuclear weapons, and poised delicately on the edge of economic or ecological collapse, creates an extreme threat for the entire socity - not merely for the "outs" but for the "ins," not merely for the poor but for the rich, and for the non-industrial parts of the world as well. For the immdediate danger to all of us lies not so much in the calculated use of power by those who have it, as in the uncalculated side effects of decisions ground out by politico-bureaucratic decision machines so dangerously anachronic that even the best of intentions can eventuate in murderous outcomes.