Outsiders dying to be insiders

WASHINGTON -- Texas Gov. George W. Bush calls himself an "outsider" but he's pulling out all the political stops to get to be a Washington insider.

Vice President Al Gore was so nervous about being seen as a Washington insider that he moved his campaign headquarters to Nashville, Tenn., far outside the dreaded Beltway.

Running against Washington is an old campaign ploy -- and it apparently works with those who choose to be deceived.

Bush is certainly not the first candidate to denigrate Washington "insiders," a theoretical population group characterized by arrogance, self-absorption and a haughty disdain for Americans who live outside the Beltway, a locale also known as "the American side of the Beltway."

In my experience, this community doesn't actually exist except in the campaign rhetoric of politicians trying to win votes so that they, too, can live and work in the same Washington morass that they decry.

As governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter ran against Washington effectively and brought with him a "Georgia Mafia" to reinforce the contempt he felt for the capital. But Carter soon found out that he needed some of the Washington pros who knew their way around the nation's capital. During Carter's presidential campaign, one of his top aides, Hamilton Jordan, told reporters that the administration would bring fresh faces to Washington, not the "Cyrus Vance" types.

Wrong.

Carter later named Cyrus Vance, a veteran government troubleshooter, as his secretary of state.

Ronald Reagan, then the former governor of California, had a heyday in the 1980 presidential campaign as he denounced the intrusive federal government whose only role, he said, was to provide national security. He won election and then, with Reaganesque aplomb, he ran for a second term, employing the same hackneyed anti- Washington slogans even though he had been the No. 1 Washingtonian for four years.

President Clinton recently referred to that style of campaigning in a speech at Princeton University:

"When I ran for president in 1992, our government was discredited," he said. "In fact, you could hardly run for president unless you had something bad to say about the government. Indeed, part of the political genius of the ascendancy of President Reagan and his associates was to attain power by discrediting the very idea of government. They basically were able to say things like, `Government couldn't run a bake sale' or `the government would mess up a two-car parade.' And they found huge majorities of Americans sort of nodding their heads."

Clinton himself got in his licks against the bureaucracies when he announced in 1994 that "the era of big government is over."

Gore lived most of his life in Washington as the son of a senator.

Bush's father -- President George Bush -- could be called the ultimate "insider." A rich man who sought government jobs, the long career of the senior Bush spanned public service as a Texas congressman, the first U.S. diplomat in China; CIA director; U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, vice president for eight years and president for four years.

It's true that Gov. Bush did not follow in his footsteps. Business and baseball were his dominant interests until he caught the political bug. After a failed bid for a House seat, Bush ran for governor and won.

His running mate this year, Richard Cheney, has been on the taxpayers' payroll for most of his working life. But he still summoned the audacity to deny that government had anything to do with his success in becoming a multimillionaire businessman.

He only had been White House chief of staff in the Ford administration and served six terms as a Wyoming congressman before becoming secretary of defense in the Bush administration.

When Sen. Joe Lieberman noted that Cheney was better off today than eight years ago, Cheney's condescending response was: "And I can tell you, Joe, government had absolutely nothing to do with it."

Cheney apparently thinks that the directors of Halliburton, the huge Dallas-based oil services company that paid him millions, hired him back in 1995 despite his years in government. And he seems to have forgotten that Halliburton won more than $2 billion in federal contracts to support U.S. troops on peacekeeping missions during his tenure with the company.

Historically speaking, Washington was not always a political scapegoat. In fact, times of national crisis it was considered the nation's savior. Take, for example, the Great Depression.

In that era, President Franklin D. Roosevelt summoned social workers and teachers from around the country to cope with the crisis. Their dedication paved the way for the New Deal programs and a stronger federal government. Those who came to Washington had a sense of mission and no one called them "outsiders."

That is why it raises my hackles when I hear politicians speak so contemptuously of government workers.

The pot shots at government also serve to bolster the cynical impression that government is not, as Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, "of the people, by the people and for the people," but rather the tool of the powerful.

In a recent Gallup poll, 70 percent of those sampled said that a few big interests ran government. Only 25 percent said it is run for the benefit of all the people.

Much as they gripe and grouse against the federal government, the Republican-controlled Congress got an eye opener a few years ago. The American people became angry when Congress and Clinton couldn't agree on spending priorities, with the result that the government was shut down. That was intolerable to the public, which expects the government to function properly. After all, taxpayers are sending their money to Uncle Sam to make it run.

I can recall a time when government was not treated as a pariah or as an alien intruder and when young people were being urged to go into public service. Whenever groups of teen-agers would visit the White House, President John F. Kennedy would always tell them to go into public service at some point in their lives and work to give something back to the country.

In an interview with Joe Klein of the New Yorker magazine, President Clinton said he was disturbed that Gov. Bush had said if he becomes president he is going "to get rid of the 100,000 cops program and he was going to take another look at AmeriCorps," in which high schoolers get paid for community service jobs.

Bush obviously does not believe in Washington programs that encourage public service. I guess he falls into the class of the young Nixon aide who, during the Watergate scandal hearings, was asked what he would tell any other young man who wanted to go into government service. He replied sadly: "I'd tell him to stay away."

But the late Arthur Flemming, a Republican who served in many top government jobs, used to tell the story of the young man who wrote "public service" on his job application and when he was asked why, he said:

"I didn't know there was an alternative."

I'd like to say to candidates who run against Washington, knock it off. If working for the federal government in public service has no appeal, why are you trying so hard to be an insider?

Helen Thomas, a longtime White House correspondent and a columnist for Hearst Newspapers, may be reached at (202) 298-6920 or at her e- mail address, helent

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