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The Consumer-Friendly State
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20670 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
2,816 Words |
| Author
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Mark Blitz
Mark Blitz is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna
College in California. |
REINVENTING GOVERNMENT
How the Entrepreneurial Spirit
Is Transforming the Public Sector
David Obsorne and Ted Gaebler
Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992
416 pp., $22.95
SHADOW GOVERNMENT
The Hidden Influence of Public Authorities
Donald Axelrod
New York: Wiley, 1992
320 pp., $24.95
Even those who should know better seem, these days, to believe that our political order is in the throes of a deep and unprecedented crisis. Only radical reform can save us. Conservatives praise term limits and new paradigms, liberals preach campaign finance reform and unselfish devotion to community, and voters seek leaders who remind them as little as possible of ordinary democratic representatives.
In such an atmosphere, any sensible book that promises to "reinvent government" is bound to make an impression. David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's Reinventing Government is such a work, and its reception has not been hurt by the fact that it comes to us with a recommendation from Bill Clinton. The authors judiciously praise one or two of his efforts as governor of Arkansas, along with countless other examples of a new form of entrepreneurial government whose rise they seek to chronicle and whose worth they seek to proclaim. Their message is that government can be made to work well, if only we reconstruct it with an eye toward the ten principles that they announce.
Although the book has a grandiose and even apocalyptic title, it in fact reads primarily as a manual for aspiring city managers. It is basically concerned with how services should be delivered, not with analyzing which should be delivered. Moreover, it only episodically considers federal government and hardly touches on structural or constitutional questions. We read little, for example, about reforms that might let Congress act more effectively, about responsibility in the media and among citizens so they could vote more intelligently, or about restraint among judges so that law could be more predictable. And when the authors turn at the end of the book to the issues of education, health, and crime, their suggestions are more hortatory than compelling because they do
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