The Cost of Doing Nothing

The Sheraton Boston hotel is not much of a place to call home. Depending on your socio-political dispositions, you are likely to emerge from a week of captivity there with either double-knit skin and a superficial handshake or with a clear antipathy towards good order and government.

But for three days at the end of August, Boston's convention hotel was the home of the National Governor's Association Convention, an event which starred such luminaries as Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, Gov. William G. Milliken of Michigan, Gov. Meldrim Thomson of New Hampshire and Seabrook fame, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), nuclear reactors, health insurance, anonymous men and women dressed to kill, and above all, the star of stars--Proposition 13.

"These are work sessions," Dukakis, the host of the conference, emphasized from behind his lighted podium at the opening press conference. "We've cut out a lot of the frills. For example, there's no state dinner this year." The small room was humming with anxious reporters from places as far from Massachusetts as the Detroit Free Press. ABC News "action-cams" were rolling away full crank while floodlights bleached the stage, which was conveniently set up for the omniscient eyes of television news.

Milliken followed Dukakis' welcoming remarks by introducing the big issue of the convention, and then added one of his own.

"This year we've had 540 accidents due to the release of toxic chemicals into the environment," he said. "I think it is more important now that we consider the development on a federal level of a management team that can move to any part of the country to deal with these problems."

Reporters smiled at his concern, blinked impatiently and jumped in to query him about tax reform, tax reform, and more tax reform. Finally, just to change the subject, one reporter asked Dukakis what he thought about Kennedy's national health insurance plan.

"Senator Kennedy's health insurance views have strong support in Massachusetts and I strongly support them."

"Do you think Kennedy will run for president in 1980, and would you support him?" the reporter asked.

"Well... I don't think he'll run, he's made that clear... but that's one bridge we'll have to look at... later." Oooooooooh. This was, perhaps, the first time Dukakis had ever blushed in public, as he realized the implications of his statement. It was a spark of comic relief in a media show full of nebulous ideas and statements.

One issue which had attracted the attention of real Clamshell Alliance demonstrators outside the Sheraton, as opposed to Proposition 13's absent masses, was nuclear power. However, it was given short shrift inside the conference hall. When I asked Milliken if support for nuclear power plants was inconsistent with his concern for toxic chemicals and the environment, he lowered his voice a little and said, "Well we are going to have to go ahead in a very cautious way, but wind and solar energy are not going to solve this country's energy problems," adding that "environmental risks and economic advantages are not mutually exclusive."

"But these are work sessions, he said again, "we are bringing on the Spartan approach, frills are passe--we can only be effective if we are serious." With a click of camera shutters, the opening session of the conference broke up, the floodlights blinked off, and the ever-present reporters began to mill around and crowd the stars into corners with a whole repertoire of Proposition 13 questions.

"I'm here because I'm interested in federalism," fellow spectator Samuel H. Beer, Eaton Professor of Government, told me as we looked at the melee. He said he was doing some informal research for his course, Government 147, "American Federalism," and sat down to offer some wisdom on the political dollar madness.

It's a mystery to most people what Proposition 13 is all about," he said in a serious tone. "It isn't just that people don't like to pay taxes, but their taxes aren't being spent coherently. State governments and local governments are terribly loose and fragmented."

The room around us rattled with the sounds of 100 typewriters, red telephones and wire services, all creating tax revolt stories. Dukakis was leading a horde of press affiliates through the press room with him. Beer continued, "It's very hard for anyone, even a sharp guy like Dukakis, to get a handle on the bureaucracy. Party decomposition--you're not talking to this party and that group, you're meeting people en masse.

"Who gives a tinker's damn about the Democratic Party in Massachusetts? There's been a decay of this private section business of party politics, of individuals acting as private people--cause groups, political parties, NAACP, and so on--the public sector has taken over and so have the technocrats, the bureacracies, and what I like to call the topocrats.

"Jimmy Carter is a prime example--he doesn't owe anything to anybody. There aren't barons anymore, there's a huge public mass and nobody is tending the store."

Press releases on "the people's tax reform" riffled around the room, and various governors were issuing timely calls for some kind of major tax reform.

"The capacity for a negative majority against something is a very grave danger to any democracy," Beer said. "The effect of this is that we're doing nothing. We're just drifting along."

The concept of a negative majority was destined to be a recurring theme in this convention, as it has been in national discussions on issues ranging from tax reform to health insurance to nuclear power plants to school desegregation. Beer, true to his reputation as The Great Federalist, said the answer to solving the country's spending problems rested not with the prevalence of stingy conservatism or spendthrift liberalism--but in "better bureaucratic machinery to control the spending--more selective spending."

The Pitch for Nationalism

The second day of the conference, August 28, was highlighted by Kennedy's address to all the governors on health insurance, an event every player in the house was waiting for. The Sheraton ballroom, newly furnished for the governors with a table and state flags, was jammed with waiting staff, press and state troopers. In the wake of a Clamshell Alliance picket against nuclear power plants going on outside, four state troopers were assigned to guard Gov. Meldrim Thomson all day. Security and expectations tightened.

Dukakis introduced the issue of health insurance and its chief advocate, Kennedy, to the front of the room. As the crowd hushed, Kennedy broke into his appeal, pointing to the illustrative charts behind him, reciting the facts and figures he has come to know cold since 1969. His voice rose and broke, and his face was pink in the TV camera floodlights, as he spilled a ballroom-full of Kennedy electricity.

"All you have to do is ask any senior citizen how much they are paying for health care today. Your association is already on record as recognizing the existence of a national health care crisis. But I know as you know that the issue on the minds of every governor these days is basically one issue--Proposition 13. But I would say that if there is one example of government out of control, it's in the health care area. If there is one example of inflated costs with less services, it's health care. If there is one issue that people are tired of seeing--last year six billion inflated dollars were spent without one more band-aid or one more aspirin--it's in the the health care area."

His voice was rising sharply and quickening with anger. People looked around the room at each other, smiling awkwardly and fidgeting in their chairs.

"And I submit that there is no way, NO WAY you are going to get a handle on health costs unless you commit this nation and these states to a national health insurance plan."

He whipped around and pointed to bar graphs comparing Canada's reduced health costs to the ever-increasing rates of the U.S. In 1963, 4.3 per cent of the federal budget was spent on health care. Today it has risen to 12.7 per cent. In 1983 it will be 13.3 per cent and a "whopping" 9.7 per cent of the Gross National Product (GNP). Canada, on the other hand, managed to contain its expenditures on health care from 6.8 per cent of the GNP when their national health insurance plan was passed in 1968 to 7 per cent in 1978. Today, health care expenditures comprise 8.8 per cent of the GNP in the United States.

"The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world along with South Africa which doesn't have some form of national health insurance," Kennedy said, "and the issue before the American people is not whether we can afford to have national health insurance, it is whether we can afford not to have it.

"Twenty-six million Americans have no insurance coverage whatsoever. Seven million families this year will incur medical expenses that will exceed 15 per cent of their total income. Fifty-one million Americans live in areas without sufficient access to health care services. Medical costs in general are running wild and Medicaid costs in particular threaten to bankrupt your states. Life expectancies vary widely by race and income levels, and infant mortality rates are 50-100 per cent higher in your urban poverty centers than in the nation as a whole."

Kennedy said that quality health care is a basic human right, and that the rest of the industrialized world "has recognized it as such." He criticized Carter's health insurance proposal which would make the introduction of a national health insurance plan conditional on the state of the economy.

"Today some who espoused that right want tocondition it-to condition it on many things over which the health care system has no control: the state of the economy, the budget deficit, oil embargoes--but human rights are not conditional, and a commitment to a conditional human right is no commitment at all," Kennedy said.

The governors gave him a standing ovation and the thick air was relieved when he sat down. It was a painfully convincing act. Kennedy had shown that the cost of doing nothing at all about health insurance would be disastrous in human and economic terms. But despite the governors' rapt attention to the speech, they still couldn't swallow it. About 24 of the 35 governors present voiced opinions against Kennedy's proposal following the speech.

By this time, the Clamshell Alliance had brought a dozen demonstrators to picket the pro-nuclear stance of the governors' association Nuclear Power Subcommittee. State troopers and Boston police kept a watchful eye on the small but noisy stream of protestors shouting, "Meldrim Thomson, Dixie Lee Ray, we don't believe a word you say." They distributed reprints of an article in Rolling Stone by Edward Kohn headlined, "The Government's Quiet War on Scientists Who Know Too Much." They chanted for about three hours, but provoked no confrontations or bad blood, just a lot of disgusted looks from Sheraton windows.

Beer thought the Clamshell protests were merely counterproductive. "They're not making good sense," he said, "People just look at them and say they're a bunch of crazy longhairs. They're bigots," he said, "just like racial bigots."

There was no one to challenge Thomson or Ray inside the convention. Various governors lunched at the Nuclear Power Subcommittee's conference as Dr. Thomas A. Vanderslice, senior vice-president of General Electric, spoke on the "absolute necessity" of nuclear power. He created economic disaster "scenarios" replete with blackouts and massive underemployment that would occur if all new 211 power units (47 nuclear and 164 coal) are not built. "If these sites are not approved," he said, "we will have about 17 per cent less capacity in 1990 than we believe necessary to avoid serious curtailment of service and widespread economic dislocations."

There was no one there to question him about safety hazards; most members of the fourth estate at the convention were uninterested in the issue and dismissed nuclear power as a foregone necessity of the future. Vanderslice emphasized that nuclear power is a necessity for continued economic growth. There was no one who questioned him on the merits of a society whose survival is committed to continual economic growth and consumption in a world of dwindling resources and growing ecological disturbance. In the company of these polyester moguls, such a questioner would have appeared insane.

"A nuclear meltdown is about as likely as being hit by a meteor on the Senate floor," he told me, "but if something like that happened, there is the possibility that we could remove the radiation from the atmosphere."

"Remove radiation from the atmosphere?" I asked incredulously.

'Yes. I think we could probably do that." And so with a complacent speech from an energy executive and a pleasing roast beef luncheon, and no coverage from the media, the subcommittee smiled at its report and adjourned for the day.

Time Running Out

It is not necessary to look to the future for nuclear and environmental disasters, as Milliken said earlier. Lives have already been scratched at the Love Canal near Niagra Falls in New York, because of negligent disposal of chemicals 16 years ago; Canadian environmental protection officials are currently investigating the construction industry's use of contaminated landfill from an abandoned uranium mine in Quebec, and have unveiled radioactive highways and beaches and backyard gardens. Scientists have discovered that long-term exposure to federally-rated "safe" low-level radiation has killed people living and working near nuclear power plants. These researchers have seen their money withdrawn and their findings have gone unpublished.

"What a Hobson's choice," one of the hotel hosts complained, "economic disaster or radiation poisoning."

And as I left the nuclear power hearings, a mob of reporters surrounded Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown of California like ants bearing food, questioning him on Proposition 13 and federal spending.

But despite all the brazen cries for tax reform, when the final score was in, not one of the association's tax reform proposals was passed. Thomson's resolution demanding constitutional limits on state and federal spending garnered only ten votes (not surprisingly), and a proposal by Gov. James Hunt of North Carolina calling for major reductions in the federal budget did not even make it past the opening round of discussion.

When I made it back to the press room, one of the press secretaries asked me if I wanted to pay the $50 social activities fee and go to Anthony's Pier 4 to hear Joan Mondale speak on art.

"But they're bringing on the Spartan approach," I said, "frills are passe." I really had no desire to hear another lecture on art, let alone watch Meldrim Thomson feast on clams.

Suddenly I lost it. I was surrounded by nylon legs and espadrilles and black ties--I had overdosed on polyester. In a fit of addled desperation I sought out the solace of the Boston Red Sox vs. the California Angels on the press room television with the refreshing company of a bored security guard named Mary Beth from Quincy.

After all the fake chandelier and highheel glory of the Sheraton Boston I could stand. I flipped on my Rolling Stones tape to the beat of the ball game.

"You know that kid?" a neon-faced gentleman of the press snapped at Mary Beth from Quincy. After some heavy conversation about over-population, nuclear power, disaster and death, Mary Beth forced the words out of her mouth.

"We're all gonna die," she said.

"What kind of pessimistic leftist nonsense were you talking about at that subcommittee luncheon?" he asked me indignantly. "Life cycles and organisms!"

"Look putz," I said, "don't argue ontology with me. It's high time we all started talking about the earth, high time, you know?"

He snapped a beer from a six pack and sat down next to us to watch the ball game, and when the press wizards saw the free drinks, several rushed over to our couch, breathing hard and sweating in the air-conditioned room. "After all," one news service reporter said, "it's only a convention, and baseball's a much better game.