America's Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through New Gingrich , by David R. Mayhew. Yale University Press, 257 pages, $30.00 Why was the Clinton health care plan rejected by Congress in 1994? Was it because of big-money lobbying from the health insurance industry? Or was the plan doomed from the first because Americans--anti-statists to the bone--simply would not stand for "socialized medicine"? Perhaps there was more to it than those simplistic interpretations suggest. Maybe it was, in fact, a fine example of how Congress works and has always worked: with influential lawmakers, both attentive to and manipulating public opinion, ultimately laying the plan to rest. And maybe, given different leaders in Congress, it could have gone the other way, powerful lobbyists notwithstanding. Political scientists--and in a more inchoate fashion, much of the public--tend to view individual members of Congress as little more than agents of the...

A decade ago, if someone had told the president of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), Al From, that Al Gore would be heading up the Democratic ticket in the year 2000, he would have thought the DLC millennium had truly arrived. Today, though, it's not so clear. Gore's support for free trade, welfare reform, and what some consider balanced-budget fetishism makes him seem like a DLC-style New Democrat. But some in the DLC are not so sure; and perhaps with good reason. It's easy to overlook how much the second Clinton-Gore administration, even in its more centrist moments, has already departed from DLC orthodoxies. Consider a few examples: What used to be called "entitlement reform" has always been a central goal of the DLC. The Council favors retrenchment, means testing, and, more recently, partial privatization when it comes to Social Security and Medicare. The administration has sought to buttress these programs with new general-revenue funds while...