By DONALD SEVENER

After four decades in public life, U.S. Sen. Paul Simon knows how the world works. He seems not to have a clue about how the world has changed.

Compassion is out; selfishness is in.

"Ask not what your country can do for you" is out; "What have you done for me lately" is in.

Government is the solution is out; government is the problem is back in.

So, while there is little question that We Can Do Better, as Simon entitles his recent book, there is even less chance that we will. Simon, who began his career in public life as an Illinois state representative 40 years ago and expects to finish it as a U.S. senator two years hence, has not caught on that America has passed him by.

This is not JFK's America, a Camelot of hope and optimism and the belief that government can be a positive force in the lives of the governed. This America has been Gingriched, at once impatient with change and fearful of it, uncertain of the future, deeply cynical about politicians, angry at government, just plain mad as hell. It is not an America much in the mood for "doing better," at least not on Paul Simon's terms.

We Can Do Better is Simon's 14th book (number 15, about abolitionist newspaper crusader Elijah Lovejoy, has just been published). Subtitled, "How to Save America's Future — An Open Letter to President Clinton," the book is a series of letters to the president that is equal parts public policy agenda and sermon about leadership.

Simon does understand how the world works, and his examination of problems confronting the nation — from welfare and education to crime and health care, from campaign finance to environmental degradation — is thoughtful, often poignant, generally well-documented and certainly challenging. For example, his analysis of the corrosive effects of money on public policy is especially blunt and trenchant. "The mixture we have of money and politics undercuts our democracy," Simon writes.

"Over and over on the Senate floor," he notes, "I see the process that should be serving the public being twisted to serve those who contribute to our campaigns. The public senses this. Their perception is of people donating money that buys votes in Congress or contracts and appointments from the executive branch. The practice usually is not that crude or direct, but too often the net effect is about the same.

"The system affects us all," Simon writes. He says he has never traded a promise involving his official duties for a campaign contribution, but he acknowledges that if he has 20 phone calls to return, the first call is likely to go to the person who contributed $1,000 to his campaign. "The financially articulate," Simon says, "have an inordinate access to policy-makers.

"But what about the unemployed person who needs access, who probably does not follow the intricacies of legislative maneuverings and certainly will not make a significant campaign contribution? That person is lost in the process." Simon urges public financing of congressional campaigns to diminish what he calls the "psychological mortgage" the current system places on members of Congress, although he fails to detail what such a reform would cost, an omission that pervades most of his suggestions in the book.

He does, though, call upon Clinton to exert some presidential leadership on the issue, and that becomes a recurrent and telling theme throughout We Can Do Better — not to mention another example of why we won't.

Always the diplomat, Simon employs both gentle chastisement and pointed reproach to urge the president to be more "Trumanesque," less inclined to follow the latest poll and more demanding of us as citizens.

He opens the chapter entitled, "Strong Leadership Requires Conviction," with praise of Clinton's leadership that won passage of the NAFTA accord. "You didn't waffle," he writes. 'You set your goal, and you fought for it."

But it's clear Simon regards that display of leadership the exception that proves the rule: Clinton is too quick to give in, change course and pander to popular opinion. Simon says George Bush was perceived as a weak leader because, aside from foreign affairs, he had no strong convictions about public policy, and the inference is clear. He advises Clinton not to expect popularity as president, to stick to his guns and to eschew polls as a motivation for public policy. "Polling is like whiskey," he writes, "a little may be OK, but it is easily abused."

He relates a newspaper report that says Clinton meets with his pollster several times each week and says, "if the report is true, you are making a mistake. Leadership will not emerge from polls." He praises Clinton for the courage to meet with author Salman Rushdie, but then condemns the action of presidential aides who, after heavy criticism from the Muslim world, tried to downplay the encounter. The White House staff, Simon complains, "turned lemonade into a lemon. Instead of a strong call for free expression, your voice was muted. Instead of being an opportunity seized to promote understanding and tolerance, the whole episode probably added to misunderstanding. And what started out as a gesture of strength instead conveyed weakness."

He argues that there has been a leadership vacuum with respect to educating Americans about the pervasiveness and consequences of poverty, and he calls Clinton's welfare reform plan "timid" and his rhetoric empty. He urges the president to lead the nation away from simplistic slogans — "Three Strikes and Out" — for dealing with crime, failing to note Clinton signed legislation enacting the slogan into law.

"People want strength, sureness and stability in leadership," Simon says.

Not exactly the qualities Clinton exhibited when, a few weeks after the Democratic debacle on Election Day, November 1994, he went before the nation to propose a middle-class tax cut aimed at winning back the affection of disaffected voters. So transparent was the proposal it prompted Paul Tsongas, former senator and Democratic presidential candidate who wrote the foreword to Simon's book, to call openly for a third-party challenge to the president's re-election.

Simon repeatedly urges Clinton to be more "Trumanesque," itself an outdated notion of what America expects, or seems to want, in its leaders. It's impossible to envision Harry Truman holding aloft the Chicago Tribune's famous headline: "Dewey Beats Truman" and declaring himself "the comeback kid." In the Age of Newt, personality has replaced performance, image has replaced achievement in defining leadership. Clinton has wholeheartedly embraced the politics of personality. The presidential image that pervades our national consciousness is of a guy in jogging shorts; he's sort of like a big brother— smart, earnest, personable, but not somebody you'd trust to stare down the Bosnian Serbs or stand up to striking air traffic controllers.

How much leadership can you expect from a president satirized in the Doonesbury comic strip as a waffle?

His attitude about leadership is but one example illustrating that however perceptive Simon's observations are about how the political system works, what is wrong with it and how it might be fixed, they are — sadly, but unquestionably — beside the point.

Simon tells Clinton: "I know you will have a hard time believing this, but the problem has been that you have not demanded enough of us."

Simon may have a hard time believing this, but the public nowadays has scant patience for more demands from its government. If anything, people seem more in tune with the attitude of Rush Limbaugh, the storm trooper of talk radio: "Heck, I wish the government didn't even know I existed."

It is not so much that Simon is wrong, but that his ideas are irrelevant. So far has the center of gravity in American politics shifted to the right that ideas that once appeared unthinkable — abolishing welfare for teen moms, for one — are now given serious currency. By contrast, Simon's call for a domestic Marshall Plan to cure the ills of the streets, the schools, the environment, the workplace and the family seems all but unthinkable.

Ironically, Simon himself identifies, albeit inadvertently, how far America has moved from his vision of government. In a chapter devoted to the influence of Rush Limbaugh, Simon notes, apparently more with amusement than envy, that Rush's first book. The Way Things Ought To Be, sold 2.5 million copies in hardcover, and the initial printing for his second book, See, I Told You So, was 2 million. "By comparison," he writes in his letter to the president, "the book you are now reading will have an initial printing of 10,000 copies."

The comparison is more revealing than Simon realizes. Simon's book is a series of letters, sober in tone and thought-

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ful and generally thorough in their examination of serious problems taken seriously. (One wonders, though, why Simon, if he were truly serious about Clinton's actually reading the letters, didn't consider sending them by e-mail to this, the first president of the information age.) Limbaugh's book is essentially a rehash of the verbal firebombs he launches from his radio show with little regard for casualties, innocent or otherwise.

It is talk radio — which Limbaugh exploits so effectively — that has become the medium of political discourse in the Newt America. Ross Perot used the Larry King show to launch his presidential aspirations, the same venue used for a debate with the vice president over NAFTA. Talk show hosts flocked to Washington and were lavished with special quarters to broadcast on the Republican coronation as GOP leaders ascended to the thrones of the House and Senate.

Rush Limbaugh's first book sold 2.5 million copies and the advance printing for his second was 2 million. But Simon's book had an initial printing of 10,000 copies

Simon employs a medium that lends itself to careful reflection, and he tries to account for the complexity of issues, the interrelatedness of problems, the shades of gray in the fabric of a large, complicated society. Not so with the Rush Limbaughs that now dominate public debate. Where Simon is thoughtful, deliberative and balanced, talk radio is shallow, simplistic and bombastic. Talk radio is to political discourse what Hard Copy is to journalism: Its intent is to entertain, and its effect is to trivialize.

So Simon misreads more than book sale statistics when, in his letter to Clinton, he advises the president to "Enjoy the Rush Limbaughs of the Nation, But Don't Let Them Get Under Your Skin." He urges that Clinton "just chuckle with him when he shows a sense of humor, but don't take him too seriously." Limbaugh, Simon writes, "is alternately fun and galling to read, and there is enough of the latter that I confess to feeling guilty when I buy his books — I shouldn't be encouraging that nonsense!"

Nonsense or not, it is Paul Simon who will retire from Congress in two years, and it is Rush Limbaugh who has been named an "honorary member" of the freshmen class of Republican lawmakers for his perceived pivotal role in turning over control of the Congress to the GOP for the first time since well, since Paul Simon was a freshman state representative in the Illinois General Assembly in 1954.

In the Newt America, it is Rush who is laughing last. Simon on crime: "We must shift our attention from policies that don't work — like mindlessly building more prisons — to less dramatic answers that we know are effective, even though they have less public appeal."

Rush on crime: "If we have too many criminals, build more prisons. We are told it's too expensive, but it doesn't have to be." He recommends inmates be put to work to pay some of the expense of incarceration and advocates cutting down on "all the luxuries criminals have in prison that a lot of honest working folks can't afford," such as cable TV. "If you send someone to jail it's not supposed to be pleasant. It is supposed to be hard. That's why it's called punishment."

The Taking Back Our Streets Act from the Republican Contract with America: "An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in-sentencing . . . cuts in social spending from this summer's 'crime' bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement. ..."

Simon on welfare: "There can be no significant welfare reform without a significant jobs program." He urges a modified WPA jobs program reminiscent of the New Deal, authority for the president to order a more conventional jobs program, increasing the minimum wage, steps to end the geographic isolation of the poor from where jobs exist, "actively discouraging" teen pregnancy, providing child care so welfare mothers can work and increased child support enforcement.

Rush on welfare: "Helping people to become self-sufficient is much more compassionate than drugging them with the narcotic of welfare."

The Personal Responsibility Act of the Contract With America: "Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending in welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility."

And so on.

Occasionally, even Simon notices that the nation has changed, significantly and fundamentally, and not for the better. At one point, speaking about the need for more money for education, he quotes a former New York City school superintendent on dropout prevention programs: "It's strange. We know what to do; we just don't do it." At another point in the book, discussing poverty and welfare, Simon asks, "Who can question John Kenneth Galbraith's conclusion about our society: 'The comfortable are now in control.'" Yet again, talking about health care reform, he writes: "Citizens come to me, crying as they tell their stories of desperation. I have to tell them there is nothing I can do — basically that their government doesn't care enough to help."

Less and less every day. America has made its contract with Newt and Rush. There is no profile in courage at the White House, or much of anywhere else for that matter. And Paul Simon's vision of government is as out of fashion as his bow tie.

So the prolific Simon will have to content himself with continuing to create his own personal literature. Perhaps he will write a sequel to We Can Do Better. He could call it: See, I Told You So. *