NATION'S POLITICAL PROCESS HAS BEEN BESET BY DRY ROT

The Thomas confirmation is history. Justice Clarence Thomas will fade from headline news, but the scars of the nomination fight will etch his reputation and memory forever. Professor Anita Hill will struggle with her sudden national notoriety. To millions she will be a heroine, but to law schools, law firms and the government as potential employers she will be damaged goods. But the most enduring harm is to an already beleaguered body politic.

Public respect for government has sunk to the lowest level in history. Americans generally do not like to think too much about the mechanics of the political system. They are, however, attentive to a process they abhor like the handling, by all concerned, of the Thomas confirmation.

Public confidence in almost anything Congress does is minimal or less. President Bush's popularity is based on events abroad; the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War and the demise of communism and the Soviet Union. No one can take that from him.

Someone could, perhaps hang the stagnant national economy around the president's neck. But that someone would have to be a Democrat and that would conjure up a recollective glimpse of the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee maybe a glimpse too far.

The real problem is not the relative popularity of a truly unprepossessing president to a now ridiculed Congress; the more serious concern is the loss of faith of a great people in a once-respected political system. In terms of substantive thought and political invigoration, the two political parties are worthless. We have become a nation of singular interests special interests, some say in which the value of the particular is always greater than the value of the whole. The value of one concern overwhelms the national good.

We have always had some special interests and divisive issues in this nation: tariffs, slavery, women's suffrage, prohibition, civil rights and more. What is new is the teeming abundance of tens of thousands of single issue pleaders with their Washington lobbying offices, computerized membership mailing/telephone lists and PACs.

We are a country of endlessly proliferating special interests stumbling around without a shared sense of national purpose. A democracy with over-lobbied, intimidated leaders is a democracy on borrowed time.

Madison and Hamilton would not comprehend what has happened to the political fabric of our nation. They would not be able to fathom the meanness of the Thomas/Hill confrontation. They would not understand the lack of rational and coherent inquiry by the Senate Judiciary Committee. They would not comprehend the "spin doctors" from the special pleaders rushing to the cameras at every bathroom break to announce their instant judgment on the "perjury" of anyone with whom they disagreed. They would not be able to understand that a cluster of television cameras could so capture the thought process of America as to be our nation's mass disseminator of information indeed our national educator, and, for lack of anything better, our national conscience Ugh!

But let's not worry about the long buried Madison and Hamilton. Let's worry about ourselves. A once noble political process is now beset with dry rot. Let's worry about how we begin to restore faith and respect in the institutions and the process that Madison and Hamilton created.