cover image Worldly Power

Worldly Power

Scharff, Edward E. Scharff. Beaufort Books, $0 (305pp) ISBN 978-0-8253-0359-3

Is it any wonder that the government gets bogged down, considering that it is built on a swamp? Armed wth wit and a keen sense of the absurd, Boston Globe Washington reporter Trausch attacks the climate, the bureaucracy and its verbiage, along with self-important, humorless politicians who suffer from Potomac Fever, which impels them to search out sensational issues to champion. Trausch skewers the presswhose hierarchy, she observes, mimics the political oneand lobbyists, such as the watermelon advocates who conduct seed-spitting contests on the Capitol lawn. Perhaps her suggestion for a streamlined government under a figurehead president, to be shipped from one city to another at three-year intervals, is no more farfetched than many of the procedures currently employed in Washington. (May 22p)