YOU'VE READ ABOUT WHO'S INFLUENTIAL, BUT WHO HAS THE POWER?

By Richard Lacayo

Being President of the U.S., Commander in Chief of the armed forces and acknowledged leader of the free world must not be all that it used to be. All that, and Bill Clinton still doesn't qualify as one of the 25 most influential people in America? What ever happened to the prerogatives of office? Whom do you have to know to get on this list?

If that roll call identified the most powerful people in America rather than the most influential (a more subtle concept), then the President would be at the top. Power and influence generally go hand in hand. Anyone who has the clout to make decisions with the stroke of a pen has influence over the way we think and live. But some people, particularly Presidents, are more notable for the former than the latter. Clinton is powerful. He can propose how to parcel out the federal budget, stock the federal courts and decide which uncooperative trade partners get spanked. Influential is another matter. When he succeeds at governing, as he has (for now) with the budget, he's a man who doesn't so much shape national opinion as locate it, then wraps his arms around whatever he has found and holds on for dear life. What he sometimes lacks is those things that help define influence: a vision that inspires people to shed their doubts and follow his lead, an ability to connect with people and shape the way they look at the world. This is why the same man who can order troops to Haiti can still lose a floor vote in Congress on health care.

One other distinction between power and influence: a list of the most influential people in America reflects at least some of the nation's racial and ethnic diversity and includes both men and women. But for now, any inventory of the people who really pull the levers of power is topped by white men in suits. The President and the Federal Reserve Board chairman, the leaders of Congress, the chiefs of industry and communication--these are the men who can, in the end, still dictate where money is spent, how troops and workers get deployed, which programs and movies are distributed, who gets promoted and who gets laid off, which factories are closed and what happens to interest rates and insurance premiums.

To hold power is to have at your disposal blunt instruments. But without influence, power dies out at the end of its own channels of command. To have influence is to gain assent, not just obedience; to attract a following, not just an entourage; to have imitators, not just subordinates. Power gets its way (when it gets it). Influence makes its way. And in free societies it makes its way further.

Power without corresponding influence is by no means a problem that only Presidents run up against. In an age of pollsters and focus groups, when public opinion leads leadership, it is the occupational disease of modern politics. This is why almost none of the leading names in government make the cut as influentials. Something about the pursuit of power these days seems to discourage elected officials from putting forward the kind of well-defined character that wins disciples and imitators. Yet in casting off the title of Senate majority leader, one of the golden prizes of American political life, even Bob Dole, a longtime master of the power game, has in effect admitted that power is a prize of uncertain value. By itself, it doesn't provide a vision or a following. It is possible that a presidential candidate can succeed without the first. Without the second, he has a problem.

Newt Gingrich has been learning that bitter lesson this year. The Republican House majority he led into Washington two years ago was the most impressive phalanx to enter the capital since the British came to burn it in 1814. As spearhead of the revolution his party was supposed to effect, Gingrich equipped himself heavily, putting aside the seniority rules to install committee chairmen loyal to him and denying his assistance as a fund raiser to House members who broke discipline on important votes. No journalist's story about him was complete until it described him as the most powerful Speaker since Joe Cannon of Illinois in the early years of this century.

But as a onetime history professor, Gingrich wanted influence as much as he wanted power. His recommended reading lists, the way he urges on listeners his favorite futurists and management gurus, are the hallmarks of a man for whom it isn't enough to get people to do things his way. He needs them to see things his way too. But while Gingrich gained a following within a segment of the Republican Party, his message stalled with the larger electorate. Lately he's a one-man version of the helpless superpower. The Contract with America is a suspended agreement, and Gingrich has the kind of approval ratings only Timothy McVeigh can envy. It can't give Gingrich much comfort to recall that Joe Cannon ended badly, getting kicked off the House Rules Committee in 1910.

The bad news that status is perishable is the eternal lesson of Washington, where handling the big levers of power is no guarantee you won't slip through the trapdoor that opens anytime enough people pull those little levers in the voting booth. (Ask Tom Foley about that.) This is why so many people in that city prefer to seek influence, whether by virtue of the strength of their ideas or their access. The powerful are apt to look a bit careworn, while the winners of the influence game tend to be less accountable in public and for the most part more durable. Together they make up the permanent government of lobbyists, advisers, think tanks and legislative aides.

"We have probably the most organized opinion-molding and influence-mongering elites of the world," says political analyst Kevin Phillips. "The principal business in Washington is not so much decision making as influencing decision making." It's not the urge to hold power but the desire to nuzzle it--to whisper in the right ear or lead "the conversation" that the powerful attend to--that gives Washington its distinctive social landscape, where Arianna Huffingtons bloom along the edges of Gucci Gulch.

What about Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board? As the man most responsible for adjusting interest rates, the magic numbers that underlie the whole world of getting and spending, he can certainly be said to influence events. Refrigerator sales and presidential approval ratings move when he moves. But Paul Krugman, a professor of economics at Stanford, argues that because Greenspan has not translated his thinking into the published theorizing that directs further thinking among other economists, he has no following, no Greenspanians. "There are people [at the Fed] who have enormous power," says Krugman. "But they probably have almost no ability to change the way the world thinks."

To enjoy the spectacle of power in its full amplitude these days, you have to go outside Washington altogether. It is in the globe-spanning fields of entertainment and communications, where mere governments are just so many obstacles to the corporate game plan, that you see power with all its cellular phones blazing. When Rupert Murdoch wants something--the Times of London, a fourth network, broadcast rights to N.F.L. games, his own 24-hour cable-news operation--he gets it with a panache that is as entertaining, and as chilling, as anything in Citizen Kane. If Machiavelli were alive today, he would be reading Murdoch.

One of the unfair advantages of influence is that it's generally more popular than power. When influence is in the right hands, its effects can seem agreeable in a subtle sense of the word, as something we assent to, even when any such agreement may be partly a matter of being stupefied into submission. (This is what we mean by the influence of pop culture.) "When I exercise power, I immediately generate resentment and opposition," says Amitai Etzioni, chief promoter of the sometimes influential idea of communitarianism. "When I influence you, you love what I ask you to do."

So power is clout, like the thud of an iron heel. Influence is sway, like being rocked in a hammock. But like the grass in Carl Sandburg's poem, influence has a way of spreading until it overwhelms every bump in its path. Leonid Brezhnev had power. Andrei Sakharov had influence. Power: the FCC. Influence: Howard Stern. What this means is that influence generally gets the last laugh. Alexander Hamilton never attained the presidency. His philosophical antagonist Thomas Jefferson did. But the world has gone Hamilton's way. By most measures, the country we live in today more closely resembles the model he prescribed, with a powerful federal government and a national economy, than it does the decentralized republic of small farmers recommended by Jefferson.

In the latter part of the last century, the historian Henry Adams used to mortify himself for falling short of the power held by his forebears John and John Quincy Adams. But his meditations upon the destructive potential of modernity and the forces that shaped life in America--a place, he complained, where all become "servant[s] of the powerhouse"--became a 20th century guide for the perplexed. As for his contemporaries in the White House whose station he sometimes envied, such men as Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland, most of them look now like the mediocrities Adams knew them to be.

If you really want to appreciate the conundrum of power these days, just watch David Letterman on any night when he wincingly pronounces himself "the most powerful man in American broadcasting." Hearing the way he wraps that phrase in a cloud, its own microclimate of irony and gloom, who would be tempted to join him in the upper echelons? Whether he's the most powerful man in broadcasting is not even debatable. That title automatically goes to one of the network heads. What is certain is how badly he wishes he still held his old crown: most influential. That's what he was a few years ago, when his "stupid pet tricks" and Top 10 lists were undoing the conventions of the late-night talk show. But influence can lose its cutting edge, especially when others (see Jay Leno) begin to copy it.

Influential people are sometimes also powerful in the conventional sense. But in the organizational flow chart of American life, they are more likely to occupy some hard-to-fathom box off to the side. Dick Morris, the President's closely-attended-to political adviser, doesn't even have a formal title. And on the Supreme Court, it has been decades since the titular chief was the real power center. During the 1970s and early '80s, the years of Chief Justice Warren Burger, the court's magnetic field emanated from the direction of William Brennan, who figured out how to attract a majority of Justices to rulings that protected the liberal jurisprudence of the Earl Warren years from the conservative appointees bunching on his right.

Brennan succeeded by refining ideas. Those are the real coin of influence. The ones that rank as influential tend to be simple to grasp, endless in their implications, challenging to accomplish but still within the realm of possibility (for instance: Love thy neighbor). Perhaps one of the most influential men in American politics is the late Leo Strauss, the German emigre political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and '60s. His distrust of moral relativism, his deep skepticism about the benefits of the Enlightenment and his concern that the unchecked authority of reason would sabotage the cultural traditions that sustained civilization were absorbed by a generation of students and disciples. Some of them, including Irving Kristol and William Bennett, eventually became leading neoconservatives, the group that brought to American conservatism a measure of the intellectual legitimacy it had lacked for decades. Kristol's son William, the Weekly Standard editor and publisher and G.O.P. strategist, is another self-described Straussian.

As the example of Strauss demonstrates, influence does not necessarily go hand in hand with visibility. An influential man or woman can be like the vanishing point in a painting, invisible until you realize how much of the picture is determined by its position. Ask anybody these days to name the most prominent person in American business, and the likely answer is Microsoft chairman and CEO Bill Gates. Something about the combination of a glamour industry and an 11-figure fortune gets noticed. But think about the man whose business has had the greatest impact in changing how people actually live lately, and a better answer is Netscape Communications chairman Jim Clark. He attracted the right talent to transform the dormant power of computing by providing truly easy access to the Internet, which, before Netscape, might as well have been the Crab Nebula, considering all the trouble it took the average person to get there.

In an open and democratic system, the strength of a society comes from the close interplay between power and influence. In voting booths and in the marketplace, influential ideas and sentiments and tastes and visions will be detected and eventually embraced by those in power. Or they won't be in power very long.

--Reported by Ratu Kamlani/New York

With reporting by Ratu Kamlani/New York