Warren: Dubious of Government? Visit the Library

President Obama should have invited Mary Dempsey to the State of the Union address. Along with other guests, who were used as symbols of a skewed tax system and the need to retrain workers, she could have made another point: government can work.

Dempsey is the Chicago Library commissioner, who is stepping down after an inspiring 18-year run. She is leaving after a remarkable transformation and amid uncharacteristic stumbles by Mayor Rahm Emanuel over library hours as the Missile and the crucial public employees’ union duel like Somali warlords.

The presidential campaign underscores the visceral distrust many have toward government. Republicans use that word as a pejorative. Even Obama took a few whacks during his Tuesday address. But take the city’s library system, please.

When Mayor Richard M. Daley and Dempsey teamed up, the system was a mess of 86 outlets, most of them in tiny rented storefronts. It was marked by a dilapidated catalog system and helter-skelter budgeting, had no strategic plan or computers, and its 1,400-person work force was willing but often not that able (a lack of professional training).

Old hands thought that Dempsey would be part of a City Hall “Irish mafia” and loyal to the mayor, not the library. Soon, word spread that she was going after incompetent workers and was pro-branch libraries. She won workers over by cleaning up the circulation system, supporting technological innovation and transforming the library’s image.

It is now a national showcase. Daley built 57 new libraries, and the system’s 79 locations served 11 million patrons last year. Book circulation is no longer the main goal, with electronic and other transactions the priority as libraries morph into creative community centers amid the much-chronicled decline in American civic engagement.

At the heart of the renaissance are about 800 workers, most of them unionized, workers who appear to care deeply, defying some stereotypes. They, too, are our much-derided “government.”

But the free-floating rage exacerbated by bombastic political rhetoric is notable and unfortunate, even if one stipulates government excesses and inefficiencies.

“The tragedy from a public-policy standpoint is that an important and credible idea — that we should be skeptical of what government can accomplish — has been completely distorted into this belief that government is inherently a bad thing, and therefore that less of it must be better,” said Charles Wheelan, a journalist turned senior lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

“Government is just how we act collectively to do things that would be hard to do alone — like building roads, keeping airplanes from crashing into each other, doing basic research on cancer, fighting terrorists,” said Wheelan. “These are not inherently bad things.”

Polling data show that the venom is directed largely at the federal government. But most people have little contact with the federal government beyond the Postal Service, Medicare and Social Security and can’t explain what many agencies do, said Robert Blendon, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who directs the Harvard Opinion Research Program.

“They are largely angry that their middle-class lives have not gotten better,” he said. “So they blame it on someone who is removed from their life because they can’t answer why their kid, who may be coming out of the University of Illinois, can’t find a job.”

Mitch Daniels, Indiana’s popular Republican governor, gave his party’s response to Obama’s address. He’s smart, tough and focused on metrics as he applies private-sector methods to public policy. He thinks government is often a wasteful and inefficient monopoly.

But he has conceded to me that it just can’t be replaced everywhere. You can’t double child welfare caseworkers, as he did, by having those who need them look in the Yellow Pages. He dealt with rising traffic deaths by adding troopers.

All the government-bashing is frightening and bewildering to Robert Michael, the founding dean of the Harris School, who has trained many for government roles. Yes, it’s far from perfect, but “without it, we’d be in far worse shape,” he said.

On Wednesday, the Missile introduced Brian Bannon, the chief information officer at the San Francisco Public Library, as the new library chief. Both he and the mayor clearly have their own ideas for the future.

Of course, they could do worse than maintain the qualitative status quo left by Dempsey, especially in an era of declining resources.