



When readers write, they usually write to tell me I don't know my head from a hole in the ground, as in: Anyone who knew anything about anything never could have said what you said about so-and-so or such-and-such.

Let me put a stop to that ugly rumor right now. I do know some things.

I know, for example, how to get the most out of a pipe wrench. If you've got a fitting that won't budge and you've got a little room to work, slip a length of pipe over the pipe-wrench handle, walk out to the end of the extension and start pushing. A pal taught me that one day six years back when I was trying to rip out some plumbing put in place half a century earlier, and it works.

I also know how to cut carpet. I know what tools to use, how to tack the carpet down and make it fit snugly, baseboard to baseboard, wall to wall. I learned that just recently, after I had bought a house that had wall-to-wall carpet in a big workroom, where it makes no sense, and not in some hallways, where it does make sense. My wife thinks I'm a carpeting genius.

Okay, you say, maybe you're a handy guy to have around the house, on certain occasions, but what do pipe-wrench extenders have to do with the price of eggs? More to the point, how does knowing about pipe-wrench extenders excuse all those boneheaded things you write?

The truth, of course, is that one thing has nothing to do with the other. But the more time I spend in Washington, the more I'm convinced they ought to. Some core of basic mechanical knowledge is missing in the national capital, with a result considerably more important than the high home-repair bills of America's recent political luminaries.

Maybe I'm wrong on this. Maybe Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy and Bob Dole are handy as the dickens. Every now and then I'm startled to find out that one of these people actually does do something other than talk and scheme.

Federal Reserve head Paul Volcker ties his own fishing flies, for instance -- a fact that doubled my trust in fiscal sanity when I learned it. Reagan chops some of his own wood at the ranch; maybe he roams the White House during his off-duty hours, looking for leaky faucets to repair. Maybe Mondale has as much intuitive mechanical sense and as much love of exercising it as the guy who taught me about pipe-wrench extenders -- like Mondale, a Minnesota-born Swede. But I doubt it.

Washington isn't in that kind of business. We're an issues town; we're into the big picture, the broad overview, megasolutions. What gets fixed here gets fixed with bills and resolutions, executive orders and presidential directives, not with ceiling tape, ball peen hammers and a couple of good boots to the generator.

A Sunday morning news-show panelist who asked the distinguished Secretary of This or That how he would go about fixing a deep gouge in the dining-room wall would be labeled a hopeless nut and driven out of the golden circle of TV panelists in short order.

There does happen to be a good way to fix such gouges: Cram them with plaster of Paris, which is adherent, quick setting and incredibly hard when dry. But woe, woe, woe be to him or her foolish enough to ask the question.

I have to admit, though, that if I ever did get a slot on one of those shows, I would be mighty tempted to ask just that. (That's one among many good reasons why you'll never see me on Meet the Press.) The answer wouldn't tell hoot about whatever immediate issue had brought the distinguished secretary to the studio, but it might say a lot about the secretary's ability to break problems down to their crux. If nothing else, home repair gets you near the fundamental nature of things.

How can you fix a badly clogged federal budget if you've got no idea how to clean out a drain trap? How are you going to bring the trade deficit into some kind of sane balance if a ratchet-wrench set -- and its possible applications -- is as foreign to you as kudzu is to an Aleut?

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