There is first and most famously, of course, Texas Sen. Phil Gramm’s announced “Dickey Flatt” test. Flatt, according to Gramm, is an upright, unassuming, hardworking friend of his, and the senator/candidate suggests that when being asked to vote for any new government program, he always asks himself whether it is something he thinks Dickey Flatt ought to be made to pay for and/or something that would make sense to Dickey. This kind of test has its value when you have been nailed into Washington for too many years, and a lot of Beltway people employ a variation on it, as I have from time to time myself. They conjure up some relative, friend or acquaintance they think of as being decent, God-fearing, worthy and pre-eminently normal and then ask themselves whether the program or activity under consideration makes sense from that person’s point of view. As in: “Should Cousin Elizabeth really have to subsidize the distribution of condoms to third-time offenders?”

The problem with this test is that although it certainly catches plenty of dumb, outrageous things in its net, it also catches some that are not. Not every national policy or practice or cultural value that makes no sense from Cousin Elizabeth’s or Dickey Flatt’s point of view deserves on that ground alone to be junked, and not everything they approve of is, by virtue of that fact, indisputably wise or beneficial. Still, this quirky, personalized standard is probably at least as useful as the more time-honored ways of testing the merit of what is before us against either the supposed mandates of the past or the supposed perils of the future.

In respect to the past, people will strip-mine the Constitution, The Federalist papers and other expressions of the Founders, all too often reading these very literally for their own immediate purposes and missing, if not actually trashing, the principles involved. They will thus end up with a version of constitutional-ism that, say, has those estimable 18th-century gents enthusiastically sanctioning the stashing of AK-47s in your 20th-century child’s junior-high-school locker. The future-test people, on the other hand, who tend to judge the issues before them today in terms of long-term prospective impact, rely primarily on the .journalists and statisticians and think tank prognosticators for their certitudes, so they are probably even worse off. They ask you to accept a scenario of what some program will do or how some social trend will play out that has about as good a chance of coming true as your contractor’s estimate did the last time he told you how much it would cost and how long it would take to remodel your front porch.

Now for the Newhart Test, which I take from one of the comedian’s best-known telephone monologues, the one on tobacco, Newhart could expose the essentially crazy nature of any cherished national custom, institution or idea simply by causing it to be explained in its own terms to someone who presumably had not heard of it before. In the tobacco phone call he pretended to be the London head of the West Indies Company taking a call from an excited Sir Walter Raleigh in America, who was trying to sell him on this terrific new thing he had discovered. The one-sided conversation went like this: “What is it? A special food, Walt? . . . Not exactly? . . . It has a lot of different uses?. . . You shove it up your nose. . . and it makes you sneeze, huh? I imagine it would, Walt. . . Or you can shred it up, put it on a piece of paper and roll it up, heh, heh, heh, and. . . don’t tell me, Walt. Don’t tell me. You . . . stick it in your ear, right Wait? . . . Oh, between your lips. Then what do you do to it, Walt? You. . . ha, ha, ha. . . you set fire to it! And you inhale the smoke . . . Say, Wait, we’ve been a little worried about you. . . "

I cannot think of any public-policy or social-values issue we have been arguing about this year that would not benefit from this kind of treatment. It is a variation on the what-would-the-Martian-think? way of reducing over-elaborate subjects to their true outlines. But it is a more useful one, in my view. I want to hear, for example, Newhart’s end of the conversation when someone–Newt Gingrich? Bill Clinton? – explains the workings of democracy as reflected in our campaign-financing laws to him. I especially look forward to the part about little gifts and big gifts and who can give what to whom and when. I also am eager to hear his responses while being explained the evolution of Bill Clinton’s Bosnia policy and the way the balanced-budget amendment was supposed to work.

But above all I look forward to hearing him get an explanation of our legal system as revealed in the O.J. trial. “They are trying to figure out who killed this man and woman, right, Marcia?” And then the rest will come. My guess is that the high point will be the part about juries and the Magna Carta and the 10 dismissed jurors and the explanation of things that they are told to pretend they never heard, or perhaps, the part about how Kate Kaelin was changed from a friendly witness to a hostile witness for the prosecution. It will be wonderful, and I would suspect. terminal to our legal system as we know it.

The thing about the Newhart Test is that you can do it yourself at home. Don’t cheat or cook the material or try to reach a predetermined result. You don’t need to. Just try very hard to understand the program or practice under consideration. This is not, by the way, a test for efficiency so much as for sanity. And it works. You will be surprised how much flunks.