When the Democrats returned to Washington on February 6, the House Republican minority leader, Michel, teamed up with the new minority whip, Dick Cheney, to propose a resolution opposing a pay raise. Wright was blindsided. The minority leader had previously assured him they would stand together to let the raise happen, but now he sensed that Wright was weak. Michel saw his chance and made a move to openly humiliate him. Wright attempted to dodge the GOP’s attack by proposing that the House adjourn, but more than half of the Democratic caucus voted against adjournment and he was defeated. The conservatives had backed the Democrats into a corner, and like their colleagues in the Senate they had to vote the raise down. Without Wright’s protection, they scrambled to save their own hides. “That blowtorch was just too hot,” quipped Charlie Wilson.31
On February 7, with the galleries packed with spectators, the House rejected the pay raise by 380 to 48. “I voted no,” the New Mexico Democrat Bill Richardson would later tell a reporter, “because I think I want to be re-elected to Congress. And secondly, because voting no means this gigantic ordeal is now over.” Leaving the chamber, the North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan observed, “This is everything the Hindenburg was without the gas.”32 Democrats like Vic Fazio, who had been out front defending the pay raise, felt that the Speaker put his colleagues in a dangerous bind and then left them to fend for themselves.
Mary McGrory of The Washington Post dubbed the entire sorry incident “Reagan’s Revenge.”33 The former president, who had struggled through his final years as he confronted scandal and a liberal rebound, had pushed forward a recommendation that caused chaos for the opposition party.
“Yippee!” Roy Fox screamed on air after hearing the news. “It’s terrific . . . the complete turnabout in Congress.” Fox told his listeners that it was “like a horse race, like extra innings in baseball.”34
“I think I had known for perhaps four weeks that the 50 percent thing just wasn’t going to wash,” Wright told reporters. “By the time I advocated [voting on a smaller increase], it was too late.”
Gingrich was uncharacteristically silent about the vote. This was not simply because he supported the raise. Rather, he was enjoying watching from the sidelines as the Speaker took this political blow. His silence ensured that the media would focus on Wright’s incompetence instead of turning this into a story about partisan attacks. And Gingrich’s tactics were catching on. This skirmish showed that an alternative media world, centered on talk radio, could shape the news narrative. Unlike Wright, Gingrich could see the synergistic power of talk radio and the conservative grass roots. The attacks were effective because they pinpointed and exaggerated real flaws within the political process and then characterized those abuses as problems caused by one party as opposed to being a symptom of a broken system.
The pay raise fiasco left Republicans with yet another issue to use against Speaker Wright and the Democrats. A corrupt party, led by a corrupt Speaker, working in a corrupt institution, had attempted to give themselves an obscene salary increase. The people had fought back and won. And House Democrats felt that they were left to foot the political costs for this fumbled effort, and without an actual raise to show for it.
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One of the people most excited about the pay raise fiasco was Lee Atwater, a terrifying prospect to House Democrats. Atwater became the RNC chair after Bush’s election, and being in his crosshairs circa 1989 was a serious matter. Notwithstanding his hand-wringing about the slash-and-burn campaign that he put together in 1988 against Governor Dukakis, Bush kept Atwater on his party’s political team. It was not that much of a surprise. After all, the new president had shown in the thick of the campaign that he had no problem getting down and dirty. Bush’s own background as the former chairman of the RNC—during the height of the Watergate scandal (1973–1974)—encouraged Atwater and other conservative operatives to believe that, unlike Carter or Reagan, Bush would go all in during the midterms. As vice president, he had campaigned in forty-seven states during the 1986 midterms, proving his chops as a politician who loved the game. “I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts he’ll be a very active participant in the [1990] off-year elections,” predicted the White House press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater.35 As soon as he took on the position, Atwater transformed the RNC headquarters on First Street in Washington from a sleepy bureaucratic building into a bustling hub of political skullduggery. The RNC had once been, as Atwater’s biographer wrote, the type of place where people obtained jobs if their parents had made large donations to the party. Atwater had re-envisioned the RNC, recruiting some of the most talented staffers in the business, young twentysomethings who were hungry, ruthless, and inspired to take action. The atmosphere was now electric.
The charismatic Atwater, arriving at work each morning, would gregariously bark out hellos in his “good old boy” accent while vigorously shaking hands as though he were running for office. Atwater even changed the Muzak system in the elevators, replacing the tired classic pop with gritty rock ’n’ roll.36 From the perch behind his desk, where he usually sat with his feet up as he strummed his electric guitar and drank a can of hyper-caffeinated Jolt soda, Atwater and the Republican National Committee sensed they had the opposition on its heels as the 1990 midterm elections approached. From his methodical reviews of the city newspapers and television broadcasts, Atwater believed that Wright’s troubles made for great copy in a media industry that was always searching for another Washington drama. The fact that so many Democrats had voted against Wright on this pay raise indicated to the shrewd Atwater that he was becoming a drag on his party, and the strategist prepared to pounce. “With Atwater at the R.N.C.,” one Democrat admitted ruefully, “we expect methodical attacks on Democratic members. Private investigators will be used by Republican challengers, who will be programmed to make Atwater-style campaigns.”37 Wright heard from trusted sources that Atwater fully supported Gingrich’s attacks on him.38 In other words, Gingrich and Atwater were pursuing the same grand strategy: take down Wright, and take back the House.
Atwater had gained a powerful ally when Ed Rollins took over the moribund National Republican Congressional Committee. The first person who called to congratulate Rollins was Gingrich, who appreciated what he had done in Reagan’s 1984 campaign. “We’ll give you a five-million-dollar bonus if you get us a majority,” Gingrich half joked in their brief conversation. “Safe bet,” Rollins replied.39 Atwater, Rollins, and Gingrich fed off one another even if they did not directly coordinate their activities. All of them saw that Speaker Wright was the major liability for the Democrats. Rollins, who looked like a bulldog, was the driving force within the GOP to make Wright a centerpiece of the party’s midterm campaigns. A populist Democrat turned Republican and the mastermind behind Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory against Walter Mondale, Rollins was a tough campaign strategist who knew exactly how to package messages in the new media environment. “The ugly scenes of Capitol Hill,” the syndicated Washington Post columnist David Broder concluded about this convergence of circumstances—the weakened Democrats, the resurgent GOP, an activist electorate, and a House Ethics Committee deep into its investigation—“could be a prelude to more panic politics to come. A House scared enough of its shadowy reputation to abandon a pay increase is certainly scared enough to ditch a speaker many of its members now regard as a campaign liability.”40
And so the plan became official on February 22, 1989, when the Republican National Committee announced that Speaker Wright would be the centerpiece of the Republican midterms, still twenty-one months away. “Target No. 1,” Rollins said in a simple yet direct statement to reporters. “My responsibility is not governing. My responsibility is to go out and try to knock out as many Democrats as I can. And obviously the guy I’m going to make Target No. 1 is the Speaker,” he warned.41 The findings of a National Republican Congressional Committee poll back in June 1988 had proven to Rollins that targeting Wright and Demo
cratic corruption was a winning strategy. The NRCC pollsters first informed voters that the Democrats controlled the House (45 percent of respondents did not know this) and then explained that Wright and thirteen other Democrats were being investigated by the Ethics Committee. When the NRCC then asked those polled whether they would vote for Republicans to replace the Democratic leadership, 51 percent said yes.42 Following Rollins’s comment about “Target No. 1,” the Democrats immediately felt the shifting winds and the electoral risks they took by defending the Speaker. And the tactics in this political fight were about to get nastier. As the pugnacious Rollins responded to a reporter’s question, “I promise you today that I won’t steal, murder, lie, cheat or pillage, but other than that I think just about anything goes.”43
Their commitment to tougher partisan warfare was strengthened in response to the Senate confirmation battle over President Bush’s nominee for secretary of defense, John Tower. A former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the sixty-three-year-old was respected by many on the Right for his hawkish positions on military spending and his strong relationship with the defense community. He was the Republican who had replaced Lyndon Johnson in the Senate in 1961. Since retiring from the Senate in 1985, Tower had been teaching at Southern Methodist University.
Although Sam Nunn, the hawkish Democrat who chaired the Armed Services Committee, predicted a smooth confirmation process, Tower came under fierce attack. With Bush in the White House, Senate Democrats were eager to flex their muscles. They portrayed Tower as a hard-drinking womanizer who could not handle the job and as someone who, as a result of his committee chairmanship, was too close to defense industry contractors to serve as an ethical or effective secretary of defense. Democrats received an assist when the conservative activist Paul Weyrich expressed doubts as to whether the senator possessed the “moral character” necessary for the job. Since his first encounter with Gingrich at the 1975 campaign workshop in Milwaukee, Weyrich had emerged as a towering figure in conservative politics; his Heritage Foundation was one of the most influential right-wing think tanks, and he founded a number of other conservative organizations and campaign operations that supported candidates and pushed social causes. When someone from the Right with Weyrich’s stature raised questions about Tower, Republicans and the media listened. The blitzkrieg of attacks that followed—most of them based on rumors coming out of Washington, as well as an FBI background report on Tower that described a “pattern of alcohol abuse,” which Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina released to the press—killed Tower’s nomination. Nunn backed off his support too.
Gingrich could see where this was all heading, and the Georgian had just the right warhead ready to launch. Gingrich warned that “the Sam Nunn rule on the chain of command has to apply” to the Speaker. “One thing you can count on,” Gingrich promised. “On the morning after the Tower vote, we are going to ask Nunn, ‘If you couldn’t stomach Tower at the Department of Defense, how do you feel about Jim Wright being second in line to be president?’”44
Just forty-eight days into his presidency, on March 9, President Bush suffered a humiliating blow when the Senate rejected Tower’s nomination by a vote largely along party lines. The vote was “conducted in almost funereal calm” as each senator sat silently while the final count was tallied.45 Everybody wanted the process to end. Fifty-two Democrats and one Republican (Kansas’s Nancy Landon Kassebaum) voted against Tower’s nomination. Forty-four Republicans and three Democrats (Texas’s Lloyd Bentsen, Connecticut’s Christopher Dodd, and Alabama’s Howell Heflin) voted in favor. “The nomination of John Tower to be Secretary of Defense is not confirmed,” announced Vice President Dan Quayle. Only after an uncomfortable silence did the senators stand up and quietly walk to the chamber door.
This was the only time in American history that a new president had seen his cabinet nominee rejected, and the first time in thirty years that a sitting president’s cabinet choice had gone down to defeat. Republicans charged—Weyrich and his conservative activists notwithstanding—that Senator Tower had been defeated through a partisan campaign of character assassination. The Senate minority leader, Dole, decried the outcome, saying of Tower, “After what we’ve done to this good man, maybe we ought to hang our heads. He knows this is politics. He knows he’s being shot down because he’s a Republican and there are more Democrats than Republicans.”46 John McCain, in the middle of his first Senate term, instantly drew a connection between Tower and the ethics investigation of Wright: “What about the Speaker of the House, what about dealings with savings and loan institutions or book contracts? The specific allegations against Jim Wright are much more specific than they are against John Tower.”47
Gingrich, viewing all this on his television set, fumed. Senate Republicans had bungled the confirmation, and Democrats had placed another notch in their belt. Now Gingrich was especially eager to see the Ethics Committee report, scheduled to be released soon, so that he could help his party exact its revenge. As one of Gingrich’s partisans framed it, “the Tower stuff” will hurt Wright most. “It takes ethics and raises it to a higher level. . . . House Democrats will now have to be as tough on him as Senate Democrats have been on Tower.”48 Senate Democrats had taken out a high-ranking general; now Republican soldiers needed to even the score.
If there had ever been a chance that House Republicans would be merciful to Wright, that time had passed. And with the RNC planning to use the Speaker to drive down Democratic majorities, the decision about Tower motivated many Republicans to accept Gingrich’s logic. Why not fight by destroying a person’s character? Even Democrats could see what was on the horizon. Speaking to a reporter, the Montana Democrat Pat Williams predicted that “there will be an orchestrated assault on the Speaker and the Democrats by Republicans,” because the confirmation fiasco “makes Republicans want to get even.”49
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Enter Gingrich stage right. In the spring of 1989, the Soviet Union was crumbling, and President George H. W. Bush did not feel that he could wait long to fill the post of secretary of defense. He desperately needed to appoint someone whose confirmation would be speedy and successful. He turned to Dick Cheney, who had only recently taken over as minority whip when Trent Lott won election to the Senate. At forty-eight years old, Cheney was the second-highest-ranking figure in the House GOP. Rollins and Atwater had been grooming this tough, right-wing conservative to be the next Speaker of the House. In contrast to Tower, Cheney was known in Washington as a cerebral straight arrow (though he had flunked out of Yale University after partying too much). His hawkish right-leaning political bona fides were unimpeachable, and his defense of the administration’s actions during Iran-contra and of officials like Oliver North had permanently endeared him to the conservative sector of the caucus. As word of President Bush’s selection reached Capitol Hill, all three Democratic House leaders praised the choice. They were eager to dispel notions that their rejection of Tower had been wholly partisan. “Dick is a very serious and committed conservative and he’ll be fairly tough minded about a lot of issues,” commented the House majority leader, Tom Foley. “I think it’s a splendid choice, a man of great experience and capacity and ability and I would hazard a guess that there’ll be an early and unanimous confirmation.”50 Just one week and one day after Tower’s rejection, the Senate approved Cheney by a vote of 92 to 0.
The successful appointment of the nation’s seventeenth secretary of defense created a big vacancy in the House Republican leadership team. Minority whip was a powerful position, responsible for counting votes, lobbying undecided members to support or reject legislation, and keeping accurate track of the vote count. The majority and minority whips were considered important liaisons between the top party leaders and the rank and file. If you became whip, you joined the inner circle.
With Cheney’s seat still warm, Gingrich seized the opportunity to take his job. For years, Gingrich had conducted hi
s attacks from the position of a bomb-throwing maverick. His status had risen much more than Republican leaders were comfortable acknowledging, given that they were echoing his message about the corruption of House Democrats. The campaign against Speaker Wright had boosted his political standing, which was the only reason he had a fighting chance for a leadership position to begin with. Now, after having gained national attention as a result of the Ethics Committee taking up his charges against Wright, the Georgian wanted legitimacy.
But Gingrich would have to compete to win the job. One of the earliest contenders was the California Republican Jerry Lewis, who was a fund-raising juggernaut and a master politician. Lewis had started his career on the San Bernardino School Board, he had recently been elected chairman of the Republican Conference, and he was seen as next in line for the job, given that he was third in the official Republican leadership hierarchy. Moreover, Lewis appealed to a broad coalition of Republicans. He was more moderate than many of his colleagues on social issues like abortion, and he had effectively used his centrist reputation to position himself as an agent of legislative compromise. Like his fellow freshman class member Dick Cheney, Lewis had secured a seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee only two years after being elected to the House in 1978, a position that enabled him to win support from a large number of colleagues who became indebted for his assistance obtaining earmarked funds. His relationships with his fellow Republicans were further strengthened by the committee assignments he arranged for while serving as a member of the “Committee on Committees.” Charismatic and handsome, with a great mane of shiny black hair, Lewis was completely at ease in front of the television cameras. Gingrich would have trouble taking him on.
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