Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  Corporate millions pour into well-oiled lobbying campaigns, and corporate money underwrites the most elaborate social occasions and cultural events. Except for Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company, Pamela Harriman, who runs fund-raising dinners and issue salons for the Democratic Party, and Esther Coopersmith, a bustling political and social activist from nearby Potomac, Georgetown hostesses have not been able to keep up with the social largesse of big business. In the past decade, corporations have openly become the big entertainers. Many politicians used to shy away from open connections with business, but the political climate has changed.

  “You just don’t hear about the Georgetown cocktail party the way you used to,” Jerry terHorst, former press secretary to President Ford and now a vice president of Ford Motor Company, remarked. “It’s still there but not as important as it once was. One reason is that an awful lot of corporate leaders can put on a party and have important people come. What they found out was that people in Washington don’t mind coming to a party given by a corporate CEO. It’s not regarded as being too bourgeois.”21

  “The most elegant dinner parties these days are given at the National Gallery,” echoed Sandy McElwaine, a well-connected free-lance writer. She was alluding to the skill of Carter Brown, the National Gallery director, at persuading corporations such as AT&T, Occidental Petroleum, Mobil, and Ford to finance major art shows. In 1985, Ford spent $3 million to $3.5 million to bring a collection of art treasures from the homes of the British aristocracy to the gallery and to underwrite much of the opening-night swirl of parties that featured Prince Charles and Princess Diana. The arrival of royalty and British peerage put democratic Washington into a froth. It brought out more mink and glitter than people had seen since the first Reagan inaugural. On one evening, there were forty-two simultaneous black-tie dinners. Ford billed it as a soft-sell, proud of the cachet and entrée it had won.

  Bill Regardie, a bright, brassy, vain, California-casual (though a Washington native) entrepreneur, has capitalized on the new Washington glitz and wealth. In 1980, he unveiled Regardie’s, a glossy magazine pitched “to the lifestyles of the rich and famous.” Six years later, the forty-five-year-old publisher pegged Regardie’s circulation at fifty-seven thousand. A feature issue in September 1985 listed what Regardie’s called Washington’s one hundred richest people, thirteen with fortunes of more than $300 million, including Katharine Graham, Jack Kent Cooke (owner of the Washington Redskins football team), Joe Allbritton (chairman of Riggs Bank), and the J. Willard Marriott family of motel fame.

  Regardie himself is full of theories, some apt, some hyped, about Washington, a city which he says has moved into Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave, a modern economy based on service, research, and information.22 Regardie has clearly picked up the new beat of a political city, where David Stockman quit as budget director and signed a $2.4 million contract for a kiss-and-tell insider’s book, The Triumph of Politics. And where other Reagan aides or campaign strategists set up multimillion dollar influence-peddling operations. In 1984, Reagan’s campaign slogan, pitched at the Olympics, was Go for the Gold, but obviously others took that slogan commercially. Bill Regardie’s own self-indulgent mockery of the city hangs on a corner coatrack, the official Regardie’s jacket: silver satin, styled like a car-racing team jacket, embroidered on the back with Money, Power, Greed.23

  This is obviously no longer the relatively quiet town that Mo Udall found in the 1960s. It’s a new game. It’s as if the Old Washington had the cool, deliberate pace, the quiet sociability, and the predictable carom shots of a game of billiards played in a smoke-filled pool parlor. While the public occasionally hooted disapproval of the old game, at least we understood the shots, we knew the few important players and we could follow the action. But the reform movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s insisted on blowing the smoke and the back-room deals out of the system.

  And paradoxically, reform opened up a razzle-dazzle political circus. The old pool-parlor game is now more like a street carnival, with roller coasters, whirling rides, shooting galleries, and a roomful of modern video games, with their gyrating spaceships, rumbling sound effects, and changing scenarios. The action of the new game is much faster and much harder to follow, both for the players and those who watch.

  Boss Tube Replaces Boss Tweed

  Television is the other major revolutionary ingredient in the new power mix. By now, it is a familiar cliché that television has largely replaced the political parties as the middleman between candidates and voters. In effect, Boss Tube has succeeded Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, Boss Crump of Memphis, and the Daley machine in Chicago. Television brings politicians right into the living room and lets voters form their own impressions, rather than voters having to depend on what local party bosses, union leaders, church spokesmen, or business chiefs say. The campaign impact of television is undeniable. For many candidates it has replaced going door to door.

  And it has also profoundly affected the Washington power game. It has eroded still further the cohesive force of the two parties in Congress, feeding centrifugal forces. Television fuels the independence of individual politicians, and that compounds the problems of congressional leaders in rounding up majorities. The trend in television politics is for candidates to build their personal mass appeal and political organizations, bypassing the regular party apparatus. Once they arrive in Congress, candidates who get elected as political Lone Rangers are less responsive to party leaders.

  Television has altered other power relationships, too. In the old days, Arthur Krock, chief correspondent of The New York Times in Washington and a premier columnist from Franklin Roosevelt’s era to Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, used to host an informal weekly luncheon table at the Metropolitan Club, one of those elite male establishments. When George Tames, the veteran Times photographer, retired in 1985, he told me that up to twenty top government officials would show up at Knock’s regular lunch table and swap gossip, news, and off-color stories. No senior columnist today commands a similar table. But, illustrating the change, 134 senators and members of Congress showed up one night in October 1985 for Ted Koppel’s ABC Nightline. Invited in advance, they were vying for a chance, first come, first served, to appear on camera for a minute each—just for the privilege of asking questions of Soviet and American policy experts on the outcome of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva.

  Television has become the new reality in American politics—in 1960 for the president, in the mid-seventies for other politicians. It has drastically expanded the arena of action. In the past few years, the commercial outlets for political news have mushroomed. On top of established network coverage, change came rapid fire: The MacNeil-Lehrer Report opened on public television in 1975, ABC’s Good Morning America started in 1975, ABC’s Nightline went four nights a week in 1980, and that same year the Cable News Network was born. A year later, the Sunday morning news shows got a shot in the arm with ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley.

  In 1979, the House began live telecasts of its floor debates. Howard Baker, before retiring as Senate majority leader, kept urging the Senate to follow suit, as a way of getting cameras to focus on the main action rather than on the publicity antics of individual members. “If you don’t let them [the senators] do anything on the floor,” Baker commented, “they do it on the Capitol steps and somehow there’s always a TV camera out there.”24 The Senate followed Baker’s advice eighteen months later.

  Quite clearly, television has offered a fast track to those with political sex appeal and a knack for personality politics. It has opened the door to celebrities from other walks of life: Jack Kemp, the former Super Bowl quarterback for the Buffalo Bills football team; Bill Bradley, the New York Knicks basketball Hall of Famer; astronaut John Glenn; and regional media personalities such as Jesse Helms, not to mention a Hollywood actor such as Ronald Reagan.

  Stephen Hess, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution, contends in his book The Ultimate Insi
ders that network news coverage actually reinforces the established leadership. In 1983, for example, he found that some, though not all, of the Senate leaders and potential presidential contenders got the heaviest coverage on the network evening news and Sunday shows and in five major newspapers.25 Indeed, the sharpest, most telegenic leaders can use TV to enhance their power; Senate Republican leader Bob Dole is a prime example. But Hess’s survey showed that in 1983, some major committee chairmen got less media play than senators with less formal power who were public celebrities, among them John Glenn and Gary Hart. Both were presidential contenders, but their news-celebrity status came not from the slow patient route of seniority and old-fashioned inside politics, but from their skill at the media game or their notoriety.

  Moreover, another study in Hess’s book made clear that publicity-sharp middle-rank or junior senators (Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Larry Pressler of South Dakota, and Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio) were doing extremely well on the newer television shows.26 On the House side, some backbenchers have clearly used video politics to magnify their influence.

  “The changes in the media,” observed political scientist Michael Robinson, “have given younger members and maverick members more political visibility—and hence greater power—than ever before.”27

  The most talented of the new breed have charm and wit on television; some have become substantive legislators, too. This group combines inside savvy with flair for the media game. What put them on the fast track was the happy combination of being telegenic and pithy—the ability to simplify issues and fashion thematic messages. John F. Kennedy, a lackluster senator impatient with inside politics, was the first to market glamour politicking on TV. Some current presidential aspirants (Jack Kemp of New York), welcome Kennedy comparisons. This is not to say that Kennedy and others have lacked substantive achievements; merely that video appeal was central to their rise to prominence. To keep up in the power game, even old-timers such as House Speaker Tip O’Neill have had to learn how to play the game of video politics.

  In Congress, the first wave of new-breed politicians who had grown up with television and found it their natural medium was the Democratic class of 1974—bright, articulate, energetic politicians such as Timothy Wirth of Colorado, Thomas Downey and Stephen Solarz of New York, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Robert Edgar of Pennsylvania, Chris Dodd and Toby Moffett of Connecticut. That class of 1974 changed the temper of the Congress, for they were upstart, independent voices, irreverent toward the congressional Establishment. Television helped them get ahead and put their mark on issues. Then in 1978, a big class of new-breed Republicans arrived to be sworn in on the new regular live coverage of the House. Some, such as Newt Gingrich, an outspoken go-getter from Georgia, have used media skills to build their influence.

  With the exception of Kemp, none of the new-breed Republicans has garnered the limelight more dramatically than Phil Gramm, a supremely self-confident Reaganite economist from Texas. Gramm is no stereotyped, blow-dried, airhead TV politician; he is not a glamour boy, but a bespectacled ex-professor with thinning locks. Gramm shot to prominence by combining a shrewd sense of timing, brilliant legislative packaging, and a knack for self-promotion and selling his ideas on television. He came to the House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1978. Just three years later he played a central role in the Reagan budget package by leading the defection of southern conservative Democrats to support Reagan’s budget. In 1983, he switched parties and got elected to the Senate as a Republican in 1984. A year later, as a freshman Senator—indeed as the ninety-seventh-ranking senator—he emerged as a prime architect (with another freshman Republican, Warren Rudman of New Hampshire) of the highly controversial plan to balance the budget by 1991 through mandatory annual reductions in the deficit. Gramm’s media skills got him wide political notice and legislative results.

  Rather caustically, some old hands branded the flashy new-breed legislators as “show horses” who chase publicity while the grubby details of legislation are hammered out in private by the “workhorses.” And in fact, Pete Domenici, the Senate workhorse budget chairman, had to rework the Gramm-Rudman plan considerably to do what Gramm and Rudman intended. But in fairness, the most effective newcomers offer more than the blow-dried look. They have developed substantive expertise. What has aroused the jealousy of their elders is the refusal of newcomers to sit back quietly and behave like novitiates.

  Television helped break up the policy monopolies of established committees and throw open the power game. Overshadowing the grinding “inside” spadework of bill drafting in committee, television offered shortcuts and a showcase. Kemp and Gramm are prime examples of those who learned how to influence Congress and market their ideas with their colleagues through the media. Over television, they sent messages to the voters and generated grass-roots interest that ricocheted back to Congress. Thus, television offered a marketplace for all 435 members of the House and one hundred Senators to become policy entrepreneurs. That is one major reason why Congress seems so unruly today.

  “Congress has become atomistic,” remarked Charles Schumer, a rising young Brooklyn Democrat. “In the House we are 435 little atoms bouncing off each other, colliding and influencing each other but not in a very coherent way,” he remarked to me. “There used to be much more structure. But now there is no bonding that holds the atoms together.

  “In a way, this reflects American society,” Schumer suggested. “Our society has become more atomistic. In fact, the thing that has struck me most about Congress is how the House of Representatives accurately reflects the country, both in terms of philosophy and structure. The other thing that has amazed me is not just how good the people are in Congress, but how the institution is screwed up. I think the pendulum has swung too far away from strong leadership.”28

  Actually, the pendulum has begun swinging back the other way. Tip O’Neill was a strong House speaker, the strongest since the legendary Sam Rayburn died in 1961. Both Howard Baker and Bob Dole were effective Senate majority leaders. All three were able—with great difficulty and only on a few occasions—to assert leadership over the atomistic forces in Congress.

  But Charlie Schumer’s observations are worth pondering by people who regularly scorn “the mess in Washington.” I think he is correct that the House of Representatives does mirror the country well. It is true that Congress has its scoundrels and dullards. But its periodic paralysis and its brawling stalemates do not prove the incompetence or laziness of its members. Often congressional immobility reflects the lack of clear public consensus on major issues. What’s more, as an institution, Congress suffers less from too many crooks and dodos, than from too many bright, hyperkinetic, ambitious politicians clamoring for attention and tripping over each other as they compete for airtime, trying to give voice to the competing impulses within the American electorate.

  The more open power game provides strong incentives for politicians to play highly individualistic politics. Except for times of genuine crisis, or when some institutional deadline is imminent, both House and Senate often bog down in immobility or mere muddling through. But that is less the fault of poor politicians than it is of the sprawling dispersion of power, of the multitude of competing interests, and of the lack of cohesive forces powerful enough to pull members to work together.

  3. The Soft Side of Power: Visibility, Credibility and Power Surfing

  This place depends very heavily on personal relationships and personal credibility.

  —Senator Warren Rudman

  Integrity is power—I’d put integrity first.

  —Bryce Harlow, aide to President Eisenhower

  One wintry afternoon, I asked Tom Eagleton, the veteran Missouri Democrat nearing the end of eighteen years in the Senate, what was the most important element of power in Washington, and he shot back without hesitation: “Being in the majority.”1

  Of course, Eagleton was right, as far as he went. It matter
s greatly who is president, who is speaker, which party is in the majority in the House and Senate, and who are the principal committee chairmen. Eagleton, who had seen a Democratic Senate majority slip away to the Republicans, explained what being the majority meant: fixing the legislative schedule, having first crack at setting the agenda, picking the top committee staff, running hearings, arranging foreign trips, being called to the White House.

  But formal titles of power confer less automatic authority than people imagine. That is an enduring lesson of American politics, but one that is especially true in the fluid arena of the new power game. Across the country, all too often people equate position with power, and overlook the soft sides of power: the intangible ingredients that add up to influence and authority. The formal structures of government are only the scaffolding of power. They do not account for its human chemistry. High office offers leverage, but politicians can either squander or exploit that potential. No power is absolute or guaranteed, for at its heart, our politics is a contest of persuasion. In that contest, the intangibles have always been important, but never more so than in the era of television, which plays up the politics of personality and where impressions and appearances are so crucial to a politician’s power.

  From recent experience, we know that one president (Ronald Reagan) appears strong and comfortable with power, while another president (Jimmy Carter) seems ill at ease with power and comes across as uncertain and strained. We have seen that a speaker of the House (Tip O’Neill) can be assertive and potent while another (his predecessor, Carl Albert) can seem almost invisible; that some committee chairmen can work their will while others flounder; that as budget director, David Stockman drove the policy process, while his successor, James Miller, was a secondary player whom congressmen kiddingly called “Miller Lite.”