Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  “You have a different kind of women in Congress now than a couple of decades ago,” observed Ann Lewis, former political director of the Democratic National Committee. “They are far less likely now to be widows carrying out the family legacy and far more likely to be pursuing careers of their own. Take someone like Barbara Mikulski, who has just won a Senate seat in Maryland. She is sought after by other Democrats as a fund-raiser for their campaigns.”36

  The growth of women’s political activism has spread into other fields: Congressional liaison for executive agencies, lobbying, public relations, journalism. Women lobbyists set up their own association in 1975 and now claim eight hundred members, the most prominent of whom are Anne Wexler and Nancy Reynolds, drawn from the Carter and Reagan White Houses and now with one of the best-known lobbying firms in town. Women journalists, barred from the National Press Club, flocked, in the 1970s, to the rival Washington Press Club, which gained several hundred members; the National Press Club agreed to a merger in 1985. Public relations has become such a promising field for women that Sheila Tate, former press secretary to Nancy Reagan and now a top public relations executive, told me that she worries that it may be turning into a “pink-collar ghetto for women.”

  “Washington is still a male-dominated city,” Tate said, “because power is at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Those are earned offices. But one half of the staffers on the Hill are women. That’s created a need for more women lobbyists. Women are better communicators than men.”37

  Of course, the most dramatic symbolic changes have come at the peak of government. From a single token woman in earlier presidential cabinets, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan have each had two or three women in their cabinet. Reagan’s precedent-shattering step was naming Sandra Day O’Connor the first woman on the Supreme Court in 1981. But an even larger breakthrough for women was the selection of New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1984. I remember standing on the floor of the convention hall in San Francisco when she first appeared as the nominee and feeling the throbbing excitement throughout the hall, especially among the women there.

  “Ferraro’s presence on that platform and in those campaign debates sent a message to a whole lot of women that they could do it,” Ann Lewis declared. “She made the possibilities real. All of a sudden, we realized what we had been missing.”

  “Forgetting the outcome and the problems she had, it broke the ice,” agreed Nancy Reynolds, a lobbyist and a strong campaign fundraiser for Republicans. “It showed that a woman vice-presidential candidate is viable, and it’s an open field now. You hear women mentioned all the time now.”38

  But even though women are pressing into new areas and male politicians recognize that they have to include some women at high levels, the power game is still a male-dominated world. If women are no longer exceptions, some old arithmetic still applies: For example, Lynn Martin, vice chair of the House Republican conference, observed that while women comprised fifty-one percent of the committee staff aides in the House, “seventy-five percent of those making $40,000 or more are men, and seventy-four percent of those making $20,000 or less are women.”39 Women are edging into more of the top jobs on the personal staffs of senators but they still have trouble penetrating the inner core of the White House staff. Anne Wexler, who was the liaison with outside political groups in the Carter White House, was an exception.

  What is more, there are still policy and political arenas where men prevail almost totally, or only grudgingly let in women—among them defense, intelligence, arms control, the senior White House staff, and political campaign strategy. That point was politely but firmly impressed on me by Katharine Graham. As one of the most powerful women in the country, Kay Graham is no upstart feminist at seventy, but like many a forceful woman, she expects men to accept women more fully as equals.

  “It’s true there are a lot of women in good jobs,” she said. “We have Nancy Kassebaum in the Senate and Elizabeth Dole in the cabinet.” Then she paused and went on, both an edge and a sadness in her voice: “But I want to tell you, it’s still a very male-chauvinist town, this town. And this has no impact on me anymore, but I think it’s very hard on spouses who come down here from places where they’ve had jobs and they’ve mattered on their own. And they get to dinner and they absolutely are treated like somebody’s wife. I mean people say, ‘What does your husband think?’

  “I just came back from an arms-control seminar up at the Wye Plantation,” she went on, “and the administration people there were kind of applauding themselves on their press relations. I looked around the room and there wasn’t a single woman there. There was no woman. I thought, this arms control is still a very male area.”40

  Jeane Kirkpatrick, who stirred excitement in late 1984 by making an unsuccessful run at capturing one of the three top foreign-policy jobs, has bristled publicly at unequal treatment in the press. Her complaint is symptomatic: The press refers to Henry Kissinger as “Dr.” Kissinger while she is “Mrs.” Kirkpatrick, though both have doctorate degrees.

  In the rough-and-tumble game of campaign politics, women have had a hard time penetrating into the inner sanctums. One major reason is that fund-raising is a difficult nut for them to crack. Men have both made more money and have the habit of dispensing it. Pamela Harriman, widow of the late New York Governor Averell Harriman, has been a major force in raising funds for Democratic Senate candidates, helping them capture a Senate majority in 1986, but she is exceptional.

  Talking about the keys to greater political clout for women, Nancy Reynolds commented: “The big secret is getting people to give and raise money, and that’s where women have always been weakest. Money is the mother’s milk of politics. Fund-raising for politicians, which has been an age-old habit for men, has been distasteful for many women. Raising money for charities is one thing, but they don’t like raising money for politics. They find it hard to ask for. It’s easier for men to tap the money-giving networks.”41

  Equally tough to penetrate is the hard-boiled work of campaign strategy and consulting. There are only a few women political pollsters, Linda DiVall for Republicans and Dottie Lynch for Democrats, and only a handful of political consultants and strategists.

  But the 1988 presidential campaign brought a few breakthroughs: Susan Estrich, a senior campaign aide in the presidential bids of Ted Kennedy in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984, became national campaign manager for Governor Michael Dukakis—the first woman to hold the top campaign job for a major national candidate. Robert Dole used Linda DiVall for poling and Mari Maseng as his press secretary, and George Bush tapped Barbara Pardue as press secretary.

  “The presidential campaign remains the last locker room of American politics,” commented Ann Lewis, a top political consultant who gave advice to presidential contender Jesse Jackson. “But this is the year when we have finally seen the locker room door begin to open. It’s still very tough. Barriers remain. Even candidates who have been right on our issues, like George McGovern, have lagged in practice. There are teams and coaches with not nearly enough women in the inner circle.”42

  Ann Lewis’s “locker-room” image fits the power game in Washington. She and Sheila Tate and Kay Graham are right: Washington is still a male town, and football is its game. I have friends who like to compare politics to poker, with its high-stakes betting, its bluffing and its uncertainty. Others think of it more as a horse race or a steeplechase.

  More often, politicians turn for analogies to those quintessentially American pastimes, baseball and football. Barry Carter, a former national security aide and now a law professor at Georgetown University, sees baseball as the sports metaphor for politics: the confrontation of pitchers and batting stars balanced by the intricate choreography of fielding plays or hit-and-run situations. Perhaps, but any city that cannot sustain a major-league baseball team is not a baseball city at heart. The Washington Senators packed up in 1972 and moved to Minnesota.

  Wa
shington is a football city, and football is the right metaphor for its politics. Washington Redskins games are sellouts every year, in Super Bowl seasons or when the team is way down in the league. In fact, one of the most coveted perks in Washington is a good season ticket to the Redskins games or, better yet, an invitation to the private box of Jack Kent Cooke, the Redskins’ owner. Football thrives as a link between the two cities of Washington: the solidly middle class, overwhelmingly black central city and the largely white, upper-middle-class political city which resides mostly in the bedroom suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. The Redskins provide the missing symbol for a community that sprawls from the District of Columbia into two states, lacking a single mayor or governor or any other unifying institution.

  What’s more, football fits the rhythm and soul of the power game. Political Washington is a city with a terribly short attention span, quick to shift from one political melodrama to another, more given to the game-of-the-week mentality than the quiet patience of a baseball season with 162 games. Moreover, the action of the power game more nearly mirrors football. Both are contact sports.

  Consider the action: Baseball offers a neat linear focus, pitcher versus batter, the crack of the bat, a fielder nimbly gathering the small white globe against a field of green, the race between his throw and the batter streaking to first base. To be sure, a bases-loaded home run or the flying spikes of a stolen base offer high drama. But generally, baseball presents a more orderly test of skills than the jarring mělée of line play on the gridiron or the crunch of ballcarrier and tacklers that evokes the brawling confusion and partisan wrangling in Congress or the bruising clashes between White House and Capitol Hill. In football, as in politics, the pass patterns are tricky; action everywhere at once.

  Consider, too, the very rhythm of play. In baseball, a rally can erupt in any inning, a low-scoring tie game can stretch into extra innings with no time limit, or a game can simply peter out in the ninth. But in football, especially pro football, the length of the game is set and the script is usually predictable. As millions of television viewers can testify, you can skip a lot of the early action so long as you’re glued to your set just before halftime and late in the fourth quarter. Then, the offense goes into its two-minute drill, with frantic time-outs, commercials, worried consultations between coach and quarterback, and the inevitable injuries, all building the suspense. In those final seconds, everything goes razzle-dazzle, and those moments determine whether the fans go home in delirium or dragging in despair.

  That mirrors the pace of the Congress, slogging through inconclusive months of tedium on the budget, some dull midfield maneuvering on the MX missile, diverted by the distraction of a hostage crisis. With the onset of the summer recess, the tempo quickens, commencing the political razzle-dazzle. Both parties, both houses go into their two-minute drills. New budget and tax formulas emerge. Compromise is in the air. Then a slow period in August and early September, building up to the political equivalent of a frantic fourth quarter. In the melodramatic windup, the president threatens to shut down the government. From the sidelines comes the magic play. Somehow a deal is struck in the final seconds. Congress and the White House play right on the brink. Like football players, they gamble on winning in the final crunch and time their best plays for the deadline.

  Government, of course, is a serious game about policy, but as the football metaphor suggests, a lot of it is for show, and the action is fairly well established, year after year. The repetitive gambits and maneuvers make it easier for us spectators to study the players and the playing fields, in order to understand the action better.

  *Constant dollars are economic figures adjusted for inflation, figures in current dollars are not adjusted. Outlays are actual government funds spent, but obligations are funds authorized for spending, perhaps in later years. The baseline is the cost of the current level of government services and programs, and the out-years are projections for future years. Launchers are bombers and missiles; throwweight is the overall payload a missile can heave aloft, and RVs are re-entry vehicles, or the nuclear warheads and decoys on a ballistics missile.

  7. Congress and the Constant Campaign: Survival Politics and the New Breed

  The campaign is never over.

  —Robert Squier, media consultant

  Well before the five-hour hearing began one September morning in 1985, there were the telltale signs of a major media event. Unusually large crowds of young people lined the columned hallways of the old Russell Senate Office Building to wait for seats. Several television crews set up video monitors and sound equipment in the hallways. The hearing room quickly filled to overflowing.

  Inside, it was almost impossible to move. The press tables were jammed. Capitol guards, in starched white shirts, manned the doors. The audience, which had come for a show, was in a boisterous mood at the prospect of the Senate Commerce Committee scrutinizing the seamy, sinful side of rock music. Senator Jack Danforth, the committee chairman, warned against applause and demonstrations. The hearing, he said, was not to consider legislation but merely “to provide a forum for airing the issue.”

  The opening shot was the protest of Susan Baker, the wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker, and Tipper Gore, wife of Senator Albert Gore, Jr., of Tennessee, among others, against “porn rock,” an escalating trend of violent, brutal erotica in rock music (heavy metal, in the argot of its fans). Sexually explicit songs, Mrs. Baker told the committee, were “glorifying rape, sadomasochism, incest, the occult, and suicide” with palpable and pernicious effects on the young. Mrs. Gore, speaking for the Parents Music Resource Center, carefully stopped short of advocating censorship. But she urged record companies voluntarily to label record albums, the way cigarette packages are labeled, with warnings of “violent and sexually explicit lyrics.”1

  Later, there was a rustle at the appearance of Dee Snider, a heavy-metal singer-composer who was a particular target of the mothers’ criticism. Snider wriggled through the packed crowd in a faded-jeans outfit, a thick shower of stringy long blond curls tumbling well over his shoulders. At the witness table, he jauntily peeled off his jeans jacket to expose a tattoo on his left shoulder and a sleeveless black T-shirt promoting Twisted Sister, his rock group. Bare-armed, he faced the somber-suited senators.

  “I don’t know if it’s morning or afternoon,” he said, peering through dark glasses at the dais. “I’ll say both: Good morning and good afternoon.” He flashed a toothy grin at the nearest television camera.

  Snider defensively declared himself a husband, a father, and a Christian. Then, he proceeded to accuse Mrs. Gore of “character assassination,” of distorting his lyrics, and of spreading an “outright lie” by claiming that a T-shirt marketed by his group showed “a woman in handcuffs sort of spread-eagled.” His song “Under the Blade,” he contended, was not a parable of rape in bondage but a tale of fear on the operating table, an interpretation that met skepticism from Senator Gore.

  Frank Zappa, a rock voice from an earlier, tamer rock era, arrived in jacket and tie, and with lawyer at his side warned against censorship. What the mothers wanted, he cautioned, would be like “treating dandruff by decapitation.”

  On the network news that night, the star was none of the above. It was Senator Paula Hawkins of Florida, a petite, politically canny and assertive grandmother, who made drug abuse, child abuse, missing children, and pornography her cornerstone issues in the Senate. Hawkins was not a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, but she has a nose for media events and a knack for attracting publicity that enabled her to upstage the committee. Through senatorial courtesy, Senator Hawkins arranged to be invited and appeared, eye-catching and camera-catching, in a fire-engine-red suit.

  Several other senators made predictable statements of moral outrage, but Hawkins had a shrewder gambit. She had her statement, too, but knowing that words were no match for pictures, she came armed with some near-irresistible visuals crafted by the graphic-arts staff of the Senate Republican Confer
ence. On her own television set, plopped on the dais, she played a couple of sizzling porn-rock videocassettes—one of them “Hot for Teacher” by Eddie van Halen—to demonstrate for one and all that the new raunchiness of rock made Elvis Presley seem as innocent as a choirboy. And she waved aloft the blowup of a lurid, blood-dripping male figure and crude four-letter slogans on the album cover of a heavy-metal group called W.A.S.P.

  Hawkins’s performance caught the play on two national networks. But she and her handlers were taking no chances; to be sure of solid coverage in her home state of Florida, where she was engaged in a tough battle for reelection, Senator Hawkins provided “video feeds”—electronic press releases, videotapes of her in action. They were fed to more than thirty Florida television stations on a satellite hookup arranged through the Senate Republican Conference.

  Indeed, according to Susan Baker, Paula Hawkins had been the catalyst behind the hearing in the first place. “She contacted me before any talk of a hearing surfaced,” Mrs. Baker recalled. “The idea came from her.” Senator Hawkins’s political instincts were sound. It was a hot topic with wide audience appeal, because one side of the argument was outraged and the other side was titillated.2 The six and a half minutes of network news time given that evening to the Senate’s porn-rock hearing was more coverage than the massive congressional efforts on the budget deficit crisis received in a full month. C-Span, the cable network that covers congressional proceedings, got more requests for copies of the porn-rock hearing than anything else it has covered since it began operating in 1979.

  Making political hay out of a televised hearing on a newsy topic is hardly a revolutionary idea. Since Senator Estes Kefauver’s investigations of organized crime in 1951 and the Watergate investigations of Richard Nixon more than two decades later, many leading politicians have used televised hearings to catapult themselves to national prominence. Kefauver made himself a presidential contender partly by his crime probe; the Watergate hearings made Howard Baker, a Tennesseean like Kefauver, a national political figure. Even tapping celebrity entertainers to excite more popular interest is not an original angle—it was one of the many techniques used by Senator Joseph McCarthy during his postwar Communist hunts.