Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  These Democrats were still at work. Some combed their hair and straightened their ties. Most were quietly rehearsing little set pieces, like students before an exam, nervously teasing each other about performing on cue. Each had forty-five seconds to a minute—no time for fluffs or retakes. The entire operation had to be completed within ninety minutes, if they were going to hit the eleven o’clock local news in New Haven, Cleveland, or San Francisco. The easterners had to make a feed to Spacenet 1 and the westerners to West Star 4, two satellites each rented for half an hour for nine hundred dollars by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

  The room had the bare rudiments of a set: an American flag as backdrop and a television camera mounted on tripod and focused toward the flag at a spot where a “T” had been marked off on the carpet with gray masking tape. Each member would stand on the “T” facing the camera and a young woman holding a microphone who gave the cue line: “Congressman, your reaction?”

  “I’m new,” admitted James Traficant, a freshman Democrat and a burly former sheriff from Youngstown, Ohio. “I thought the first State of the Union address was a combination of Walt Disney and Cedric [sic] B. deMille, and I think this one is sort of Steven Spielberg. I honestly got to believe that with a $150 billion trade deficit and the president submitting a budget that supposedly is going to call for another $28 billion plus in defense spending, he’s out of touch with reality.”

  Some applause in the room, and the assembly line moved forward. Charles Rangel, a dapper black from Harlem with sixteen years in the House, gave Reagan a more practiced jab. “I think it was a great ending of a good class-B movie,” quipped Rangel, “but it doesn’t really take into consideration the problems of the homeless, the jobless, and the hopeless that we have in this country.” Sandor Levin of Michigan, older, thoughtful, more sorrowful, decried the “major gap between the rhetoric of the speech and the reality of the programs.”

  Timothy Wirth, a Democrat from a heavily Republican district in Colorado who was running for the Senate, cast himself as a middle-of-the-road ally of the president. “I think the president did just right in talking about the future,” Wirth said. “Making government work is clearly something we all want to do. The Pentagon has to be made to work just like every other program.… I think the president focusing on trade is right, as well. One job in five in the United States is now dependent on trade directly or indirectly. That’s an enormous change and we have to have free trade, open trade, fair trade.”

  As we walked away together, Wirth, a lanky, handsome six-foot-five political Gary Cooper, spoke confidently of getting good exposure in Colorado from his video feed that night and on the morning news shows. His press office had alerted television stations from Denver to Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, and Durango that they could “pull” in his piece from the West Star 4 satellite with their dish antennas. Wirth preached the gospel of video politics.

  “You’ve just gotta go up there and do your number,” he enthused. “You have to get over the embarrassment of doing it and feeling it’s hokey. What you have to realize is that in thirty-five or forty seconds, you have tens of thousands of people see you.” Then, with a widening grin, he chirped a new-breed epigram: “Having a press conference is a good thing. Having a press conference with a television camera is a better thing. Having a press conference with television cameras in double figures is absolute bliss.”10

  The Political Video Race

  Senate Republicans, long stuck in the underdog Avis position and determined to try harder, were the ones who changed the congressional video game. They pioneered the rapid shift in 1982 from old-fashioned radio “beepers” for the “mom and pop” radio stations to slicker, prepackaged, newsy satellite feeds. Their first attempt was clumsy and primitive (it all but missed the relay satellite)—but the sheer Republican chutzpa titillated the commercial TV networks.

  The only portable television camera on Capitol Hill (owned by Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska) was a relatively cheap six-thousand-dollar Japanese camera which produced film that was red at the edges, not of professional quality. Nor was the cameraman, Bill Livingston, a press aide at the Senate Republican Conference, who had studied filmmaking at the University of Southern California. On thirty separate cassettes, Livingston shot each senator responding to Reagan’s address in a Capitol hideaway. The film was bicycled over to the Russell Senate Office Building for editing, driven downtown to Pyramid Video for further processing, and finally relayed by microwave to a satellite dish farm in suburban Virginia for the “uplink” to the satellite. At every step, there were fumbles, delays and near-misses.11

  As a precaution, the Republican camera team began filming hours in advance, working from Reagan’s prepared text. They were filmed in the act by network camera crews. Phil Jones of CBS News caught the canned reaction of Rudy Boschwitz of Minnesota. “It’s only five-thirty, hours before President Reagan delivers his State of the Union address, but here is Senator Rudy Boschwitz giving his reaction,” was Phil Jones’s tongue-in-cheek report on the evening news—ahead of Reagan’s speech.

  It is amazing how rapidly the technology developed after that. Playing catch-up, the Democrats set up a makeshift media center in 1984 in the converted garage of a Capitol Hill townhouse bought for them by Pamela Harriman, an important Democratic angel. Now, both parties have multimillion-dollar media complexes and studios on Capitol Hill that are technological wonders. They are equipped with state-of-the-art videotape recorders, mixers, modulators, electronic switching and blending machines with massive keyboards to mix sight and sound, live interviews, and fancy graphics. Most proudly, they include the latest, $250,000 ADOs (Ampex digital optics machines), which can simulate 3-D, spin and flip pictures upside down or inside out, and project all the dazzling cut-ins that viewers have come to expect from modern TV. Both parties also have the capacity to do satellite relays from their own studios instead of clumsily carting film cassettes to a downtown studio.

  The Republicans, richer by far, still have the edge, especially on the Senate side. In the Hart Office Building, a few feet or a few floors from many Senate offices, the Senate Republican Conference has studios and film-editing rooms and dishes on the roof to provide satellite uplinks and downlinks. This means that senators can do live two-way press conferences, town meetings, and call-in shows on a toll-free 800 number with cable listeners from Maine to Montana, or Alabama to Alaska.

  “The technology gives us an enormous advantage,” enthused Bob Vastine, a former legislative director and now, in effect, the TV executive producer for the Republican Conference. “A senator can come into our studio from his office, four minutes away, and talk to a TV station in his state. The technology is fabulous. It can provide a real-time, live-news situation. What we are is a public relations agency for the Republican senators with our own broadcast bureau.”12

  In theory, the shots of senators in action, their town meetings, and press conferences are reports to voters, and that is why they are paid for by tax money, just like the congressional frank. But often they typify the blatant electioneering of Capitol Hill: senators or House members introducing bills they know will go nowhere, making floor speeches or inserting documents into the Congressional Record to impress the home audience rather than to persuade colleagues, running hearings that attract publicity but have little practical impact. Moreover, the line between reporting official duties and campaign publicity gets fuzzy when the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee picks up the tab for satellite time and when the most aggressive users of the Republican Conference video service in 1986 were the eighteen Republican senators up for reelection.

  The 1986 battle royal for control of the Senate demonstrated that video politics are important, but not infallible. A large class of freshman Republicans, many fairly new to politics in 1980 when the Reagan wave carried them into office, were struggling desperately to hang on to their seats. Satellite feeds were one of their principal tools in more than a dozen close races. De
spite the help of video politics, freshman Republicans lost in North and South Dakota, Alabama, Georgia, Washington, and Florida. But other freshman Republican senators survived in 1986, significantly helped by incumbent video politics: Charles Grassley of Iowa, Steven Symms of Idaho, Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

  “Those were competent senators who did their job well, worked hard at their grass-roots campaigns, and did a good job of organizing,” one Republican Senate strategist contended. “That wasn’t true of some Republicans who lost. They tried to make up for their failings with video feeds. You can’t take a mediocre operation and do a video feed a day and have it make up for a lackluster performance as a senator. But with a quality operation, good video politics can make the difference.”

  For the home audience, the critical question is, How many stations take the political bait of video feeds? Some television stations are skittish about being used by politicians, without labeling the true source of their video reports. In Florida, for example, only about half the state’s seventy TV stations used Senator Paula Hawkins’s satellite feeds—mainly medium-sized stations in Fort Myers, West Palm Beach, Pensacola, Jacksonville, and Orlando, and especially independent stations with no network affiliation. Big stations in Miami, and network affiliates in other cities, shied away. That fits a national pattern. Republican-produced feeds got cool reactions in urban California but went over well in rural Idaho and the Dakotas.

  “What we do is very controversial,” Bob Vastine admitted. “A lot of people say that it is practically immoral. The newspapers get very holier-than-thou. A lot of newspapers have attacked the use of our stuff by TV stations, saying, ‘You guys are using stuff that you didn’t film.’ The TV stations ought to turn on the newspapers and say, ‘You guys routinely use press releases you didn’t write.’ The TV stations are embarrassed about it, and often they won’t admit it even when they do use our stuff. They’ve been made to feel guilty by the print press.”

  New Breed vs. Old Breed

  Satellite feeds reflect a far broader pattern of change in the power game. For television has organically altered the face of American politics. It has changed the ways of Congress, produced a new breed of politician in Washington, and forced the old breed to change their ways or fade out. Boss Tube has both brought the techniques of the constant campaign into the operations of Congress and emphasized the generational cleavage between the yuppie politicians who grew up with television and the gray-haired, old-fashioned “pols” who have had to adapt to video politics late in life. Though there are exceptions, the generational divide between old and new breed occurred in the Democratic party in 1974 and probably four years later among House Republicans.

  Right after that pivotal election of 1974, Tim Wirth, a ringleader among seventy-five newly elected Democrats, got a phone call from House Speaker Carl Albert. They were a mismatch right from the start. As Wirth recalled, Albert offered congratulations and told Wirth, “ ‘We’ll be sending you some material in the mail that’ll cover all your health-care benefits and retirement benefits and parking privileges and so on’—as if that was why I’d run for the United States Congress.”13

  Then Albert told Wirth, “Oh, by the way, we’re having a little organizational meeting here in December and hope you can get back for it.” No hint of important doings, but Wirth smelled something. It turned out to be the House Democratic Caucus at which longtime liberal reformers such as Richard Boiling of Missouri were going to push their challenge of the seniority system, begun in 1971. Wirth and another Democratic freshman, Edward Pattison of Troy, New York, decided to visit Speaker Albert.

  When they asked the speaker how to organize their class to make it a force in the House, Albert suggested they leave the organizing to his lieutenants. But Wirth and company did it themselves. They raised $15,000 and set up their own office and staff to push their agenda: congressional reform and opposition to the Vietnam War. Rather than silently waiting to be called upon by their elders, they did unprecedented, upstart things such as organizing a class dinner and inviting the House leadership or having the temerity to request that powerful, previously unchallenged committee chairmen come answer questions from the freshmen.

  Their moves to curb the old barons made network news, although the freshmen were so new in town that Frank Reynolds of ABC misidentified Tim Wirth as Max Baucus of Montana, another trim, sandy-haired freshman from the West. Ultimately, the reformist putsch, led by Richard Boiling, Phillip Burton of California, and David Obey of Wisconsin and using the freshmen as shock troops, toppled three old-line chairmen, sending tremors through the House. All this happened before the freshmen Democrats had formally taken their oaths of office. At one gathering, Wirth was approached by Jamie Whitten of Mississippi, a Faulknerian figure first elected just before Pearl Harbor.

  “Here you’ve been on national television for the last three days, and you haven’t even been sworn in yet!” Whitten muttered with asperity. “And in all my thirty-three years in Congress, I’ve never been on national television once.”

  As so often happens, the political changes in the House mirrored changes in the country at large—especially the demographic movement to the South and West and into the suburbs. Many new-breed Democrats came from suburban districts and from western or border states. Politically, they cut different figures from old-breed Democrats representing traditional strongholds in the Old South or in big cities—veterans such as House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a classic Irish politician from just outside Boston, Danny Rostenkowski, a gravel-voiced Polish-American from North Chicago, raised in the machine politics of Mayor Richard Daley; or Charlie Rangel, a black from Harlem who won away Adam Clayton Powell’s seat in 1970 and quietly worked his way up the power ladder within the House.

  By capitalizing on the voters’ anti-Watergate mood, many freshmen Democrats won seats in traditionally Republican districts. Having run middle-of-the-road campaigns, they had much looser ties to party than the old breed, and they disdained political machines. “This brand-new bunch weren’t very much Democratic politicians,” commented Richard Boiling, a Truman Democrat who had been in the House since 1948. “They were running on the Democratic ticket, but they were managing their own campaigns. They were good on media. They had great success because of the Watergate situation. They were not dependent on party and were probably only really interested in being against the Vietnam War and for reform of Congress. Those two things held them together.”14

  In time, the new-breed Democrats differed with the old breed on economic policy. As the country swung conservative, they adjusted more easily than veteran New Dealers did. But more than issues marked the new breed apart; their backgrounds, their educations, their whole political styles were different.

  The new breed went for high-tech politics; they ran as independents rather than partisans. Once in Congress, they bypassed the old power ladder by playing the new game of video politics, and they advanced quickly. Half a dozen moved on to the Senate, and others took large public roles in the House. Even little differences were noticed: The old breed used to play gin together at the University Club in the evenings; the new breed, puckishly self-styled the Hardwood Caucus, played basketball in the House gym—afternoon, bipartisan games with Republicans. The generational divide reflected different habits and upbringings.

  “The new-breed guys were born in the TV studio, and the old breed were born in the political clubhouse” was how Chris Matthews, Tip O’Neill’s spokesman, put it. Matthews, at forty-one, is a curious blend of new-breed glibness and old-Irish roots in North Philadelphia. “It’s the difference between Atari Democrats, high-tech Democrats, and street-corner Democrats,” he went on. “The old guys worked their way up through the chairs, as Tip puts it. They’re very hierarchical. They keep their friendships. They keep their alliances. They dance with the girl they came with. They stick together. The new-breed guys play one-night stands. They’re always forming new coalitions.
They’re always worrying about their image and how to position themselves. They decide what image they want to project, and they position themselves to project that image.”15

  Roots explain a lot: Old-breed politicians such as O’Neill and Rostenkowski grew up in strong Catholic, ethnic enclaves that shaped their outlook and their dialect, while many of the new breed hail from WASP, suburbanite districts.

  “The new-breed guys have no imprint of their districts,” Matthews suggested. “Wirth or Les Aspin [of Wisconsin] could come from a hundred different districts around the country. The new-breed guys went away to college. They became unrooted. They were very mobile, and they are very national in their perspective. They don’t represent a neighborhood. The old-breed guys stayed home. Tip went to Boston College, and Danny went to Loyola. Tip O’Neill could only come from Cambridge. He fits the district. Danny Rostenkowski is a telephone-book candidate. You could open the phone book in his district, point to a name, and come up with someone like Danny. Not as smart, but with his attitudes and style. And I think that’s one reason why the older members have a greater instinct for the neighborhood.”

  In a witty and intriguing book, Tribes on the Hill, anthropologist J. McIver Weatherford compares the two types of politicians and their quite separate power games to tribal figures—shamans and warlords. By his account, tribal shamans are medicine men, witch doctors who win followers by seeming to dispense magic to protect warriors, end droughts, arrange love matches. “Unlike the chiefs and war leaders in a tribe, the shaman’s power derives not from the authority of his position or from the practical results which he produces, as much as from the confidence he displays and the emotions he can extract from his followers,” Weatherford wrote. “They publicize, play upon, and eventually help to allay the worst fears of the common people. They make real the threat of unseen demons, which they then exorcise. In the political world of Washington, shamans do not invoke the dread of evil spirits as much as the dreaded forces of world communism, the Mafia, monopoly cabals, the moral majority, or immoral minority.”16