Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  It would be wrong to leave the impression that new-breed politicians are all talk and little legislative action. That might fit Gingrich, or Paula Hawkins and other one-term Republican senators who lost in 1986, and a goodly number of House members. But the best of the new breed have become effective legislators as well as communicators—none more influential and effective than Dick Gephardt of Missouri, a serious presidential contender in 1988.

  By many estimates, Gephardt has a rare blend of the skills of both inside and outside politics, better than John F. Kennedy at a similar stage in his career. More than any other new-breed Democrat in the House, Gephardt has come to personify the generational divide—on substance as well as on tactics. He can not only play the outside game of video politics but also work the inside game of coalition politics that is vital to making Congress function. On television, he has been an articulate Democratic spokesman on national issues; in Congress, he has often been at the heart of prolonged negotiations over tough, intricate, technical legislation.

  If Congress is like high school, then Dick Gephardt is a classic student-council president: all-American good looks, intelligent, thoughtful, committed to public service. Under his sandy, close-cropped hair is a straight, sincere, direct gaze of the eyes, a firm jaw, and an open, receptive face.

  Gephardt has volumes of energy and patience. He is a born organizer, a born leader, who manages to be everywhere at once and yet seems to do it all with ease. He is so purposeful, so results oriented that it is hard to imagine him just whiling away the time. Yet one of his favorite pastimes is listening to St. Louis Cardinals baseball games on the radio. He is such a fanatic that he will often go out in the evening and sit in his darkened car in the driveway listening to a play-by-play account because the car radio gets better reception than the radios in the house. Once or twice, he has even gone in the announcer’s box to try a bit of play-by-play announcing himself.

  Like other new breeders—he is forty-seven and was first elected in 1978—Gephardt has been eager to see his generation take over leadership. He has pressed the generational divide against older leaders. In late 1984, for example, Gephardt and Tony Coelho of California organized meetings of younger House Democrats, which became gripe sessions against the House Democratic leadership. That angered Speaker O’Neill. Gephardt even let out word that he might challenge Jim Wright for the speakership after O’Neill retired; wisely, Gephardt decided against a confrontation. He made an easy peace with O’Neill, whose wrath fell on Coehlo, but Gephardt later clashed with Wright on tax and protectionist issues. Organizationally, Gephardt went after and got the number four leadership position, Democratic caucus chairman. That was typical of Gephardt, for he is an agent of gradual change rather than sharp revolt. He is a compromiser, a coalition builder who waits for the best openings.

  A favorite complaint of the old breed is that the new breed lack finesse at one-to-one politicking, at melding clashing factions in order to pass legislation, at sensing where the winds are blowing, at counting votes accurately ahead of time. They make an exception of Gephardt. “He’s the best vote counter and vote getter of that group” was the admiring appraisal of Kirk O’Donnell, a Tip O’Neill lieutenant. “He’s someone who has an excellent sense of the House. I think he’s a good vote counter because he’s a good listener, and people respect his political instincts, his political judgment. He is not an ideologue who is going to allow an issue to get in the way of his personal relations with other members. But Gephardt is a lot tougher than people think.”22

  Gephardt is emphatic that the generational divide among Democrats is a matter of substance as well as technique. The two generations, he told me as we walked from his office to the Capitol one morning, are defined by economic experience: the older Democratic leaders shaped by the searing shock of the Depression and mass unemployment, the new breed forged by the high inflation and the stagnant growth of the 1970s.23 That has left Gephardt and his peers wary of big deficits and renewed inflation, quick to combine with conservative southerners on economic issues and trimming programs. While Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs were being passed, Gephardt reminded me he was an alderman in St. Louis, and he remembers the federal regulations being too intrusive and restrictive. That left him not opposed to federal programs, but inclined to go sparingly and give more leeway to local governments.

  Typical of the new breed, Gephardt is a centrist, both by temperament and by geography. Coming from a border state like Missouri makes him a natural bridge between North and South. On the budget, he has pressed Snowbelt liberals to accept more cuts than they wanted, but he has also gotten Sunbelt conservatives to help protect safety net programs.

  In 1981, when the Democrats were floundering before Reagan’s onslaught, Gephardt combined with Timothy Wirth and others to develop a Democratic economic policy. They focused on ways to make American industry more competitive by funding research and education and promoting high-tech industries. More fruitfully, Gephardt joined Senator Bill Bradley as cosponsor of the plan to cut tax rates and close loopholes that was adopted by Reagan and passed by Congress in 1986.

  In the spring of 1987, Gephardt made his trademark tough protectionist legislation—an amendment requiring tariff reprisals against countries, such as Japan, if they did not reduce excessive trade surpluses with the United States. He showed his mastery of the inside power game by rallying 201 House Democrats, despite the combined opposition of Speaker Jim Wright, Majority Leader Tom Foley, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Danny Rostenkowski, plus the Reagan White House and Republican leaders. Gephardt’s amendment won 218–214, a testament to his pull among peers.

  “If the amendment was not offered by Dick Gephardt, we would have beaten it,” Rostenkowski told my New York Times colleague Jonathan Fuerbringer. “Dick Gephardt is a popular young man.”24

  Gephardt had mastered the technical details of his legislation, and he spoke with passion. His amendment was doomed in the Senate. But more costly to Gephardt, he was knocked, mainly by the Reagan White House and in the press, for what was seen as a blatant pitch for support from organized labor with a harsh protectionist formula that risked starting a disastrous trade war.

  Generally, Gephardt’s stand on issues and his tactics mark him as new breed—less ideological and diehard than the old breed. For example, in 1985, Gephardt, fearing some southern Democrats were getting ready to bolt the party after Reagan’s landslide reelection, took the lead in forming the new Democratic Leadership Council, a group of rising politicians, mostly from the South and West, to help keep them in the party. With a core group of Gephardt, former Governor Charles Robb of Virginia, Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, and former Governor Bruce Babbit of Arizona, this largely new-breed group deliberately set out to show independence from the old, established, northern-dominated party leadership. Its hallmark was new-breed-style television campaigning and organizing and new-breed issues.

  The formation of this group and Gephardt’s leadership role, moreover, underscored his turning increasingly from the work of governing and the inside game of Congress to the outside game of the constant campaign, this time at a higher level—for the presidency. By 1985, three years ahead of the 1988 election, the campaign pulled Gephardt away from his legislative duties in Washington sixty percent of the time, more in later years. He was gone so much in 1987 that his press secretary, Don Foley, remarked in mid-May, “Last week, Dick was in Washington three and a half days, and that was a major exception,” because his trade amendment was up for a vote. Otherwise, he would have been on the road even more.25

  “Narrowcasting” with Targeted Mail

  Obviously, television is the glitzy, visible tip of the power game. High-profile new-breed politicians such as Dick Gephardt and Jack Kemp have parlayed their skills at video politics into presidential candidacies. But for most congressional politicians, the cornerstone of the politics of survival and the constant campaign is free congressional mail.

  The mail frank is exploite
d to the hilt by the new political breed. In 1984, the flow of mail generated by Congress reached the staggering volume of 920 million pieces, much more than double its volume just four years earlier. That means an output of 3,836,142 pieces of free mail on an average working day—for the 240 days that Congress is in session each year.

  One senator alone—identified by aides as Pete Wilson, a California Republican—racked up $3.8 million in mail subsidies in 1984, nearly ten percent of the Senate’s entire mail budget. Getting elected to the Senate in 1982, Wilson had spent about $7 million; as a freshman senator, he was spending more than half that on mail.

  The free-mail frank was born in the first Congress and has been controversial nearly ever since. Congress abolished it for twenty years in 1873, but it came back; in 1973, Common Cause, the public-interest lobby, filed suit to abolish the practice on grounds that free-mail privileges for incumbents violated the constitutional rights of their challengers. But in 1983, the Supreme Court upheld the privilege. Politicians from opposite poles decry the practice. “An appalling amount of public money is spent sending out mailings that are nothing but political puff pieces,” complained North Carolina’s New Right Senator Jesse Helms. Morris Udall, the liberal Arizona Democrat, warned of “evil consequences” unless limits are put on congressional mail.

  Technically, the intent of the frank is to let officeholders report on their “official business, activities and duties.” The rules forbid soliciting political support. To curb the most obvious self-promotion, Congress has some rules: No mass mailings 60 days prior to an election; on mass newsletters, the word I can be used no more than eight times per page; and there can be no more than two personal photos per page. Even so, there’s no disguising the real purpose of franked mail. It shows up in the roller-coaster patterns of usage volume—it rises in election years and falls in off years. In fiscal 1981, for example, the congressional mail cost just over $50 million, and it doubled in 1982. By 1983, it dropped to about $70 million, and then jumped to $110 million in the 1984 election year. In 1985, the figure was $80 million and in 1986, the target was $144 million. Only congressional embarrassment during the battle to reduce the deficit forced 1986 mail costs down to $96 million.

  The role of mail in the permanent campaign is very different from the role of television. Television is broadcasting; it reaches the widest possible audience with a general message. Old-fashioned newsletters, sent to every voter in a state or district, do the same, but newer, more sophisticated types of direct mail employ what politicians call narrowcasting—segmenting voters for special messages. The ultimate narrowcast is the candidate meeting one voter, face-to-face. The next-best substitute, the experts say, is direct mail targeted at subgroups, after finding out what they think and how to reach them.

  The secret is to tap the modern technology of mass marketing and yet convey a personal touch. “As with everything in politics, it’s image that counts, and the objective is to convince as many people as possible that I, the officeholder, am aware of and concerned with the issues that are important to them,” said David Himes, a small specialist for the National Republican Congressional Committee.26

  “We used to hear that congressmen got in trouble for not answering the mail,” observed Marty Franks, Executive Director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “But nowadays, it’s not so much answering mail; it’s generating mail to impress people. You can tailor a letter. Say you’ve gotten a lot of mail on aid to the contras in Nicaragua, pro and con, or on a balanced-budget amendment. Say, then, there’s a political development, a report about Nicaraguan guns showing up in Colombia, or you vote for the Gramm-Rudman bill to balance the budget. One of your aides drafts a letter to the people who wrote in: ‘Knowing of your interest in a balanced budget, I thought you would like to know that today I voted for Gramm-Rudman.’ Or, ‘Knowing of your interest in the contras, I thought you would like to know about this development.’ You use the mail to keep in touch. You use the mail to remind people that you agree with them.”27

  Targeted direct mail was pioneered by conservatives frustrated by what they saw as the liberal slant of major media outlets. One of the first was Marvin Liebman, a former Israeli terrorist and later a Communist who converted to Catholicism, became a friend of William F. Buckley, Jr., and organized the Committee of One Million to support Nationalist China. Liebman used that list of a million names for other issues in the 1950s and 1960s. Later, he shared the list with a protégé, Richard Viguerie, who developed mass-fund-raising potential for Senator Jesse Helms and for New Right causes. In the mid-1970s, Bill Brock, as chairman of the Republican National Committee, moved the party heavily into direct mail to raise money, with phenomenal success, rebuilding the Republican apparatus from the top down.

  The techniques spread quickly into political campaigns, because candidates found they could send different messages to different sets of voters.

  “With our ability to segment the market with computers, we can go after people who have single-issue goals and motivation,” asserts Robert Hacker, president of the Delta Group, an Atlanta-based direct-response-marketing company. “You have the ability to target people by an interest, for example, the abortion and the gun lobbies. In the old days, you had to get up on a stump and try to reach everyone. Television has made that worse. Mass political speeches are less and less specific and issue oriented. Where the candidates handle the specifics is the one-to-one communication with direct mail. The nice thing about direct mail is I can hit you in your home and make the pitch directly to you and tell you exactly what you want to hear and that I don’t want other people to know I said to you.”28

  For the constant campaign, mail targeting is crucial. The trump card is the list, or rather the lists, of voters, compartmenting them into target segments. Roger Stone said: “I always tell the congressional incumbents I advise: ‘Build a list of senior citizens in your district. Take the computer tape of registered voters, take the tape of licensed drivers—age is on the driver’s license—and cross the tapes on the computer.’ You can find Jews, find Irish, and others. We have a little table of all Italian names or all Jewish names or all Korean names or all whatever it may be and cross it with the voter tape and select the names. You can get people’s religion. You can get people who rent as opposed to people who live at the same address for a long time. The long timers tend to be voters; renters are less responsive to the property tax issue.”

  The point is to refine your list—not to waste time, money, and effort on hostile or inert groups. Some congressmen get membership lists from organizations that support them in elections—small-business federations, farmers’ groups, the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, environmental groups, labor unions. They also put in their computers the names of every person who sends a letter or postcard, or who drops in at their offices. Good lists are essential, especially by members in marginal districts or swing states. Those members circulate mass questionnaires with the prime purpose of getting people to say what issues matter most and to state their point of view: People who reply go on targeted mailing lists.

  Take Tim Wirth’s operation: He won a House seat in 1974 with fifty-one percent of the vote and scraped by in 1976 with 50.1 percent. As a matter of sheer survival, Wirth has cultivated and farmed his mail lists assiduously. In eight years, his computerized lists jumped from a total of twenty thousand names to 150,000 names, broken down into one thousand different categories: for example, twenty thousand people in business; 6,817 interested in the environment; 2,683 keen on energy issues; 117 on women’s issues, including eight on women in mining; 1,136 who had written in about the nuclear freeze; 1,948 on the deficit; more than three hundred concerned about communications issues, a Wirth specialty; plus eighteen thousand people whom he had met personally on “Tim’s #3 list” (#1 being family and #2 personal friends).29

  As a senator, Wirth can use the Senate Computer Center, manned by a staff of 180 and financed in 1986 by a $31.9 million taxpay
er subsidy. Its laser-powered printers can roll out fifty thousand letters daily, predesigned paragraph by paragraph by staff aides to produce the desired mix for target audiences. The Senate’s computers store the names, addresses, and interests of millions of voters broken down into more than thirty-three hundred categories that reach beyond typical breakdowns to such politically useful target groups as “fat cats,” “Jewish groups and interests,” “fiscal conservatives,” and “top bureaucrats” who got appointments with the help of some senator.

  To disguise the assembly-line production, politicians strive for a personal touch. According to Roger Stone, the Republican consultant, vital ingredients are a chatty, punchy, conversational tone; short paragraphs; what is known as “fill”: personalized references in the body of the letter that repeat the voter’s name, his hometown, his group, or what prompted the voter to write; and ink that disguises that the signature was done by a machine. The best, Stone explained, is “a blue signature that smudges when it’s wet or when you run your finger across it. That’s important—people check. Millions and millions of people actually believe that Ronald Reagan or some senator sat down and dictated this letter to them, and signed it. A special ink can be found that will smudge as if someone did in fact sign it.”30

  Tim Wirth personalizes his mail. Staff aides at his elbows jot down notes about individuals with whom he talks and feed that information into the computer. So when a letter goes out, there will be a reference to someone’s Aunt Sarah or their last contact with Wirth. The theory on mail is that it is a political life-or-death matter. Paige Reffe, Wirth’s administrative assistant, recalled the day that Wirth announced he was running for the Senate, a grueling marathon of hopping around Colorado, ending late at night after a fund-raiser in a Denver hotel. The hotel banquet room was empty save for Wirth, a couple of aides, and a hotel custodian.