Wirth went over and stuck out his hand to the custodian. “Hey, I’m Tim Wirth,” he said.
“Congressman, I know who you are,” the man replied. “I wrote you a letter in 1975. I wrote it to everybody in the Colorado delegation, and you’re the only person who responded. I will always remember that. I may never write you again, but whatever you’re running for, I’ll vote for you because you care about me.”31
Casework: See “Mayor” D’Amato
That personal touch typifies one old-fashioned ingredient of the new-fangled incumbency politics: casework. Think of the “politician” in a big city like Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, or Boston, and what often comes to mind is the ward boss or block captain, the person to whom people went if they had an immigration problem, a traffic ticket, a sanitation notice, or a kid in trouble with the law. Going to the “politician” was like going to a tribal chief or an elected judge. This was the guy who went to City Hall and fixed your case, and he checked on election day to be sure you were there with your family and your grandmother supporting his candidates. What’s new is that congressmen and some senators are deep into that game, handling people’s grief with the federal government in exchange for their support. It is probably true, as some contend, that Congress has a stake in the in efficiency of federal bureaucrats: It lets members and their staffs become important fixers for the ordinary folk back home.
No one fits that bill more than Senator Alfonse D’Amato, a pushy, competitive New Yorker who turned his pork-barrel, do-a-favor-style politics into a remarkable success story. When D’Amato arrived in the Senate in 1981, after twenty years working his way up in the local Republican political machine of Nassau County, Long Island, his Senate colleagues marked him down as a sure loser the next time around. They saw him as a small-timer, too narrow and locally bred to measure up to the prominence and issue influence of New York senators such as Jacob Javits, his predecessor, or Daniel Patrick Moynihan, his Democratic colleague. But D’Amato played his own brand of constant campaigning. In the classic style of a machine politician, he began doing favors for the whole state and grabbing every conceivable scrap of publicity for anything that came New York’s way.
Within a couple of years Democratic mayors such as Ed Koch in New York and James Griffin in Buffalo were singing his praises as a politician who understood and remembered the local folks. “You would go to D’Amato if you wanted to get your passport expedited, but if you want a discussion on policy toward the People’s Republic of China, you’d go to Moynihan,” Koch told my New York Times colleague Frank Lynn. “D’Amato is a hands-on person. Give him a problem, he goes right to it. Moynihan is a much more reflective person who will see the policy end, the theoretical end, which is very helpful, too.”32
“When you’re a town official, you fight for the people in the town on a regular basis,” D’Amato’s press secretary, Ed Martin, explained. “D’Amato adopted the whole state. Placement on committees, that was the key to an ability to basically watch over the interests of his constituents.”33 D’Amato got himself put on the Appropriations Committee, and on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee; he picked subcommittees that dealt with New York interests such as transportation and consumer affairs. The appropriations assignment positioned him well to slip into one money bill funding defense research at Syracuse University; to press the Pentagon to put a light army division at Fort Drum in upstate New York and to base a battleship at Staten Island; to bargain with the Reagan administration for $140 million to hire more customs agents and Coast Guard personnel to fight drug smuggling through New York City ports and harbors.
D’Amato became notorious for haggling in private with the Reagan White House, pushing what one official called his New York “shopping lists” before he would agree to support the president on big items such as the MX missile. Kiddingly, some of his colleagues call him the “mayor” because of his unabashed parochialism and his reputation for vote trading.
“D’Amato came out of being a county executive, and he’s a county executive in the Senate,” said Senator Warren Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican.
Alan Simpson of Wyoming, the Republican whip, told me that at the Wednesday Club, a Republican luncheon group, he had disclaimed being a bagman—a money man—for western water projects and said, pointing with a grin at D’Amato: “Now, if you want to see a real bagman, go to Al D’Amato.” The other senators all laughed.34
D’Amato has thrived on publicity about his constituency politics. He used it to build such an impregnable base of support that when 1986 rolled around, prominent Democrats were hesitant to take him on. Without cutting a big figure on issues, D’Amato, the sure loser, had become D’Amato, the sure winner, all from the tactics of the constant campaign.
In House districts, some political scientists believe that casework and the ombudsman role can pull as much as five percent of the vote, and that explains why House incumbents have so successfully cushioned themselves against big swings of voter sentiment on national issues. Sometimes, constituency politics beats a criminal rap. Former representatives Daniel J. Flood of Pennsylvania and Charles C. Diggs, Jr., of Michigan built such support from pork-barrel and little-favor politics that they got reelected in spite of a criminal indictment in Flood’s case and actual conviction in Diggs’s case.
“Our surveys have shown that constituency service—especially in the House—is more important than issues,” David Himes of the National Republican Congressional Committee told me. “Voting at the congressional level does not turn on the issues. There is considerable evidence that people’s image of a congressman is more important to their vote than his stand on the issues.”35
Casework politics are aimed primarily at projecting the incumbent’s presence to voters and conveying a sense of engagement and compassion. New Jersey’s Senator Bill Bradley has developed ingenious variations on that tactic. As a Rhodes Scholar from Princeton and a New York Knicks basketball star, Bradley did not go after the limelight in Washington to create an image; he already had one. He chose to develop a reputation for sound, substantive inside politics, and he won high marks with his proposal in April 1982 for a sweeping reform of the tax code by closing loopholes and lowering rates.
At home, Bradley created a typical network of constituent services, but as a likable, loping, rangy guy in his mid-forties, he came up with his own twist: “the walking town meeting.” It fits him, for Bradley is one of those elemental politicians who thrives on direct physical contact with voters. The most effective modern campaigners, whether Ronald Reagan, Lyndon Johnson, or John Kennedy, have this quality. They get enjoyment and strength from immersing themselves in crowds, pressing the flesh, literally bumping up against humanity. It recharges them.
“Every summer I walk the seashore, and somebody walks thirty yards in front of me with a sign, MEET SENATOR BRADLEY, ASK SENATOR BRADLEY A QUESTION,” Bradley told me over a quick sandwich lunch at his desk. “And I walk the shore and visit with the people. In the regular town-meeting format, people come to ask you a question. If you really want to know what people think, you gotta go where people are, surprise them, and ask them what’s on their minds. In four hours on a New Jersey shore on a Sunday afternoon in July or August, you’re going to see fifty to sixty thousand people, and you’re going to get an immediate reaction”—his fingers snapping in the air. “The best example of that: The KAL 007 shoot down—it happened on a Friday. A day and a half later I was walking the shore. I have never seen such outrage from the people about the Soviet action. It was just intense.36
“I also appear at commuter stops,” he went on. “For example, if you stand in the Port Authority bus terminal in New York between four and six P.M., you see an incredible amount of people—a minimum of a hundred pass you per minute. They are rushing to get the bus, right? And if they immediately recognize you, they’re going to give you a response. It’s physical. You stand there and they’ll hit you, or they’ll say, ‘Ah, you, I don’t want to tal
k to you.’ Or they’ll say, ‘Keep going on that home care,’ or, ‘I’m with you on tax reform,’ or ‘What’s going to happen with Reagan?’ It is physically exhausting, but it is a remarkable way to interact.”
“Where’d you get this idea?” I asked. “From the campaign?”
“No, no, no, no, no,” Bradley shook his head. “Harry Truman.”
“You mean Truman’s going for a walk in the morning?”
“Yeah, he went for a walk in the morning. So then, well, why don’t I go for a walk where people are?”
“What made you ask yourself that question?”
“Because I have all my life been a listener, and so it’s a natural impulse for me,” he said. “We tried it a couple of times and it really was good. Now I’ll be somewhere in the state and people will say, ‘Hey, I saw you last year down at Manasquan,’ or ‘Hey, I saw you at Seaside.’ The point is, they’re associating me with being there. Presence, right?”
“You’re using campaign techniques as part of a constant campaign in office,” I suggested.
“Well, they’re campaign techniques but see—what are you trying to do in a campaign?” he parried. “You’re trying to tell people you care. Right? Then the traditional assumption is you disappear. Then you come back later and tell them you care. Well, I don’t stop caring. And it helps me do my job. I mean, you know, it’s flesh and blood. It’s emotion. You get on the floor of the Senate with the amendment to the amendment and the unanimous consent request to proceed, blah, blah, blah. You’ve gotta remember why you’re here. You’re here because of those people. The more interaction with them, the better you are.”
I asked Bradley whether, like Paul Tsongas, he worried that he became less good as a senator while he was working at becoming more visible at home.
“I don’t see it at all,” Bradley came back. “I mean, I think part of being a good senator is being accessible to your constituents. Let me give you an example: At one town meeting a couple of years ago, the question was the defense budget, and why don’t we spend more money, or why don’t we spend less. This had gone on an hour and a half. There were about three hundred people, jam-packed in a city hall council chamber. There was a woman over at the side, and she said:
“ ‘Senator, one more question.’ Pause. ‘Senator, I heard the question about the defense budget, and I just want to tell you two years ago my son was killed.’
“And, okay, the audience had been restless. They go total silence. She said:
“ ‘I was in the military twenty-seven years.’ She was. ‘And my son was working at McGuire Air Force Base, and he was supposed to be wearing flame-retardant clothes, something happened, and he burned up. When are we going to spend our money on our people?’
“And, you know, all this debate about conventional military versus strategic weapons just kind of dissolved down into an individual experience of a mother who lost her son because she felt the military was not caring enough. That anecdote, that experience, first of all, sears you. Second of all, it’s a part of everything that you do after that. That comes only because you put yourself out there in a town-meeting format and take the blows.”37
The Ins and Outs of Chasing Money
Of the five pillars of the constant campaign (video politics, targeted mail, casework, personal presence, and money), the one that most grinds members of Congress is the drudgery of raising money. Except for the exceptionally wealthy, raising political money has become a throbbing headache that drains vital time and energy from the job of governing. This chore leaves many members part-time legislators and full-time fund-raisers.
Certainly since the 1890s when Mark Hanna passed the hat to the wealthy trusts, money has been mother’s milk to American politics. But it used to fall mainly to political parties and political bosses to raise it. Today, at the national level, the Republican party and its various arms seem to have found a forest of money trees which they harvest. They raised $210 million in the two-year cycle leading up to the 1986 midterm elections, and the Democrats raised a comparatively paltry $50.6 million.
Were it not for Tony Coelho, the miracle money man for congressional Democrats, that party would be even farther behind. A staff aide for years to a California congressman, Coelho is an agile, wiry, constantly-on-the-go politician with a phenomenal record as a supersalesman for Democrats. He was elected to the House in 1978, and as a mere second-term member in early 1981, he took on a thankless task for House Democrats and made an incredible success of it. With the Republican party riding a wave of fund-raising, Coelho became head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He stunned older Democrats by promising to raise $5 million in two years, more than triple what had been done before, and he actually raised $6 million. Then, he offended his colleagues by refusing to pour all this new money into campaigns; instead he invested in rebuilding the party’s apparatus: a media center, direct-mail fund-raising lists, and a bigger staff. Ultimately, he laid the financial cornerstones for a brand-new party headquarters in Washington.
Coelho, an ultimate new-breed politician, won enormous clout inside the House with his outsider style of politics, and he has been amply rewarded. He has shot up the career ladder with astonishing speed, becoming Democratic whip, the number three Democrat in the House, in just eight short years (it took Tip O’Neill nineteen years).
But the money campaigns of the Republican and Democratic parties have not spared individual incumbents. They must still hustle after their own millions. One night Senator David Durenburger, a Minnesota Republican, regaled me with the travails of his 1982 reelection, when millionaire businessman Bruce Dayton spent $7 million against him (the Senate lists twenty-five millionaire members; Durenberger is not one of them). “I got $214,000 from all the various Republican party organizations,” Durenburger said. “I got $1 million from political action committees. That still left me $3 million short. I had to raise that myself from individual contributions.”38
Campaign costs, driven by pricey television ads, have skyrocketed. Before 1974, most of the big political money went into presidential campaigns. But the 1974 reforms set up public subsidies for the presidential campaign in general elections; since then the money rivalry has shifted to congressional races. In the dozen years between 1974 and 1986, the average cost of a House incumbent’s campaign jumped from $56,539 to $334,222 and the average cost for an incumbent senator leapt from $555,714 to $3,303,518.39 As a result, members of the House, with their short two-year terms, virtually never stop raising money. As soon as one election is over, they begin passing the hat for the next.
“In a contested district, literally a quarter of the member’s time in Washington is spent fund-raising, organizing, thinking about it, making the calls,” a veteran congressional aide told me. He worked for a Northwest Democrat known as a conscientious legislator. It was nine months before Election Day, and in frustration, the staff man shoved the member’s daily schedule to me, showing four to eight P.M. blocked off for fund-raising and campaign strategizing. “I’ve been on eleven congressional payrolls and they’re all doing that!” my staff friend said in disgust. “The taxpayers are not getting their money’s worth. Even under the most rose-tinted construction of the thing, where I’m ruling out any issue corruption, it’s a scandal. And we all know that there’s some influence on the issues.”
Incumbents hit big-moneyed constituencies in their areas—defense contractors, agricultural interests, labor unions, major manufacturers in their district, and their Washington lobbyists—to build an early financial base and to form the steering committees for Washington fund-raising receptions. Incumbents have enormous advantages over challengers—some incumbents more than others: Members of the appropriations committees which vote the funds for the entire government, the tax-writing Finance Committee in the Senate, and the Ways and Means Committee in the House. Also, in the House, John Dingell, as chairman, has made the Energy and Commerce Committee a choice spot by pushing its powers and jurisdiction into man
y areas that affect business. But being on an intelligence committee is not worth much financially.
“The going rate at a fund-raiser for a member of Ways and Means is much higher than for the average member of the House,” David Cohen, head of the Advocacy Institute, a public-interest group, told me. “For a normal member, the tab is usually no more than $250. I get invitations to fund-raisers for Ways and Means members and they get $500 to $1,000 a head.”40
In the Senate, fund-raising is serious business, years ahead of time. “In my time here in Washington, it has grown from awful to odious, from odious to obscene,” Senator Tom Eagleton of Missouri declared with disgust. After eighteen years in the Senate, Eagleton still has the air of a country lawyer, walking around his cluttered office in rumpled striped shirt and black suspenders, his graying hair tousled. On a desk littered with books, files, leaves of yellow legal pads, and other miscellanea, he has posted a sign: IF A CLUTTERED DESK IS THE SIGN OF A CLUTTERED MIND, WHAT IS AN EMPTY DESK THE SIGN OF?
“When I first ran in 1968, we raised about five or six hundred thousand,” Eagleton recalled. “Now it’s estimated that you need a war chest of about $4 million in Missouri,” Eagleton harangued. “Back when I came, fund-raising was basically a one-year process. Now, had I been running for reelection, I would have been fund-raising, at the very minimum, for a three-year period, maybe a four-year period. And I know some illustrations where it’s six years, where senators have started fund-raising within a few months of their being sworn in.”41
I later learned, for example, that John Kerry, a Democrat who won a Senate seat from Massachusetts in 1984, had started collecting money for his reelection virtually right away. By the first six months of 1986, with their next Senate election still four and a half years away, Bill Bradley raised $1.1 million, Phil Gramm of Texas $804,170, Joseph Biden of Delaware $614,160, and Kerry $471,195. But in mid-1986, the incumbent senator with the biggest war chest for the 1990 election was Bennett Johnston, a Louisiana Democrat, with $1.6 million.
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