Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  Now, Reagan was taking the oath that Baker had wanted to take himself. As the leader of the new Republican Senate majority, Baker had a choice to make: He could either operate as an independent force, using the leverage of his position, judgment, and experience to challenge and modify Reagan’s messianic conservatism, or he could become a loyal lieutenant to the new president.

  In manner, Baker is as warming as the southern sunshine, as mellow as a Tennessee country waltz. But his mellowness can be misleading, for Baker has grit. The fires of presidential ambition still burned in him. There were, he reflected then, precedents for using his new post of majority leader as a springboard toward the presidency. Lyndon Johnson had done that in the late 1950s. Closer to Baker, as a Republican, was the example of William Knowland, an ambitious, old-guard California conservative and a prickly, jealous champion of congressional prerogatives as majority leader under President Eisenhower in the mid-1950s. Knowland had told Eisenhower repeatedly that the Senate should not merely be a rubber stamp. He struck an independent course, especially on foreign policy.

  Glancing at the wintry skies and out over the inauguration throng toward the spire of the Washington Monument, Baker mused about another model, another Republican Senate leader, the late Everett McKinley Dirksen, his own father-in-law, whose gold watchband Baker was wearing. Dirksen had revered the presidency, even when the opposite party controlled it. Privately, Baker confessed a newfound respect for Reagan—he had beaten a field of Republican rivals and then vanquished a sitting president. But Baker still wondered how to deal with Reagan.

  “I was listening to his speech, and I have to confess that it sounded a little like every other presidential Inaugural Address I’d ever heard,” Baker later recalled. “He was making a lot of promises about this, that, and the other. But there was one difference, it seemed to me, and that is that he was promising to make fundamental changes—not incremental changes, but fundamental changes in policy. His reduction in the rate of growth of government, if not the size of government itself, reduction in taxes, vast increase in level of armaments, and the reduction of regulations. All the good things that he talked about in the campaign, he was saying those things.… I sort of toyed with the idea, sitting there, about whether I was going to stake out a different position on some things or not.

  “But the striking difference to me between this and every other Inaugural Address I’d heard since I went to the Senate in 1966 was that we had a Republican majority in the Senate for the first time in twenty-six years. And that I was the majority leader and that man up there was making those promises for me, too. And I guess it was at that moment that I made sort of an unconscious decision that I’m going to carry his flag. That doesn’t mean that you’re forever going to stifle any concern or question about what he’s doing.… [But] I decided that the Bill Knowland example was a disaster. He tried to be president in a way. He was always griping and scrapping with Eisenhower and finally went off to California and got beat. But he was never happy, never cooperative, and never really was sympathetic to the Eisenhower program. There are two roles for majority leader in the Senate: One is the president’s spear-carrier, and the other is an independent force. And I chose to be a spear-carrier. And I have no apology for it.”1

  Howard Baker’s private decision on Inaugural Day was critical to the success of Reagan’s presidency, for Baker became one of the most effective Senate leaders in decades. His decision was symptomatic, too, of the Republican mood in the afterglow of their 1980 election victory. Multiply Baker by fifty-three Republicans in the Senate and 192 in the House, and you have the solid core of the Reagan coalition that voted time and again to produce Reagan’s stunning 1981 budget and tax victories, shaking Democrats accustomed to running Congress for a quarter of a century.

  The coalition game—building coalitions and making coalitions work—is the heart of our system of government. Although the coalition game is usually ignored during the passions of American election campaigns, no president can succeed unless he can build a governing coalition. For limited periods, presidents can act on their own: devaluing the dollar as Nixon did, negotiating an arms treaty with Moscow as Carter did, sending American Marines into Lebanon or working secret arms deals with Iran as Reagan did. But eventually a president must come to Congress to fund his programs, approve his treaties, finance his wars, or sanction his secret diplomacy. If he cannot bring Congress along—cannot form a governing coalition—his programs founder, his treaty must be shelved, the Marines must come home, his diplomacy must halt. Coalitions are the necessary engines for sustaining policies.

  Triumphant coalition makers are rare: Franklin Roosevelt at the start of the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s, and Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Other presidents, such as Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, and Gerald Ford did pass pieces of legislation or got particular treaties ratified, but they did not pass their major programs because they could not make coalition government work. Solid congressional majorities eluded them. Over the past half century, with Congress usually in Democratic hands, Democratic presidents have had an advantage. Roosevelt and Johnson, for example, built their legislative achievements on big partisan Democratic coalitions. But Kennedy never managed that, and Carter labored like Sisyphus with precious little to show for it because he could not pull the Democrats together. Republican presidents, normally faced with a Democratic Congress, usually have to take the bipartisan route to coalition government. Eisenhower did that fairly effectively, but Nixon and Ford were hamstrung by divided government—Congress in the hands of the political opposition.

  Reagan, in his first, most triumphant year, chose to build his coalition with partisan hardball, not with Eisenhower-style bipartisan compromise. In 1981, Reagan did woo conservative southern Democrats and get some to vote with him against their own congressional party leadership. But Republican unity was Reagan’s Gibraltar. That is the primary lesson of American politics—rule number one of the coalition game: Secure your political base first. Much was required for Reagan’s first-year coalition: the President’s wide popular appeal, his knack for lobbying Congress, some tough grass-roots politicking, and of course a winning idea to rally a coalition. But Republican unity was the anchor. With unity forged by Howard Baker and House Republican Leader Bob Michel of Illinois, Reagan made his legislative mark. Without that unity, he would have been destined to one-term mediocrity.

  Republican solidarity was far from preordained, nor did it endure. In 1980, Reagan had run against Washington; he had been the populist candidate attacking the system, the radical western Republican overthrowing his party’s mainstream eastern establishment, the citizen outsider mocking the inside political game. Now inside this den of power, he needed allies.

  Historically, American presidents have turned to their political parties to rally support. But years of revolt and reform in the late 1960s and 1970s had weakened the cohesion of the American party system. Congress had been torn asunder, faction by faction, region by region, interest by interest. Congressional leaders had little patronage to bind followers to them. Many members ran almost independent of party. As Reagan came to power, few people prized the vital cohesion offered by parties, which for so long had served as crucibles of compromise and pulled together coalitions.

  What is more, Republicans had been in the minority in both houses for so long that they had fallen into a “minority mentality.” They were not trained or conditioned to govern. Instead, they had developed the habits of a permanent opposition. They were practiced in the arts of negative politics: how to stall, how to filibuster, how to resist, how to block. Newt Gingrich, a bright light among younger Reaganites, gloomily declared, “The House Republican party, as a culture, has a defeatist, minority mentality that either did nothing, or opposed for so long, that it has no internal habits of inventing a coherent strategy or following it through for any length of time.”2

  When Orrin Hatch, a staunch Utah conservative, took over from Ted
Kennedy, the Massachussetts liberal, as chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Committee, his staff had to train him to work legislation through his committee. “His mind-set of what you do in the Labor Committee is oppose Ted Kennedy,” a senior Republican aide said. “Suddenly he had a big chunk of the Reagan program thrust on him, and he didn’t know what to do.” Other Republicans were accustomed to cutting personal deals with Democratic chairmen, but not to passing bills. Newcomers such as Alfonse D’Amato of New York, Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, or Paula Hawkins of Florida were suddenly thrust into being subcommittee chairs without a single day’s experience in the Senate.

  “The first thought on my personal agenda was whether or not we can turn these folks into a real majority, a functioning majority, instead of a numerical majority,” Howard Baker told me later. “No single person in the Republican branch had ever been a committee chairman or a subcommittee chairman before. Brand new. We were going to have to reinvent the role of the majority party in the Senate. We were going to have to figure out if we have a permanent minority mind-set or whether we can pull together.… I perceived the greatest responsibility I had [was] to make the place work, because it could quickly have devolved into chaos if we had two minority parties.”3

  That is rule number two in forming a functioning coalition: Inculcate the mindset of governing. It is a subtle, intangible notion—one that comes naturally to parties long in power, but not to parties long out of power. Without that governing mind-set, little can be accomplished in our system; parties clash, factions stalemate each other, individual members of Congress push their agendas, selfish interests overwhelm the common interest, and the machinery of government is immobilized.

  Fortunately, politics is like sports: There are electric moments which transform group psychology, dramatically altering the dynamics of the game. When the lead suddenly changes hands, emotions swing from one team to another. Elan soars; partisan juices flow; the other side is thrown off balance. A team or a party, once faltering, gains inspiration; it is suddenly energized. Riding a collective high, individual players pick up tempo and confidence. Shrewd leaders keep the roll going. Winning generates its own momentum.

  Early 1981 was one of those heady, pivotal moments for Republicans in Congress. Politically starved for a generation, they soared on an incredible crest of enthusiasm, emboldened as much by their own newfound muscle as by having a Republican president. After all, by 1984, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan had won five presidential elections since 1952 (to just three for the Democrats). Now, the sudden net gain of twelve seats in the Senate, plus thirty-three in the House, created a surge of partisan optimism.

  Some Republicans, sniffing a massive sea change in American politics, felt on the brink of a national political realignment. They believed American political history was crossing one of those major fault lines that come every generation or two. They sensed the end of the national hegemony of the Democratic party, begun half a century before, and they hungered for a new era—with Republicans as a majority party into the next century. Eisenhower and Nixon had won the White House, but Congress had eluded the GOP. Now full realignment finally seemed at hand. Partisan esprit was rampant among the Reaganite Young Turk Republicans elected in 1978 and 1980.

  “The freshman and sophomore classes make up almost half of our 192 members,” Max Friedersdorf, Reagan’s chief congressional liaison, observed in 1981. “They are extremely aggressive to make their mark. They want to win and they are fully aware that they have power in unity. They have an influence on the more senior Republicans who have developed a minority complex over the years. They sense that they’re getting close to having a majority in the House. This makes for an esprit that I’ve never seen before.”4

  King of the Hill

  It takes more than enthusiasm to consolidate power. In the king of the hill game, rule number three is: Strike quickly for a win, during the early rush of power. That helps establish momentum and an aura of success. Lyndon Johnson had a colorful maxim for such moments. “Johnson operated under the philosophy with Congress—if you’re not doing it to them, they’re doing it to you. And frequently, he used a more vivid word than doing,” recalled Douglass Cater, one of Johnson’s White House advisers.5

  Winning is power, was the gut summation given me by Jim Baker. “I’ve always felt that it is extremely important in terms of a president’s power—power as opposed to popularity—that presidents succeed on the Hill with what they undertake up there,” Baker asserted. “And I really believe that one reason that Ronald Reagan has been so successful is that he succeeded in the high-profile issues that he jumped on in the first term. The way presidents govern is to translate their philosophy into policy by working with Congress. That’s why Carter failed in my view. Because he never learned that lesson.”6

  The image of success is crucial, as Dick Darman pointed out in a White House memo. On February 21, 1981, Darman told me that he had urged crafting a “plan for the preservation of the appearance of the president’s continuing strength and effectiveness—the avoidance of association with losses,’ the association with a planned string of ‘successes.’ ”

  Political gamesmanship required quickly tapping Republican optimism to translate electoral victory into legislative power and a governing majority. Otherwise, momentum could slip away.

  But as Carter learned, there are no automatic legislative victories for a new president. Carter lost his first battles, on water projects, and Reagan was nearly upset by his own troops in the very first test—long before his celebrated victories.

  In the Senate, Howard Baker faced a Republican revolt that threatened to shatter his narrow 53–47 majority before it would ever taste victory. That first test was critical, because Reagan had to make the Senate his coalition cornerstone. If he could not hold the Republican Senate majority in line, it would dash his hopes for a coalition with conservative House Democrats; if Reagan lost in the Senate, why should these House Democrats defy their own party leaders in the House to join forces with Reagan?

  What forced Reagan’s hand was the need to raise the legal ceiling on the national debt to $985 billion by February 6—so the government could borrow money to finance deficits and keep running. Democrats had long voted routinely to raise the debt ceiling because they believed in government programs, but conservative Republicans hated these votes. They opposed raising the debt ceiling because they opposed the government programs, and on principle they rejected deficit spending. Reagan too had felt that way, but now it was his responsibility to run the government. That meant getting conservative Republicans to bend their ideology to help him govern. In the House, Democrats and Republicans combined to pass the debt-ceiling bill.

  But in the Senate, the Democrats played rougher. Initially, many voted against the bill to force the distasteful chore on the Republican majority. Very quickly, the debt-ceiling vote became a test of Reagan’s and Howard Baker’s ability to secure their partisan base. There was strong resistance.

  Almost all thirteen Republican freshmen were opposed. Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Mack Mattingly of Georgia, Slade Gorton of Washington, Steve Symms of Idaho, and Paula Hawkins of Florida protested to Howard Baker. These Reaganites believed ardently in budget balancing. “We’ve told our constituents we’re never going to vote to increase the debt limit,” they told Baker. “We’re dead set against it. It is an article of faith with us.” Their rebellion left Baker shy of votes to pass the measure.

  Another obstacle was posed by William Armstrong of Colorado, one of the brightest, most vigorous Senate conservatives on economic issues. In 1981, he vowed to vote against the debt bill unless it carried an amendment giving the president power to cut spending unilaterally. Armstrong saw the deadline pressure of the debt bill as a chance to restore to Reagan and future presidents power taken away by Congress in 1974. This was the power of “recision”—the power of a president to notify Congress he will not spend certain funds. As the law stood in 1981, a president’s recision re
quired congressional approval—winning majorities in both houses. But under Armstrong’s amendment, the president could act and his cuts would stick—unless Congress overrode him within forty-five days. That put the burden of veto action on Congress.

  The day before the debt vote, Armstrong was summoned to Baker’s office to meet with Baker and Vice President Bush. Baker, fearing filibusters from Democrats, wanted a clean debt bill with no amendments, to help get Reagan a quick victory.

  “This is no time to rock the boat,” Baker declared. “We’ve got a new president. We ought not to buck him.”

  “But this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” objected Armstrong. “To dissipate it on making nickel-and-dime changes in the budget instead of going for institutional reforms would be a terrible mistake.” He appealed to Bush: “The honeymoon lasts only so long. If the president asks for it, think of the leverage he has. Don’t you think this is a golden opportunity?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” Bush replied. “The president wants a clean debt-ceiling bill. So please back off.”7

  Armstrong relented, feeling it was ridiculous for a single senator to try to force on Reagan a power he did not want.

  But that still left the rebellious freshmen. Baker had played high cards—senior conservatives such as Barry Goldwater of Arizona and John Tower of Texas—to try to persuade them. The president had them to the White House in ones and twos. That softened them up, but it did not change their minds.

  Howard Baker’s ace in the hole was Strom Thurmond, the senior Senate Republican. Thurmond epitomized tight-fisted austerity and fierce independence. He had stood against the federal establishment as the segregationist governor of South Carolina and the Dixiecrat candidate for president in 1948. He had staged a one-man filibuster for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In twenty-seven years as a senator, first as a Democrat and then as a Republican, Thurmond had never voted to raise the debt ceiling.