Baker ran into Thurmond on the Senate floor, found him willing to help, and quickly rounded up the Republican freshmen.
“I sat them down around the conference table, brought in Strom, and Strom started slow and low in that measured South Carolina cadence,” Baker recalled. “He started working up, and at the end of three or four minutes—it wasn’t very long—he said: ‘Now some of you in this room say that you have promised never to vote for a debt-limit increase, and I understand that. And you ought to understand that I’ve never in my whole career voted to increase the debt limit before. But I’ve never had Ronald Reagan as president before either. And I’m going to vote for the debt-limit increase. And so are you.’ And there was a deathly silence. Strom got up and left. And there was some grumbling and grousing and leaning back in the chairs, and they got up and wandered out.”8
The Democrats, stung by Reagan’s charges that they were big spenders, made the vote painful for the Republicans. One by one, they voted against the bill to force Republicans to swallow their ideology and their campaign promises, to show solidarity with the president. One by one, the Republicans voted aye. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the veteran Democrat from Washington state was so tickled to see Republicans squirm that he danced a jig on the floor. Ultimately, all but three Republicans—Armstrong, Mattingly, and John East of North Carolina—supported Reagan. Baker let out a “whew” when he had fifty votes; then a score of Democrats switched sides to pass the measure, 73–18.
The public never grasped how narrowly Baker’s control of the Senate had ridden in the balance. After the vote, Baker told Thurmond, “I never owed a greater debt of political gratitude to anybody than I do to you.”
Because defeat that early, due to Republican defections, would have derailed the Reagan program. Had Republican ranks shattered just seventeen days after Reagan’s inauguration, the initial momentum of Reagan’s presidency would have been lost. Baker felt it vital to demonstrate command and to get Republicans to make sacrifices for the sake of unity behind Reagan. “Strom, more than just about anybody else, maybe except me, understood how important it was that we act like a majority,” Baker said.
That debt-ceiling victory, seemingly minor, did three things: It forged Republican unity, it inculcated a governing mentality, and it established a winning momentum.
The President—Being Loved and Feared
Success in the coalition game depends enormously on presidential influence with the individual members of Congress; a president can pull enough reluctant votes his way if he has the right political touch. It is an old maxim of politics that an effective leader, mayor, governor, and above all, president, must be both loved and feared. That is how a president marshals support from his natural followers and deters attack from his natural enemies. Issues matter, of course, but so does human chemistry. A president has to make clear there are benefits for supporting him and consequences for opposing him.
No one understood this better than Lyndon Johnson, who was masterful at ferreting out the weak points and deepest hungers of other politicians. Yet Johnson was so blatantly Machiavellian that it hampered him. He made it hard for people to go along and still retain their dignity and independence. Carter had the opposite problem. Arm-twisting and deal-making were not his forte. When he tried to act strong, he often came across as mean and willful because exaggerated forcefulness was out of character.
At bottom, Carter seemed ill at ease with power, and ill at ease hobnobbing with other politicians. He immersed himself in substance but despised wheeling and dealing with Congress. Many a senator or House member told me that Carter was awkward or hesitant about asking directly for his or her vote. He frowned on horse-trading. Only from painful experience did he learn the value of doing little favors for other politicians. Both his intellect and his engineer’s training at Annapolis made him impatient with that vital lubrication of the wheels of legislation: making other politicians feel important.
At intimate occasions—a small dinner at the White House or a personal interview at his home in Plains, Georgia—I found Carter engaging, but many members of Congress found him cool and brisk. When he had groups for breakfast, he would arrive late because he had been busy at work in his study. Then he would give a little speech on whatever policy he was pushing. Carter once complained to Jack Nelson, Washington Bureau Chief of the Los Angeles Times, that some members of Congress wasted his time because they were not well prepared on substance. People who meet with me, Carter told Nelson, “had better know the subject because I know it” and my time is “extremely valuable.”9
Carter did not sense what many members regard as the essence of such sessions. “The problem was that the congressmen didn’t come to the White House to hear a logical argument from the president, which they could have gotten just as well from his aides,” observed Mark Nimitz, a lawyer who served in Carter’s State Department. “What Carter didn’t understand was that these guys came down to the White House to swap stories and go back up to the Hill and brag to the others, ‘I told the president … and he told me …’ ”10
“It doesn’t take much in the White House to pick up the phone and say, ‘Is there anything we can do for you in the next two or three months?’ In the Carter White House that was regarded as treason,” added Mark Siegel, a veteran Democratic party official who worked in the Carter White House. “Congress was the enemy. The Democratic party was the enemy. The Washington establishment was the enemy. Tip O’Neill wanted to help a Democratic president enact a Democratic agenda, but the Carter people didn’t understand Tip O’Neill. They regarded him as a horse’s ass, and if you call someone a horse’s ass in the White House, do you know how fast that gets back to that someone?”11
Carter and his inner circle had been ill-trained for Washington. In Georgia, a one-party state with a fairly docile legislature, Carter felt he could afford aloofness. In time, Carter came to understand how that cost him with Congress. In his third year, I heard him mock his own ineptitude at a convention of southern state legislators. He said he used to ask people how to deal with Congress. “Someone told me to treat them like the Georgia legislature,” Carter recounted. He paused to let that sink in. “I tried it,” he said. “And it didn’t work.”
As outsiders, Carter’s team did not know the Washington power game or its power networks. Their lack of understanding was almost inevitable, given the type of presidential campaign Carter had waged. Carter had won the 1976 nomination by running against Washington and avoiding much contact with party leaders. After the election, Carter’s Georgia political mafia arrived in Washington with a chip on their shoulders and then kept a cool distance. Initially, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter made a point of not socializing with the Georgetown set and other Washington insiders. Carter not only disdained the trappings of the imperial presidency but the symbols of the Washington establishment. On his energy proposals, for example, Carter did not consult the Democratic legislative leaders, Tip O’Neill and Senator Robert Byrd. Hamilton Jordan was so remote that O’Neill complained months later that he had never met the president’s right-hand man, whom he ridiculed as “Hannibal Jerkin.”
Carter and his Georgians, having won an upstart, outsider’s victory and enjoying partisan majorities in both houses, acted as if they did not need others to succeed. Carter seemed convinced that the sheer rationality of his proposals and his eminence as president would pass them. He was initially misled by enormous press attention, by his having beaten a slew of Washington politicians, and by his self-righteous self-confidence on the issues.
As Reagan roped together his first-year coalition, he profited greatly by striking contrasts with Jimmy Carter. It hardly requires much rehearsing of Reagan’s Irish warmth and his love of personal banter to underscore the differences. Reagan is as comfortable shmoozing with other politicians as he is with power. He fitted the presidency easily, and that was reassuring to other politicians as well as to ordinary people.
Reagan was far from perfect. I have hea
rd Republicans such as Bob Packwood, Pete Domenici, and Warren Rudman bridling after a session with President Reagan because he read from his cue cards or deflected serious discussion by repeating shopworn anecdotes about welfare queens supposedly defrauding taxpayers with high living. But in that first year, Reagan was in top form. He demonstrated rule number four in the coalition game: Lavish attention on the Washington power structure. Democrats were flattered to be courted. Republicans were tickled to walk away with a Reagan story to retell, or some Reagan cuff links, or tickets to the presidential box at the Kennedy Center.
For a man who, like Carter, had run his campaign against Washington, Reagan did a quick 180-degree turn in catering to the Washington establishment. He mounted a mellow social and political campaign that set a Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People) standard. Shelving his campaign rhetoric, Reagan played the gracious outsider eager to win acceptance inside the beltway.
That was in character: Despite his messianic rhetoric, Reagan was no dry ideologue of the right, but was ready to bend and bargain with mainstream Republicans. At the 1980 convention, Reagan had tried to enlist Gerald Ford as his vice president, shocking dyed-in-the-wool Reagan partisans, and then he picked his rival, George Bush, rather than his closest political ally, Senator Paul Laxalt. When right-wingers urged replacing Howard Baker as Senate Republican leader with Laxalt, Reagan—with Laxalt’s encouragement—turned thumbs down. He reached beyond his California circle to tap former Ford and Nixon advisers for his White House staff.
On his first night in town as president-elect, Reagan wooed fifty local notables with a dinner at the F Street Club, an understated symbol of old money. Many of Washington’s old names, snubbed by the Carters, were surprised and delighted to be invited: Harold Hughes, then Democratic governor of Maryland; Marion Barry, the outspokenly liberal Democratic mayor of Washington who had bashed Reagan in the campaign; James Cheek, president of Howard University; and attorney Edward Bennett Williams, a well-known Democrat and owner of the Baltimore Orioles. “When you come to town, there’s a tendency as an officeholder to act as if you’re a detached servant,” Reagan explained to Elisabeth Bumiller of The Washington Post. “Well, I decided it was time to serve notice that we’re residents.”12
Eight years as governor of the nation’s largest state, dealing with a Democratic majority in the California Assembly, had taught Reagan about seducing adversaries as well as allies. The next couple of nights, he was out first celebrating with Republican senators and then mingling with the Washington establishment—Katharine Graham, chairman of The Washington Post; Meg Greenfield, chief of the Post’s editorial page; and Robert Strauss, Carter’s former campaign chairman—at a small dinner given by George Will, the unabashedly pro-Reagan columnist who had helped coach Reagan for presidential debates. Later, Reagan met not only with friends but with such foes as Senator Ted Kennedy and paid a courtesy call on Speaker O’Neill, who purred afterward, “I liked him. He was very personable.” As for Reagan’s staff, O’Neill added, “I get along better with them than I did with Carter’s staff.”
Reagan’s stroking of Washington’s political egos was a brilliant gambit. Washington was captivated. It was ready for a shift from Georgia country to California gentry, and it was flattered by a president who paid court to the courtiers.
In sum, Reagan’s confection of charm and deference seduced the citadels of power before the political battles began. He not only demonstrated that the presidency was now in the hands of an experienced politician, he also calmed the animal instincts of other politicians that his campaign had aroused. His charm treatment disarmed skeptics who had conjured him as a warmonger and a rabid ideologue.
Circumstance also gave Reagan one enormous advantage: After the failed presidencies of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, the nation ached for a strong, effective leader. If another president failed, politicians were saying, it would show the presidency had been fatally crippled by Vietnam and Watergate. There was a widespread feeling that some president has got to succeed. That climate was a boon to Reagan. And his soft sell made other politicians want to help him. Case in point: the Republican moderates and liberals, a very important swing group in 1981. They disagreed with Reagan’s philosophy, yet they responded to his appeals. James Leach, a thoughtful, sandy-haired, pro-Bush Iowan, described how the contrast between Reagan and Carter influenced him.
“I’ll never forget the first time meeting with Carter,” Leach said. “He walked in and he said two things. He said, ‘You know, I want to tell you first of all that your constituents are my constituents. And secondly, I know that this is a really tough issue for you but … I hope you do what’s best for the country and not what’s politically expedient. That’s what we’re all here to do.’ When he first expressed that, I was rather impressed. The ninth time I heard that, I wanted to fight. I mean there was something about Carter that brought out an instinct to do battle. And there is something about Reagan that has caused Republicans, even those that differ with him, to want to some extent to rally behind [him]. Particularly in ’81 and ’82, when the presidency itself was at risk. And secondly, the vulnerability of a president who came to Washington as an outsider … a very decent man who didn’t know the insiders’ game and therefore needed help. People genuinely liked helping Ronald Reagan.”13
Events also helped Reagan. On his Inaugural Day, as he was taking his oath, the fifty-two American diplomats held hostage in Iran were freed. The shackles came off. America was no longer in chains. Carter deserves great credit for their release; that was his legacy to the nation and to Reagan. But their release helped feed the immediate notion that Reagan was “Lucky Dutch.” And politicians, like athletes and gamblers, instinctively gravitate toward those who bring lady luck with them.
The second major event, of course, was one that Reagan turned magnificently to his own advantage: the attempt on his life on March 30, 1981. Before the shooting, Reagan’s private polls showed his popularity slipping. Any crisis, let alone a presidential shooting, causes the nation to rally around its leader. That happened in 1981. And Reagan’s personal gallantry created public sympathy and an aura of heroism around him.
“That [whole episode] was crucially important,” Dick Darman asserted. “I think we would have been way out of the normal presidential honeymoon at the time of the crucial votes on the budget and tax cuts if there hadn’t been a ‘second life.’ The shooting and Reagan’s recovery was not only a second life for Reagan but a second life for Reagan’s honeymoon. Sheer chance—and extraordinarily important. In fact, I think we would have had to compromise on the tax bill without it.”14
Reagan and his team knew how to make the country’s mood pay off in the inside power game. In lobbying Congress, they capitalized on his unusual popularity. There were precedents: Lyndon Johnson used to carry a card with polls showing his popularity and pull it out to show to other politicians—until his poll results began to slide in May 1966. But the wave of sympathy and approval that Reagan won after the shooting was unique—what Kennedy might have enjoyed had he survived. It gave Reagan more leverage than he had won in the 1980 election.
That personal popularity was an incomparable advantage in welding Reagan’s coalition. It was an especially potent weapon against wavering Republicans and southern Democrats who came from congressional districts which Reagan had carried in 1980, with sixty or seventy percent of the vote, and could appeal directly to the voters. Strong, emotional public support gave Reagan the second half of that vital amalgam of a leader’s leverage—love and fear. There were two dozen House Republicans who knew they had ridden Reagan’s coattails into office in 1980, and half a dozen Republican senators for whom Reagan had added the final one or two percent for their paper-thin victories. These Republicans, indebted to Reagan, were reluctant to cross him. Southern Boll Weevil Democrats feared Reagan too—enough to extract a promise that he would not campaign against them in 1982 if they backed his program in 1981. “I couldn’t look my
self in the mirror in the morning if I campaigned against someone who helped me on this program,” the president promised the Boll Weevils.
The fear factor helped lift Reagan to his 1981 victories.
The Steamroller Effect
In the making of a majority coalition, a new president has the great advantage of casting his first major legislative proposal as a personal test of confidence in his presidency. The key to this strategy is rule number five of the coalition game: Make the president himself the issue, as much as the substance of his proposals. That strategy immediately puts the congressional opposition on the defensive. It makes voting against the new president almost like repudiating the results of the election just finished, which many politicians are loath to do.
Reagan was doubly armed for this strategy by his election victory and by surging public sympathy after the attempt on his life. Communications Director David Gergen shrewdly proposed that Reagan capitalize on the outpouring of public goodwill to make what amounted to a second Inaugural Address in 1981, to a joint session of Congress on April 28. It was a very powerful gambit. I remember Reagan that evening, striding confidently into the House, the picture of manly vigor and purpose, bathed in applause, acknowledging it with a frisky toss of his head. Democrats as well as Republicans were cheered by his recovery, warmed by his ruddy good humor. The country was so pro-Reagan then that it was easy for Reagan’s lieutenants to frame virtually every vote for another hundred days on Reagan personally: Are you with Reagan or against him?
Republican control of the Senate in 1981 gave Reagan an excellent arena to work that strategy and an important advantage over Nixon, Ford, and Eisenhower, who had faced Democratic control of Congress—except in Eisenhower’s first two years.
In the Senate, it fell to Majority Leader Howard Baker to translate the “up-or-down strategy”—the strategy of a yes or no vote for Reagan—into tactics.
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