Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  As a legislative leader, Howard Baker is a chess player, planning moves far ahead, watching many pieces on the board. His method ws to draw all fifteen Republican committee chairmen into what became known as the “committee of dukes and earls,” to let them feel a part of his team. But he would personally work out Senate strategy, sharing it only with close aides and surfacing it gradually, even to President Reagan. “Baker is extremely logical, extremely firm-minded,” said one Senate staffer. “It is a mark of Baker’s boldness—which most people do not give him credit for—that he handled Reagan’s budget the way he did in 1981.”

  By 1981, Howard Baker had become impatient with the Senate, frustrated that it was no longer a great forum for debate and action but crippled by delaying tactics and filibusters. Not only were there filibusters on the issues, he blurted out to me, but filibusters on the leader’s motion to start debate, filibusters on various amendments, and filibusters after a vote of cloture that theoretically cut off filibusters. Moreover, on most legislation, amendments were unlimited and often totally unrelated to the bill at hand. That meant bills could be strangled by endless amendments. Senators with one pet topic, especially a deadlocking issue such as abortion, could stalemate the Senate repeatedly.

  In Baker’s southern colloquialism, anybody could “sprague the wheel”—put a stick in the spokes. Getting the Senate to act, he groused, was like “pushing a wet noodle.”15

  That frustration welled up in Baker as he crafted a legislative strategy. Because Baker is so likable, so patient in stroking the egos of other politicians, many misjudged his grit in ramming through Reagan’s economic program. The legislative instrument he adopted was a blunt weapon to impose discipline—“high-handed and draconian,” he admitted.

  Baker built his coalition around making all key votes a test of loyalty to the president, up or down. That was essential for pushing Reagan’s ambitious budget cutting through Congress, for a budget is not just abstract figures—it is flesh-and-blood programs. A budget is a chart of national priorities, a menu of spending choices—missiles vs. Medicare, Star Wars vs. student loans, aircraft carriers vs. Amtrak, farm-price supports and food stamps vs. F-18 jet fighters. In theory, everyone in Congress is for cutting the budget and the deficit, but in practice, all resist cutting programs that help their states or districts. That was the political habit that Baker wanted to override.

  Left to the normal procedures of Congress, a budget gets lost in a swamp of turf battles and rival committees’ protecting pet programs. What Baker needed was a procedural club to crack legislative heads. He needed technical leverage—the technicalities of congressional procedure are an important form of power when shrewdly used—to force the Senate to place the common interest over special interests, the common interest of budget cutting over the special interests of budget protecting. He needed a legislative vehicle for forcing an up-or-down vote on Reagan’s budget—in short, on Reagan.

  At the urging of Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici and his staff director, Steve Bell, Howard Baker decided on a very strict procedure known as reconciliation. Without it, Reagan’s dramatic 1981 budget victory would have been impossible. As it was, Reagan won the crucial test in the House by only four votes—and the issue on that vote was whether to apply a tight version of reconciliation. So the tactic of reconciliation became central to the whole Reagan legislative strategy.

  The reconciliation procedure had been written into the 1974 budget act but never used as Baker intended to use it. For Baker, its attraction was this: Normally, budget committees in both houses draft a budget resolution which is a guideline for the tax-writing committees that raise revenue, the appropriating committees that vote funds, and the thirteen substantive committees that approve various programs: defense, agriculture, labor and human resources, interior, public works, and so on. But a normal budget resolution lacks the power of law, and those other committees, protective of their programs, are not tightly bound by its guidelines. The total of their individual budgets invariably adds up to more than the budget committee target. So there is a second budget resolution, and a third, as Congress tries again and again. If the totals are not in line by the third budget resolution, it can include reconciliation—that is, reconciling the different committee spending totals with the overall target. On this third round, reconciliation has the force of law—it imposes a specific target on each committee and can require that programs be cut to meet those targets.

  In the Senate, which normally allows unlimited debate, reconciliation puts a flat lid of fifty hours on debate—that is, a debate on the full federal budget, a process which normally takes weeks upon weeks; reconciliation restricts filibusters. Finally, reconciliation forbids any amendment not germane to the budget—no wandering off into abortion, school prayer, or other issues that can paralyze the Senate; and it demands that whatever spending is added must be matched by tax increases or by spending cuts in other programs.

  Howard Baker liked the idea of using the steamroller tactic of reconciliation right off the bat on Reagan’s budget—on the first budget resolution—skipping months of maneuvering. Reagan’s strategists embraced this tactic because it offered one big vote of confidence on Reagan and on joining his coalition. Democrats screamed that this tactic made David Stockman, as budget director, a legislative tyrant and turned Congress into a rubber stamp, shorn of institutional powers. Years later, Stockman agreed with them.

  “We did not coronate Mr. Stockman as king,” bellowed Jim Wright, then House majority leader. Privately, some Republicans, including House Republican Leader Robert Michel, worried about looking like “Reagan robots.” Bruce Vento, a militant Minnesota liberal Democrat, mocked the Republicans. “When Commander in Chief Stockman says jump, you do not ask why,” Vento hooted. “You do not ask if it will be good for your district. You only ask how high and how often!”

  Once the steamroller got going in the Senate, it was impossible to stop. Pete Domenici, the no-nonsense Budget Committee chairman, protested that in the headlong push for victory, the substance of the budget was getting lost. Domenici did not believe Reagan’s Rosy Scenario, which promised huge tax cuts in 1981 and a balanced budget by 1984. Domenici, a laconic, plain-spoken father of eight from an Italian immigrant family, plays his politics the way he pitched minor league baseball in the West Texas–New Mexico league: straight and hard.

  Using estimates of the Congressional Budget Office, Domenici disputed the economic claims of Reagan and Stockman. At a minimum, he warned, Reagan’s tax cuts would leave a deficit of $44 billion in 1984 (actually, it would be $185.3 billion). Stockman promised to find another $44 billion of budget cuts for 1984—but later. “That’s a pig in the poke!” Domenici protested. He led the Budget Committee to vote against Reagan’s budget, on grounds that it broke faith with Republican pledges to balance the budget. But a few weeks later, at a White House strategy meeting, Howard Baker overruled Domenici—in one of the most critical decisions of 1981. As Reagan’s loyal lieutenant, Baker accepted Stockman’s promise to cut $44 billion and suggested that budget documents designate the cuts with a “magic asterisk.” On paper that meant the Reagan program showed a balanced budget in 1984, making it more palatable to Senate Republicans. Domenici was conscience stricken, but he acquiesced.

  “I knew the Rosy Scenario wasn’t going to happen,” Domenici told me much later. “It stuck in my craw.”

  When I asked Domenici why he had gone against his better judgment, his response showed how the bandwagon mentality swept Republicans along. “Here we have a new president, a new team, a new theory, a new set of committee chairmen,” Domenici explained. “We just had to go along and say, ‘We’ll try to work with the president. Let’s give the president and his team a chance.’ We thought there would be a chance to correct the first resolution later, but there never was. It didn’t take us too long before we started saying, ‘The deficit is going to go haywire.’ ”16

  Howard Baker swung Domenici in line—indeed, it i
s impossible to exaggerate the importance to Reagan’s success of Howard Baker’s personal influence with Senate Republicans or of his relationship to Jim Baker at the White House.

  Rule number six: Building a governing coalition hinges on a close working link between the president’s top strategist and his party’s congressional leaders. The failures of Carter’s aides, Hamilton Jordan and Frank Moore, demonstrated the cost of ignoring this link. In 1985, Reagan paid a high price for touchy relations between his new chief of staff, Don Regan, and Bob Dole, the new Senate majority leader. In his first term, Reagan had superb legislative liaisons led by Max Friedersdorf, a smooth diplomat from the Ford White House, and Ken Duberstein, an amiable, voluble political persuader, who worked the House. Reagan had a warm personal relationship with Howard Baker. But the crucial working alliance was between the two Bakers, Howard and Jim, who were constantly in touch.

  “Jim Baker has a lot of great traits, but one is he can carry on a thirty-second conversation,” Howard Baker said. “I place great value on the thirty-second conversation because my days were made up of hundreds of thirty-second conversations.”17

  Both Jim and Howard Baker—no relation to each other—are main-stream Republicans, temperamentally disposed to compromise and to making the legislative system work. Both Bakers have that vital sense of what was politically doable and what was not. They loyally carried Reagan’s water in public, but they argued with him in private, trying to save him from lost causes. Their pragmatic cast of mind made them natural allies and natural coalition makers. Neither was a true Reaganite; both had worked for Gerald Ford against Reagan in 1976 and had initially opposed Reagan in 1980. They had ties with other Republicans and could widen the circle of Reagan’s support. Indeed, if it had been left to hard-core Reaganite ideologues such as Edwin Meese, William Clark, Lyn Nofziger, or Pat Buchanan to pass the first Reagan program, it probably would have been defeated. For ideological rigidity can derail even a partisan coalition, and both Bakers were masterful at bending at the margins and helping Reagan corral the final few votes needed for victory.

  Howard Baker gained national fame during the televised Watergate hearings as a symbol of Republican integrity. Actually, however, he lacks the charisma or phrase-making glibness of most media politicians. His natural terrain is legislative politics; three terms in the Senate made him a creature of Congress and its master. In 1981, he united Republicans who were as philosophically incompatible as arch-conservative Jesse Helms of North Carolina and outspokenly liberal Lowell Weicker of Connecticut. He got Helms to swallow a long delay before pushing against abortion and for school prayer, to allow Reagan’s economic program first crack. When Republican committee chairmen got into a tug-of-war over who would handle the guts of the Reagan program, Baker massaged egos with charm and patience. Even Democrats liked him as leader.

  “If you had a secret ballot for majority leader, I suspect Democrats would have picked him,” observed Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd. “We wanted to see the place function.”18

  Unusual for a politician, Baker is a listener, attentive to his colleagues. “Baker led by a combination of intellect—being four steps ahead of everybody—and humanness and warmth,” enthused Warren Rudman. “He had patience and compassion. When Howard Baker listened to you, you had the feeling that all that was going on for him was what you were saying at that moment.”19

  “He spent his whole day on the phone holding people’s hands,” added James Miller, one of Baker’s aides. “He knew that if you beat someone, you might need him again. He knew the most important time to stroke some senator was right after you’d beaten him. Baker would roll [defeat] Jesse Helms on a cloture vote, and then he’d sit Helms down in the cloakroom and have a talk with him afterwards.”20

  In the Senate, declared Colorado’s William Armstrong, “the success that Reagan had was sixty percent Reagan and forty percent Howard Baker. When you look at those first couple of years, you’ve got to admire the way Baker held the Republicans together, over and over. There was a selfless quality to his leadership. Everybody knew he was doing it to support the president and not to advance his own ideas. Baker is a beloved leader. He gets the break: People will vote with him because they love him. Not when they think he is dead wrong, but if there is reasonable room for maneuver or reasonable doubt, as so often there is, then they will support him.”21

  Hardball: Inside and Outside Politics

  The Senate provided Reagan with the cornerstone for his 1981 coalition, but the real challenge lay in the House, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans 243–192. How the Reaganites forged a House majority is a lesson in modern coalition building. To the steamroller tactic of reconciliation, the Reagan team added another tactic: the grass-roots-lobbying blitz. Rule number seven of the coalition game is: Use the muscle of the president’s nationwide political apparatus to swing votes into line for his legislative coalition. The Reagan operation in 1981 was a textbook case of how to use campaign and lobbying techniques to produce a functioning coalition in Congress.

  The arithmetic of the Democratic majority in the House left Reagan with two options—both common to Republican presidents: He could either strike a deal with the House Democratic leadership to form a grand bipartisan coalition on budget cutting or go for a much narrower coalition by holding all the Republicans in line and chipping off a block of at least twenty-six Democratic votes, to reach a majority of 218. Although House Democratic leaders were willing to go along with some budget cuts, that would not satisfy Reagan. He disagreed philosophically with Speaker Tip O’Neill and he wanted a visible Republican victory. So Reagan played partisan hardball; in the argot of Congress, he decided to “roll Tip”—topple the speaker. That strategy required forging a conservative coalition—the kind of alliance between Republicans and conservative southern Democrats that had helped Eisenhower and Nixon.

  In the House, the key to Reagan’s victory lay with two groups. “Very seldom do you get one vote at a time in the House,” explained Ken Duberstein, Reagan’s likable, street-smart House lobbyist, who has the chutzpah and humor to deal with big-city Democrats as well as Republicans. “You usually get blocks of votes. You usually get state delegations, say, the Democrats from Tennessee or the Republicans from Oklahoma, or the oil-state boys, or you get the Cotton Clubbers, or you get the tobacco boys, or you get the textile guys or the timber folks or the Gypsy Moths [the Northeast-Midwest Republicans]. So you see wholesale merchandising in the House, even if you’re meeting with them one by one or in small groups, whereas in the Senate it’s really one by one.”22

  The first key group was the Boll Weevils—about fifty conservative Democrats from Virginia to Texas who had clashed for years with their national party leaders on defense spending and budget deficits. They styled themselves Boll Weevils because they were boring from within the Democratic party, just as insect weevils bore inside the cotton boll. Many won elections by running against their party and Speaker Tip O’Neill; they came largely from districts where Reagan solidly thumped Carter. These Democrats were lineal descendants of the former Democratic allies of Eisenhower and Nixon—with one big difference. In the old days, the Republican White House usually teamed up with the “barons”—conservative southern committee chairmen. But in 1981, most top committee posts were held by mainstream Democrats and the southerners were mainly junior members relegated to the back benches. That left them in a renegade mood, ripe for recruitment by the Reagan forces.

  The second key group was the Gypsy Moths, some fifteen to twenty liberal Republicans from the Northeast and Midwest. Their name was a parody on the Boll Weevils, making the point that they ate at the leaves of the Republican tree, just as real gypsy moths do. The Gypsy Moths were habitual defectors from Republican ranks, joining centrist and liberal Democrats in legislative coalitions. In 1981, Gypsy Moths, such as Manhattan liberal Bill Green or Iowa’s progressive Republicans Jim Leach and Tom Tauke, were philosophically at odds with Reagan. They sympathized with
some efficiencies in government, but not deep budget slashing. Reagan’s coalition required every single Gypsy Moth vote.

  That task fell mainly to Bob Michel, the hearty Republican leader from Peoria, a popular legislator given to gol darn, geeminy Chrismus, and barbershop harmonizing. “Look,” Michel told his troops, “there’s no way you can really convince some good votes on the other side [Boll Weevils] if we can’t stick together on our own side. In unity, there is strength. We are still a minority party, but if we stick together and begin anew with a new president, we can accomplish great things.”23

  In 1980, the conservative coalition had a test run before Reagan won the presidency. The Republican–Boll Weevil alliance had produced 170 votes, thirty of them Democrats, for a Reagan-style program of deep budget cuts and supply-side, growth-oriented tax cuts. Moreover, smelling Reagan’s victory and a chance to increase their leverage, the Boll Weevils formally organized as the Conservative Democratic Forum.

  Reagan’s basic approach delighted the Boll Weevils. In fact, some were more zealous for budget cuts than Reagan. After Reagan’s State of the Union address, Ken Duberstein asked Charlie Stenholm, the Boll Weevil spokesman, “How’d we do? Did the president give you the cuts you were talking about?” Stenholm, a homey Texan from farm country near Abilene, wryly observed, “The president did fine, but I think he’s a cheapskate—he could have gone with $10 billion or $15 billion more in cuts.”

  But House Democratic leaders were not prepared to give up Boll Weevil votes without a fight. Budget Committee Chairman James Jones of Oklahoma, put together a conservative Democratic budget that embraced nearly eighty percent of the Reagan budget cuts. (It had only a one-year tax cut; Reagan’s had a three-year cut.) Jones probed Stockman about chances for a broad bipartisan compromise, but Reagan flatly rejected any deal. “I’m convinced that the American people strongly support my program and don’t want it watered down,” he declared. In 1981, that strategy paid off, but it was unwise for the long run. By holding out for a total victory, Reagan sowed resentment among moderate Democrats such as House Democratic Whip Thomas Foley, and their resentments later tripped Reagan on other issues.