Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  In 1981, the threat to Reagan’s coalition strategy was that some Boll Weevils wanted to stick with their party if possible, and they were attracted to Jones’s budget. In early May, the Boll Weevils had a showdown meeting, one after another praising Jones’s package as a reasonable, workable compromise, consistent with Reagan’s goals. But a rift opened: Phil Gramm, a firebrand free-market Texas conservative, insisted that Jones’s budget “flunked” criteria the Boll Weevils had adopted earlier: no deficit bigger than Reagan’s, no less savings on the big benefit-entitlement programs, and no less money for defense.

  “It’s time to draw the line in the sand,” Gramm insisted. “I’m voting against this budget even if I have to stand alone, like the people at the Alamo.”

  Amidst the shouting that ensued, John Hightower reminded Gramm of Texas history: “Remember what happened to those people who crossed the line at the Alamo. They all got killed.”

  Marvin Leath, a third Texan, challenged Hightower. “The other people who didn’t cross the line also got killed,” Leath coldly countered. “Only no one remembers their names. By God, I’m going with Gramm. So there’ll be two of us.”24

  The Boll Weevil revolt was launched, but it was unclear whether Reagan could capture enough defectors to win.

  In the game of political persuasion, the Reagan White House took no chances. It played outside as well as inside politics, and it played hardball. Stockman lobbied his former allies in the Boll Weevil group. Reagan went public, stirring up popular support with nationally televised addresses. He sharpened the sense of economic crisis, focusing on the gloomy statistics of high inflation and economic stagnation. He bluntly reminded Congress on April 28 that it had been six months since his election and the people wanted action.

  “The American people are slow to wrath but when their wrath is once kindled, it burns like a consuming flame,” Reagan declared, quoting Theodore Roosevelt. “Well, perhaps that kind of wrath will be deserved,” Reagan warned, if Congress resorted to “the old and comfortable way … to shave a little here and add a little there.” His speech touched off an avalanche of mail to Congress.

  For maximum leverage, the Reagan team mounted a massive political pressure operation against the Boll Weevils that must go down as one of the most effective grass-roots-lobbying campaigns of any modern presidency. It is an example to be studied by future presidents, for Jim Baker and Lyn Nofziger, Reagan’s key political strategists, had properly fathomed the significance of the breakup of the old congressional power structure. No bargain could be struck with a few leaders; there were no barons in the House to deliver the southern Democratic votes. The defections of Gramm and Leath did not guarantee support of other Boll Weevils. That would take heat from back home, and the White House turned up the flame.

  The concept was not new, but the Reaganites applied it with new sophistication. Under Lyndon Johnson in 1965, White House political chief Larry O’Brien had mobilized Democratic activists across the country to pressure Congress to pass Johnson’s Great Society legislation. But the Reagan operation had new technology—computerized lists of campaign insiders and contributors to House members—so it knew precisely who could squeeze congressional waverers. In addition, Reagan had a better-organized national mass movement than any previous Republican president. In fifteen years of crisscrossing the country, he had built a network of conservative activists. His campaign volunteers were still in place, itching to show their muscle.

  Reagan’s political operation was masterminded by Lyn Nofziger, a rumpled California conservative with a black Charlie Chan mustache and goatee; and Lee Atwater, a bright, intense, young South Carolinian (later campaign manager for George Bush in 1988). Nofziger and Atwater ran a political blitz in fifty-four swing congressional districts, forty-five in the South. They used scare tactics on congressmen by getting their campaign contributors to threaten to oppose them in 1982 if they bucked the president now.

  The Reagan team, working like a presidential campaign, generated direct mail, phone banks, radio and television ads, and sent out top speakers to put heat on targeted congressmen. They mobilized the Republican National Committee, Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, National Conservative Political Action Committee, Moral Majority, Fund for a Conservative Majority, and political action committees linked to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, Business Roundtable, American Medical Association, and scores of groups interested in cutting federal spending and taxes.

  “The premise of the whole operation is that political reforms and the impact of media have made it so that a congressman’s behavior on legislation can be affected more by pressure from within his own district than by lobbying here in Washington,” Atwater told me during the operation. “The way we operate, within forty-eight hours any congressman will know he has had a major strike in his district. All of a sudden, Vice President Bush is in your district; Congressman Jack Kemp is in your district. Ten of your top contributors are calling you, the head of the local AMA, the head of the local realtors’ group, local officials. Twenty letters come in. Within forty-eight hours, you’re hit by paid media, free media, mail, phone calls, all asking you to support the president.”25

  It was the nice-cop/tough-cop routine, with Reagan working the soft sell and his minions the hard sell. In the ten days leading up to the first House budget vote on May 7, Reagan met personally with a dozen Republicans and sixty Democrats, while the grass-roots blitz hit them from back home. A typical target was Butler Derrick, a South Carolina moderate Democrat.

  “I’ve been here since 1974, and I’ve never seen an operation as well orchestrated as the way the Reagan administration has handled this budget battle,” Derrick told Haynes Johnson of The Washington Post. “The president invited me down to the White House one morning with five other congressmen. It was very pleasant conversation. There wasn’t any pushing. He was giving his views—kind of good-guy conversation.”

  Back home, Derrick said: “They have apparently gone back through my contributor files and pulled off prominent conservatives that have contributed to my campaign over the years and also probably have supported the national Republican ticket. They have gotten in touch with them. It’s been very effective in the business community … probably sixty or seventy percent of the large-business people in my district have contacted me. And of course, I have had many small businessmen contact me. I don’t recall that I’ve ever been lobbied quite as hard from the district.”26

  The Reagan hardballers jolted other congressional fence-sitters. Ronnie Flippo, an Alabama Boll Weevil, got hit with a call from then-Governor Forrest “Fob” James, a pro-Reagan Democrat. Dan Mica, another Democrat from Palm Beach, Florida, was pressured by his former campaign manager. “I had a call, too, from a local mayor, a Democrat very active in the party and associated with liberal causes, and he asked me to vote with the president,” Mica revealed. “That surprised me that they would get to him.”

  “Reagan had a big enough stick so that all we had to do is organize the support and no Boll Weevil would stand up to him,” Atwater later boasted.27 Indeed, Derrick, Mica, and Flippo were among sixty-three Democrats who voted on May 7 for the Reagan budget.

  Similar lobbying tactics were used on liberal northern Gypsy Moth Republicans. “I got a call from Henry Kissinger,” Manhattan’s Bill Green told me, “and when I started arguing about the budget numbers, Kissinger said, ‘I don’t know anything about that. Let me just say that after four years where we have lost international leadership, it’s important that we be seen as having someone who can lead the country. It’s important from an international point of view that the president win this first key vote.’ ”28

  That intense lobbying, behind Reagan’s personal appeals, gave the new president a sweeping victory, 253–176. Every single Republican voted for his package. That was an extraordinary feat.

  Johnson-Style Horsetrading

  Forming the coalition is only the first step; sustaining i
t long enough to lock up final legislative victory is much harder. In the American system, victory rarely ends the fight—it marks the start of the next battle. This time, it was not Reagan’s charm treatment or the grassroots blitz that rescued the Reagan coalition. It was old-fashioned, Lyndon Johnson-style barter politics: buying votes by doling out favors—what some call “running the soup kitchen.” Rule number eight of the coalition game is: Bend at the margins and wheedle votes where you can; don’t get hung up on ideological purity. Horse-trading is the way the battle is fought in the final clinches.

  Reagan’s battle was not over because entrenched committees of Congress resorted to intricate, arcane maneuvers to undo the effects of that first budget vote. The reconciliation measure passed required implementing by regular committees, and they had a field day with the fine print of the legislation, molding it their way. The White House was shocked to see conservative Republicans and Boll Weevils engaging in legislative chicanery along with liberal Democrats, all protecting their favorite programs. Many of the “cuts” enacted were empty numbers that reduced spending only in theory.

  “Sabotage!” shouted David Stockman, himself no slouch at fudging budget numbers and tilting estimates when it suited him. In June 1981, he accused the committees of shady bookkeeping, false arithmetic, and phony cutbacks. Pro-Reagan Republicans and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that House committees cut $55 billion for the year 1984, but Stockman reckoned only $25 billion was valid.29

  In alarm, Stockman persuaded the president that he had to send another whole budget to Congress. “The committees have broken faith with the first budget resolution,” Stockman told Reagan in mid-June. “It could jeopardize your entire economic program. We have to make a major fight to restore the provisions in your first budget. If you want to balance the budget in ’84, you can’t live with the cuts they’ve made.”30

  Stockman secretly prepared a massive new reconciliation measure, a line-by-line substitute for the congressional bill. It was a high-handed tactic, because Congress—not the budget bureau—is supposed to draft money bills. It meant rejecting the congressional bills and making a fresh effort. Reagan went along with the plan, still counting on one up-or-down vote and the pull of his own popularity to preserve his coalition.

  But it was now summer and the Reagan coalition had begun to fray. Moral appeals were not enough to restore it. The White House was short of votes. Gypsy Moths were threatening to bolt unless some modest programs favored in the urban East and Midwest were restored. New York’s Bill Green wanted $50 million more for the National Endowment for the Arts, a higher cap on Medicaid for the poor, and guaranteed student loans provided to more families; Jim Leach of Iowa sought $100 million in family planning; Carl Pursell of Michigan wanted $30 million for nurses’ training. Others wanted $100 million more for Amtrak and Conrail, another $400 million in energy subsidies for the poor, restoration of economic development grants, and so on. The White House paid their price to get their votes for the final budget package.

  The Boll Weevils were demanding sweeteners, too. Georgia Democrats got state-owned cotton warehouses exempted from a new user fee. Some $400 million in cuts of veterans’ programs were restored to satisfy Mississippi’s Sonny Montgomery, a powerhouse for veterans. Louisiana’s John Breaux was lured aboard with a promise to revive sugar import quotas to protect his home state.

  “I went for the best deal,” Breaux crassly admitted afterward. He maintained his vote had not been bought but—he confessed—“I was rented.”

  The bargaining was like stock-market bidding, right to the wire. Ironically, to get votes, Stockman had to trade back to Congress things he had objected to in mid-June. The final budget was such a rush job that it reached the floor after the debate began, and it mistakenly listed the name and phone number of a congressional staffer—“Rita Seymour, 555–4844”—which someone had scribbled in the margin of a draft copy. Clearly, no one had proofread the retyped version.

  The critical test vote came on procedure, not substance. House Democratic leaders tried to outmaneuver the power of Reagan’s single up-or-down vote. They figured Reagan’s budget would be tougher to pass if it were broken into five packages, forcing Gypsy Moth Republicans and Boll Weevil Democrats to be counted on separate votes—and some of those votes were bound to be unpopular back home. Hoping to break up the Reagan coalition that way, Democratic leaders fashioned a procedural rule which divided the budget into five separate packages.

  It was an ingenious tactic, but it backfired, because members wanted to avoid the wrath of constituents who were telling them: Cut the budget, but save our programs. One big vote spared House members that dilemma; it was politically easier to handle. (Rule number nine of the coalition game: Make votes politically easy.) Once the big package of cuts was fixed, members could not both cut the budget and save local programs; they had only one choice: yes or no. Since budget cutting was generally popular, they could justify swallowing some distasteful cuts. The Democratic tactic would expose members to cross-pressures to both cut and save programs; so it rankled many House members. As a result, the Gypsy Moths backed Reagan and just enough Boll Weevils defected to beat the Democratic procedural rule by the perilous margin of 217–210. A shift of four votes would have beaten Reagan and radically altered the outcome.

  That procedural vote on June 25 was little understood by the public, but it demonstrated the power of technicalities: The vote on the “rule” (for handling the budget bill) framed the ultimate vote on the substance of the budget (one vote or five separate packages).

  Defeat of the Democratic rule, moreover, solidified Reagan’s coalition and shattered the Democratic leadership’s control of the House. It cleared the way for Reagan, on the very next day, to win a similarly close victory on the biggest budget cuts ever enacted at one time.

  The pattern of coalition building for Reagan’s big tax-cut bill in 1981 was similar—except that it was easier for the Reagan team. Cutting taxes is inherently more popular than cutting the budget, because in budget cutting some voters’ favorite programs are going to be cut. Also, Reagan had developed such an image of invincibility from his budget victories that the main issue in the tax fight became not whether but how much to cut. Reagan once advocated a thirty-percent cut in individual tax rates over three years, later dropped to twenty-five percent. Business interests and orthodox Republicans insisted on big business tax cuts through an investment tax credit, generous depreciation write-offs, and favorable tax-leasing arrangements. Boll Weevils wanted cuts in estate and gift taxes; those from Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma also wanted to protect oil-depletion allowances.

  Democratic leaders argued that a three-year tax cut was very dangerous because it was likely to produce huge deficits—and they were right, as many Republicans later admitted. But playing to win back the Boll Weevils, Dan Rostenkowski, House Ways and Means Committee chairman, tried to outbid Reagan. He never offered more than a two-year cut in individual tax rates, but in other areas, he was very generous. There were so many giveaways that at one point, David Obey, a liberal Wisconsin Democrat, wisecracked, “It would probably be cheaper [for the government] if we gave everybody in the country three wishes.”

  Stockman later reckoned the tax-cut package would cut tax revenues by $2 trillion over a decade, but substance got lost in the scramble to win. “The only real numbers being counted were the votes,” Stockman later lamented. “Questions of tax policy and fiscal impact had long since been forgotten. When the final showdown came, it took the form of a raw struggle for political power and control of the House—and the nation’s revenue base was the incidental loser.”31

  Once again, Reagan prevailed handsomely, leaving a political model for others on how to mold a majority coalition. Any coalition requires a single central idea with wide appeal, and Reagan’s central core of convictions about less government and lower taxes provided a unifying force for Republicans. Reagan rallied the country and was masterful at courting Congress
in twos and threes, while his lieutenants used reconciliation and the grass-roots blitz as instruments of persuasion. And for all his unyielding rhetoric, Reagan showed the tactical wisdom of horse-trading in the eleventh hour in order to paste his coalition together. Tip O’Neill paid him tribute by complaining that “every time you compromise [with Reagan], the president gets eighty percent of what he wants.” And Reagan retorted: “I’ll take eighty percent every time, and I’ll go back the next year for the other twenty percent.”

  After a period of eroding party ties, Reagan held the Republicans in Congress together with remarkable unanimity. Only one of 192 House Republicans had voted against him (James Jeffords of Vermont), and Senate Republicans had gone down the line several times. Democrats were awed. Gary Hymel, a top aide to O’Neill, told Ken Duberstein, Reagan’s House liaison man: “What I admire most about you guys is not the Democratic votes. It’s the fact that you got every single blessed Republican on a major substantive vote. That’s almost unheard of.”32 It was true: Neither Eisenhower, nor Nixon, nor Ford had achieved that party discipline. Such solid Republican voting had not been equaled since the hardheaded rule of “Czar” Joe Cannon, Republican Speaker in 1910. Nor was Reagan ever again able to muster such Republican unity.

  August 1981 was the high tide of Reaganism. In just eight months Reagan had pushed through Congress the most massive tax cut in American history and budget cuts far larger than anyone had imagined. Given the monumental deficits that ensued, it was a pyrrhic victory. But that August, political Washington was not heeding economics; it was stunned by Reagan’s triumphant coalition making. His was a performance to match Woodrow Wilson’s after his first election, FDR’s at the start of the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s in 1965.