Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  “The system works well at only one time—right after a landslide election,” James Sundquist, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution, observed. “This is one of those brief periods in our history when a president comes riding a great tide of personal popularity.”33

  1985: The Lost Coalition

  Sometimes even that great tide meets with heavy resistance. Nine days before Christmas 1985, President Reagan had to make a desperate pilgrimage to Capitol Hill. House Republicans had mutinied against his efforts to put together a coalition for tax reform, the domestic centerpiece of his second term. Five days earlier, they had stunned the Reagan White House by blocking a tax-reform bill from coming to the House floor for debate. Reagan’s strategy was in tatters. Now, it required Reagan’s personal plea, on bended knee, to revive the bill and to prevent his becoming a lame-duck president less than a year after his landslide reelection.

  That personal journey was a mark of Reagan’s tenacity and his personal pull with Republicans, because his appearance turned around just enough House Republicans at the last moment to extricate him from disaster. But the fact that Reagan had to go to Capitol Hill in such desperate straits underscored his troubles in playing the coalition game as his second term began. Instead of having a secure Republican base, Reagan spent most of the “honeymoon year” of his second term fighting—not with Democrats, but with Republicans. The summer in 1985 was consumed by angry clashes with Senate Republicans over the budget, and late in the year he faced the siege of House Republicans unhappy with tax reform. As the humorist Will Rogers once quipped, “Republicans have their splits right after the election and Democrats have theirs just before an election.”

  Other presidents, too, fought more with their own partisans than with the opposition—Lyndon Johnson, for example. After Johnson marshaled large Democratic majorities for his domestic program in 1964 and 1965, he faced an onslaught a few years later on the Vietnam War, clashing more with Democrats than Republicans. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman William Fulbright of Arkansas was an unrelenting critic of the war. I remember the dramatic moment in 1967 when Robert Kennedy, then a New York senator, publicly broke with Johnson over Vietnam, deepening the Democratic rift. And of course, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota humiliated Johnson by nearly upsetting Johnson in the 1968 New Hampshire primary.

  Reagan’s Republican critics in 1985 were neither as brazen nor as hostile as Johnson’s Democratic dissenters. But even with a forty-nine-state landslide, Reagan floundered in forming a governing coalition. That was a paradox, because Reagan’s sweeping reelection victory in 1984 stirred expectations that his second term would start with legislative triumphs to match his first year in the White House. For three years he had actually been on the defensive, accepting tax increases in 1982, 1983, and 1984, seeing his budgets ignored, making compromises on Social Security, and suffering the cutoff of aid to Nicaraguan contras in 1984. A big reelection landslide was Reagan’s chance to recoup, but his governing coalition was gone.

  Reagan’s experience tells a lot about second terms: They are notoriously hard, even on presidents who win landslide reelection. Woodrow Wilson, so triumphant in his first term, could not win Senate approval for his cherished League of Nations in his second term. Franklin Roosevelt, towering in his first term, was battered in his second term for his plan to pack the Supreme Court. He saw the New Deal slow down. Harry Truman, after reelection in 1948, became mired in Korea. Two decades later, the nation was so riven by the Vietnam War that Lyndon Johnson was politically crippled and dared not seek another term. Richard Nixon, who had made an opening to China and agreements with Moscow in his first term, was forced to resign in ignominy because of the Watergate scandal and other abuses of power. Eisenhower alone seemed to escape the painful rhythm.

  Reagan’s enormous personal popularity was not enough to protect him from the fateful pattern. He won individual issues as Jimmy Carter had, but the winning coalition formula of 1981 would not fall into place until the very end of 1985 with tax reform—and then just barely.

  As president, Reagan was different from 1981. He was slow to engage forcefully with Congress, and he ignored some of his own lessons in coalition making, enshrined in 1981. A governing coalition needs a rallying idea, and in 1985 Reagan did not have one. His reelection victory was so personal that it did not build support for his program in Congress. Moreover, far from wooing other politicians assiduously, as he had in 1981, he spent much of his time attacking Congress. He waffled between proclaiming his role as captain of the ship of state and trashing its crew. That approach sometimes makes for good reelection strategy, as Harry Truman proved in 1948 by lambasting the Republican Congress. But blame-game tactics rarely make for sound coalition building after the election is over.

  What is more, Reagan did not readjust quickly to the changed composition of Congress. In 1985, the political balance in the House did not permit Reagan’s natural instincts for partisan hardball; he did not have enough Republican votes to revive his ideological majority of 1981. Circumstance dictated bipartisan coalition making, and that meant concessions on the budget, which Reagan resisted making. Belatedly, he tried bipartisanship on tax reform. But in the first hundred days, he was less effective, less focused, and less activist as a leader than in 1981, and that afflicted his whole second term.

  As a result, the coalitions of 1985–86 emerged largely from below, from Congress, rather than from the president. As the new Senate majority leader, Bob Dole performed a near miracle in forging a Senate coalition for a courageous deficit-cutting budget in 1985, only to be cruelly cut down by Reagan and his new chief of staff, Don Regan. Two freshman Republican senators (Phil Gramm and Warren Rudman) produced a dramatic plan to balance the budget in six years. That forced a shotgun coalition: all sides pressed into an unwilling and unsustainable political marriage, less out of mutual interest than out of fear of being blamed for the mounting deficits (which nonetheless climbed higher in 1986). Reagan won a precarious House victory on tax reform, but on that too he was eventually rescued by Congress—by the brilliant coalition making of Oregon’s Republican Senator Bob Packwood, in the spring of 1986.

  It was an odd record for an immensely popular president. And the lessons of Reagan’s failures at the start of his second term tell as much about the Washington power game as his first-term successes.

  First, Reagan was still extremely popular, but his clout with other politicians—his presidential capacity to inspire love and fear—had diminished. In 1981, the Republican surge (Reagan’s election, the Republican takeover of the Senate, and a gain of thirty-three House seats) had loomed like a political Matterhorn over Washington. Reagan had clout, in part, because other politicians believed his coattails pulled other Republicans into office. There was an X factor that magnified the numbers because Republicans were feasting on dreams of a larger political realignment. But in the elections of 1982 and 1984, Reagan had failed to translate his personal popularity into Republican dominance in Congress. In 1985, the X factor was working against Reagan; the Republican dream of realignment had faded. Republican numbers in the House had fallen back from the 1981 level. As voters gave Reagan his landslide, ticket splitting reached all-time highs in 1984. Either purposely or perversely, the voters denied Reagan a firm grip on Congress.

  Some congressional Republicans blamed the president and his lieutenants for the Republican failure to make larger congressional gains in 1984. The Republicans had lost twenty-six House seats in the recession-dominated midterm elections of 1982, and they had looked to Reagan help to win back those twenty-six seats plus a few more for insurance, in order to lay the foundations for a new conservative coalition in Congress. They won only fourteen seats, and House Republican Leader Robert Michel accused the Reagan team of focusing on their own landslide, to the neglect of Congress.

  “As good a communicator as the president is, he really never, in my opinion, joined the issue of what it really means to have [favorable Rep
ublican] numbers in the House,” Michel complained the morning after the election. He was especially irked that while polls had shown Reagan far ahead of Walter Mondale, the president’s strategists did not use more of Reagan’s time to help Republicans win House seats. Reagan’s aides contended that Reagan’s appearances did help Republicans, but Michel argued that Reagan’s campaign stops would have been chosen differently if the House races had been top priority. He was furious, for example, that Reagan’s men were so bent on winning a fifty-state sweep that Reagan spent his final campaign day stumping in Mondale’s home state of Minnesota, instead of boosting congressional Republicans elsewhere.

  “Look at that last thing, going up to Minnesota—at the last minute, unannounced,” Michel fumed to the Associated Press. “That had to be only an attempt to make it a clean sweep, fifty states.… Here the son of a buck ended up with fifty-nine percent and you bring in [only] fifteen [more Republican House] seats.”34 (Actually, it turned out to be only fourteen seats.)

  Not only did these results irk Republicans, but they gave Democrats less reason to fear Reagan. Back in 1981, some of Reagan’s coalition-building clout had come from the fear of Boll Weevil Democrats that Reagan would campaign against them unless they played ball with him. They were especially afraid when Reagan was on the ballot, pulling voters into the Republican camp. But in 1984, only a handful of House Democrats had lost; the far more salient fact was that 192 House Democrats had won reelection in congressional districts that Reagan had carried. In short, they had weathered Reagan’s influence with the voters; the threat of a Reagan lobbying blitz was less intimidating in 1985 than four years earlier.

  Reagan’s second problem in forming a coalition in 1985 was even more his making: He wasted the political honeymoon period after his reelection landslide. Even without a Republican sweep, Reagan could have capitalized on his huge vote to create momentum—if he had quickly set firm priorities. But he moved slowly to frame his agenda and he allowed the belated shake-up of his White House staff. By late spring, he had lost his best chance to pressure Congress on the tide of popular goodwill. When he sent up his budget for 1986 in February 1985, Senate Republican leaders pronounced it “dead on arrival.” In the House, it got only one vote (Jack Kemp’s) out of 435.

  Third, Reagan’s credit and credibility were higher with the country than with politicians in Washington, for he was often out of step with most congressional leaders—Republican as well as Democratic. Congress and Reagan differed on priorities. In the campaign, Reagan had vaguely promised “more of the same,” but virtually all factions on Capitol Hill, except the Young Turk Republicans in the House, were disillusioned with his budget formulas. Overall legislative support for Reagan’s proposals had fallen from eighty-two percent in 1981 to sixty-six percent in 1984 and would fall further, to just under sixty percent in 1985.35

  In part, this declining support reflects the passage of time. It is easier for a president to get support of his measures in the first term, before voters have seen their impact and voiced unhappiness with the consequences. But by the second term, members of Congress know public reactions and are loath to offend more voters. In Reagan’s case, the tax cuts of 1981 and the explosion of military spending created a $212 billion deficit in 1985 that demanded fixing, and there was no popular solution. Reagan had been the pied piper in 1981, but in 1985, many in Congress found his tune far less seductive.

  Senate Republican leaders as well as House Democratic leaders disagreed with the president on the deficit and taxes, on farm subsidies, protectionism, voting rights, the MX missile, and South Africa. By 1985, congressional leaders had reached a consensus that the deficit was the nation’s most urgent issue, and the most sensible way to control it was to make everyone sacrifice: to slow defense spending, to freeze growth of the big social-entitlement programs, and to raise taxes. Reagan was the odd man out. He was against raising taxes, against slowing defense, and he waffled on freezing entitlements.

  The fourth problem, largely of Reagan’s making, was the weakening of the vital White House connection with Republican congressional leaders—a crucial ingredient of the 1981 coalition. The new link in 1985 was less reliable and less expert. The Bakers were gone: Jim Baker had become Treasury secretary and Howard Baker had retired. Howard Baker’s successor was Bob Dole, a far more independent-minded, outspoken majority leader with presidential ambitions.

  On the day of his election, November 24, 1984, Dole signaled his independence from the White House, making clear that his top priority was leading the Senate, not carrying the president’s flag. His message, delivered in Kansas twang, was more cooperative than William Knowland’s to Eisenhower, but not as loyal as Howard Baker’s to Reagan. Dole would follow his own political instincts and call his own shots.

  “We’re going to retain the Republican majority in ’86—that’s our agenda—and at the same time support the president’s program where we can,” Dole told reporters in the Capitol. “We’re members of the Senate. We have our own institution.”

  At the White House, a similar shift away took place. The president did not warm to Dole as he had to Howard Baker. They rarely met, except for congressional leadership meetings, and rarely talked on the phone. “We’ve had a couple of private meetings,” Dole told me in 1986, “but my view is we’re all adults and big boys, and we ought to be able to do our job and shouldn’t have to bother the president with my problems, and they shouldn’t have to bother me with theirs.”36

  But the president can set the tone of that relationship, and it was Reagan’s mistake not to form a more personal tie with Dole. That cost him when it came to coalition making.

  What is more astonishing is that Reagan let Jim Baker leave the pivot point for coalition making as chief of staff. Reagan seems not to have grasped how much that would affect his relations with Congress. Apparently he did not fathom how coolly Don Regan, his new chief of staff, was regarded on Capitol Hill or how Regan’s limited political experience would hurt the presidency in this key spot. Regan was more confrontational than Jim Baker, and he had less feel for what would work with Congress and what would get the president into trouble.

  “Don Regan is a financial genius,” said Tip O’Neill, another blunt Irishman who, like Regan, had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “He thinks he knows everything about everything, and he has no political common sense whatsoever. No political knowledge, political talent, no political intuition.”37 A harsh view, but common on Capitol Hill.

  As Regan took over, he did not properly reckon the power of the mainstream House Democratic leadership or the need for a consistent bipartisan strategy on major issues. Nor did he understand how to weave together rival Republican factions in one coalition. As a result, both Regan and the president swung like yo-yos between Republican factions, creating confusion and fury among Reagan’s natural allies.

  What saved the president in 1985 and 1986 was his own popularity and tenacity and the fact that his top domestic priority—tax reform—wound up in the hands of Jim Baker as Treasury secretary. For Baker, unlike Regan, had the good sense to see that the 1984 election results meant the president could pass major legislation only by forming a bipartisan coalition with mainstream Democrats. Baker held the president to that strategy—not without difficulty—and shepherded Reagan to his one major victory in 1985, on the tax bill.

  The Republican Rift

  The most serious obstacle to Reagan’s second-term coalition making was the open political rift in Republican ranks, the shattering of the Republican unity that had been the cornerstone of his 1981 coalition. Any presidency, like any political party, is an umbrella for very different streams of partisans. Reagan’s magic in 1981, typical of a popular leader at peak strength, was to hold these contending factions under one tent. But his success in 1981 had been a one-shot achievement. In 1982, House Republicans had split virtually down the middle when Reagan agreed to a major tax increase to check the rising deficit. Alliance with the Democrats carri
ed that day, but the rift among Republicans had been opened.

  After Reagan’s reelection, there was little to check Republican rivalries. Republicans were looking to the future—beyond Reagan; the scramble to succeed him was under way. And that reality played havoc with Reagan’s coalition making.

  The two chief Republican protagonists, who personified competing camps in Congress, were Senator Bob Dole and Congressman Jack Kemp. The factional struggles between them had burst into the open at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, where their camps clashed over the party’s platform. Kemp’s well-organized Young Turk Republicans had won out. Factional warfare was suspended during the 1984 campaign, but once the campaign was over, it resumed.

  “The post-Reagan era began the morning after his reelection,” lamented Ed Rollins, then White House political director.

  Dole and Kemp were natural rivals, both eyeing the presidential nomination in 1988. Their competition had all the electricity of a bristling personal feud. For years they had been taking swipes at each other. Talking about tax reform to college Republicans, Dole cracked that Kemp, known for his blow-dried-for-TV hair, wanted to take a business deduction for his hair spray. Kemp threw back a belittling zinger at Dole; he joked that in a recent fire, Dole’s library had burned down and “both books” were lost—and that Dole had not finished coloring one of them.

  “Kemp and Dole don’t like each other,” said a moderate Republican. “It’s ad hominem, not just what they stand for.”

  Unquestionably, they grated on each other, but their political confrontation sprang less from personal frictions than from their bedrock disagreement over the proper economic philosophy, long-term strategy, and political priorities for the Republican party. They represented different philosophies, different interests, different regions.