Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  Over the years, O’Neill occasionally joined forces with Reagan, especially when Reagan was in retreat and ready for genuine compromise. They pushed through a tax increase in 1982, agreed on modest changes in the Social Security program in 1983, and worked to pass the tax-reform bill of 1986. On another major issue, O’Neill also went far out on a limb to endorse Reagan’s use of Marines in Lebanon in 1983—only to feel betrayed when Reagan pulled them out in 1984, one week after implying that O’Neill was cowardly for suggesting a pullout. In the second Reagan term, O’Neill’s tactics became more canny. He let Senate Republicans battle Reagan on the budget and then rammed home Democratic victories on trade and South Africa.

  In general, O’Neill’s strategy, his way of playing the opposition game, was far different from Rayburn’s. O’Neill’s hallmark was the politics of confrontation. He fought Reagan on the war in Nicaragua, the budget, military spending, taxes, South Africa, trade. O’Neill is a partisan scrapper by nature and training. His political school had been the highly partisan Massachusetts legislature. In Congress, he stacked committee ratios heavily for Democrats, and he believed that the opposition’s main function was to oppose on substance.

  Moreover, Reagan left him little practical choice. Eisenhower had made collaboration easy for Rayburn and Johnson because he was not a very partisan president. But Reagan initially disdained cooperation; his sharp partisan hardball in 1981 provoked a partisan response from O’Neill. Their joint efforts amounted to temporary truces in running partisan warfare. For six years, the power game was largely animated by the rivalry of these two leaders, who stood at opposite philosophical poles and ruled at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Both had lived through Depression, war, and recovery, and both had reached opposite conclusions. Both came from humble beginnings, and Reagan had started life as a Democrat. But for Reagan, the New Deal was where the Democratic party took the wrong path into deficit spending. For O’Neill, the New Deal was what politics was all about, helping the underdog, lifting the country by its bootstraps. For Reagan, big government is the source of modern America’s problems: intrusive, bloated, wasteful, and stifling to individual initiative. For O’Neill, big government had helped build America’s strength as a society: succor to the needy, springboard for the aspiring. “I believe it is wrong for the people who have made it up the ladder to pull the ladder up behind them,” he declared. “If the success stories of this country needed a helping hand up the ladder, why should we not give the same help to those young people trying to get ahead today?”6

  Two radically different politicians, yet they sprang from similar humble roots: one from a blue-collar Boston suburb, the other from the small-town Midwest. Both about seventy, they were strong-willed, proud, stubborn in their convictions, and bent on rolling each other politically. And they exulted in the combat.

  They cut enormously different figures. Here was Tip O’Neill, a self-proclaimed “old-hat FDR-liberal Democrat,” like an aging heavyweight prizefighter, his shaggy thatch of white hair, his massive Hogarthian girth and jowls, big nose, and fat cigar (unsmoked), a walking cariacature of the inside politician. He was poised against Ronald Reagan, the antigovernment Republican crusader with his Hollywood glamour, agile as a middleweight, trim, far younger looking, the political outsider come to do battle with the bureaucracy. They seemed a mismatch: the plodding legislator and the dashing movie hero—the tortoise and the hare—matching halves of the American dream. Reagan limned the magic of opportunity; O’Neill preached the obligations of compassion.

  The Reagan quickly crowd discounted O’Neill as an intellectual lightweight, an old-fashioned pol with a gift for gab, the prisoner of an outdated ideology who lacked the smarts and finesse for leadership.

  And for liberal Democrats, the early “book”—the political tout sheet—on Ronald Reagan read much the same: another lightweight, a detached, hands-off president, ignorant of much in government, prone to delegate great authority to lieutenants, subject to their manipulations. There was truth in both assessments; they were similar. Both relied heavily on staffs; neither was strong on substance. But as political leaders, both were easy to underestimate. Reagan and O’Neill governed from the gut, with a sure sense of self that made each remarkably steadfast, when lesser leaders buckled. Both were enormously resilient, capable of absorbing defeat and rising from the canvas after a knockdown; both were tireless and tenacious. They were thematic leaders, not brilliant strategists or tacticians. Fighting rhetoric was their trumpet call.

  For the television audience, the battle over Reagan’s program became a heavyweight match of O’Neill vs. Reagan, man to man. Each relished that. Personalizing the clash fit the folksy style of an earthy Boston pol such as Tip O’Neill. To him, Reagan’s Beverly Hills address and millionaire friends were as symbolic of Reagan’s philosophy and as central to the president’s political outlook as O’Neill’s own immigrant upbringing and middle-class home were to his New Deal views.

  Republicans welcomed using O’Neill as a target. In a 1980 campaign ad, the Republican party had parodied O’Neill as the stereotype of the overgrown federal government. They found a hefty, chortling, white-haired actor for O’Neill’s stand-in and showed him getting stranded in a gas-guzzling American car on a highway to nowhere, while a passenger carped, “Congressman, we are running out of gas.” O’Neill took the personal hit. But over time, he fought back well enough that Republicans stopped making him a butt of their ads. In the polls, he eventually became as popular a figure as Reagan.

  Like Reagan, Tip O’Neill relished the macho battle. Despite sniping that he was over the hill, O’Neill adjusted rather rapidly to the new political game. O’Neill had been raised as an old-breed politician, son of a city councilman in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After arriving in Congress in 1953, he had learned from earlier speakers—Sam Rayburn, John McCormack, and Carl Albert—how to work the inner pathways of legislative politics. But Reagan’s video presidency forced O’Neill to adapt; he had to pick up enough of the new-breed media game to compete. What’s more, O’Neill pushed congressional Democrats, and the national Democratic party, into new fund-raising and media operations to do battle with the well-heeled, modernized Republican party. From a back-room operator, he became a media figure. He developed the apparatus of the speakership and brought new thrust to the opposition leader’s game.

  O’Neills Opposition Predicament

  Tip O’Neill began the Reagan era as a punching bag. The Democrats were the elected House majority—243 Democrats to 192 Republicans—but the numbers were misleading because congressional Democrats were demoralized. The 1980 election debacle had stunned them—not just Reagan’s victory, but seeing Republican novices beat such prominent Senate liberals as Frank Church of Idaho, Birch Bayh of Indiana, John Culver of Iowa, and George McGovern of South Dakota. In the House, the Republican tide had swept off Democratic Whip John Brademas and Al Ullman, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “It was a total shock wave to the party,” recalled Kirk O’Donnell, O’Neill’s able political strategist.7 “Like a hapless victim run over by a truck, the Democratic party knows what hit it last November but is uncertain of the extent of its injuries, how long it will take to recover and what shape it will be in once it gets out of intensive care,” Dom Bonafede wrote in the National Journal.8

  For the first time in fifty years, Democrats felt that not just their candidates but their party had lost an election. The long span of the New Deal had finally expired. Even before the 1980 campaign, many Democrats in Congress had stopped believing in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, widely ridiculed as “throwing money at social problems.” As Reagan took office, many Democrats wallowed in unhappy political self-analysis. The Democratic mainstream had lost its sense of direction.

  The other side of the coin was Republican cockiness: the belief that a majority of voters were moving into the Republican camp for the long run. By mid-May 1981, Reagan’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin, report
ed the stunning news that Republicans had pulled even with the Democrats—thirty-nine percent of voters polled by Wirthlin called themselves Republicans, forty percent Democrats, and twenty-one percent independents—a phenomenal change from longtime Democratic dominance. In Congress, Republican leaders predicted Democratic officeholders would defect; two did cross over in 1981, Bob Stump of Arizona and Eugene Atkinson of Pennsylvania. Later, Phil Gramm, the renegade Texas Democrat, switched parties, too.

  Out in the country, the Democratic party had been hemorrhaging for years, losing the lifeblood of voter support, and the 1980 election displayed the trauma in living color. Since the 1950s, streams of southern white voters had defected to Republican candidates—Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan—and had been choosing Democratic congressmen closer to the Republican mold than to the national Democratic mold. More recently, ethnic, Catholic, blue-collar voters from the urban Northeast and Midwest had become disillusioned by Carter’s economic policies and moved to Reagan in 1980. The old New Deal coalition had finally been shattered after half a century. The Democratic party, as David Broder of The Washington Post observed, was “fragmented, frustrated, and politically frightened.”9

  Inside Congress, the power earthquake compounded O’Neill’s problems as opposition Leader. Enviously, O’Neill lamented that he lacked the institutional power of Rayburn. In the Democratic disarray of the early 1980s, the legendary power of Rayburn was magnified; it was widely believed that “Mr. Sam” had held the House in the palm of his hand. Rocking back in his swivel chair, Tip O’Neill loved to tell stories about how Rayburn, during a tough vote, would line the front bench of the House chamber with junior Democrats awaiting Rayburn’s command on how to vote. Their home-district politics dictated a vote against Rayburn, but they were in his debt for some favor: some committee assignment, some pork-barrel project, some tilt of the legislative process. To hear Tip tell it, Rayburn held them captive as he watched the vote tally, using their votes as he needed them or releasing them if his majority was ample. Richard Boiling, a Rayburn protégé and later Rules Committee chairman, said that O’Neill exaggerated Rayburn’s powers.

  Nonetheless, it was true that Congress had been transformed since the Rayburn era. The seniority system had been cracked, the committee chairmen had been weakened, subcommittee chairmen had proliferated—and new, independent attitudes had made House members more unruly. Boiling contended that the speaker had gained institutional power at the expense of the committee barons. He pointed out that Rayburn was all-powerful once a bill reached the House floor but Rayburn was often blocked or defied in committee by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. Speaker O’Neill, Boiling argued, had more power over the Rules Committee—which had often defied Rayburn; more control of the legislative schedule, even in committees; and more say on most committee appointments.10

  But in Rayburn’s day power had been more predictable. Power centers were fewer. Bargains could be struck by a handful of powerful barons, and Rayburn’s great personal sway was bolstered by the seniority system that made junior members susceptible to his sticks and carrots. O’Neill had a more complicated task shepherding sprawling factions.

  Above all, what made the process of House leadership so daunting was the ethic of political independence prevalent in the 1970s, eroding party discipline. In addition to regional and ideological splits, Democrats suffered a generational divide. The new breed, elected since 1974, were not awed by authority. They took their own importance for granted: They had run their own campaigns, raised their own money, put on their own TV ads, and felt little debt to the national Democratic party or to the speaker. In the old days, local party bosses such as Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago could give orders to the Democratic congressmen from the Chicago region and swing them in line for the speaker. But old-fashioned party machines no longer provided the glue to hold Democratic majorities together. After Vietnam, the political vogue was antiauthority politics.

  On the issues, the new breed had a different slant from the old breed. To those in their thirties and forties, the Depression was dim history. Their bětes noires were inflation, stagnation, and high interest rates. They talked less about unemployment than about deficits, swollen budgets, and waste. Old-breed leaders (Tip O’Neill, Richard Boiling, Danny Rostenkowski) called these newcomers “weak Democrats” who wore the party label but felt no deep loyalty. “There’s no love for the party, there’s no love for the leadership, there’s no love for anybody out there,” Tip O’Neill complained.11

  Finally, O’Neill lacked a crucial element of Rayburn’s power in opposition: a Senate under Democratic control. When both houses had been led by Democrats, a Republican president had to make deals with the Democratic leadership of Congress or suffer the consequences. Control of both houses meant the opposition’s ability to set the legislative agenda and to rewrite legislation from the White House. Essentially, it put Congress on an equal footing with the president.

  “If your party controlled all the committee and subcommittee chairmanships and scheduling on the floor, the president couldn’t get very far without at least beginning to work with you,” observed Norm Ornstein, congressional scholar at American Enterprise Institute. “Or if he did try to jam things through, he’d get awfully damn bloodied in the process, as we saw with Nixon long before Watergate.”12 Rayburn and Johnson worked Eisenhower as a pair. Democratic leaders had also outnumbered Nixon, two to one. But in 1981, Democrats were the Senate minority, and O’Neill did not get along well with Minority Leader Robert C. Byrd. Against Reagan, O’Neill stood alone.

  1981: The Politics of Patience

  Shorn of political leverage, O’Neill fell back on the politics of patience. His initial strategy was to retreat and regroup, nurse the party’s wounds, give Reagan his chance, and try to pull the disparate strands of Democrats together. In policy terms, O’Neill was realistic enough to see that some retrenchment in social programs was inevitable. Congressional Democrats had begun that in 1979 and 1980, before Reagan’s election, but O’Neill wanted to limit it. In political terms, his overriding priority was to protect the Democratic majority in the House and to prevent a national realignment in favor of Republicans. These were high stakes, and O’Neill’s defensive reflex obeyed the first law of politics: survival.

  That meant making a bid to disaffected Boll Weevils, the conservative southern Democrats enamored of Reagan. They had been neglected for years by House Democratic leaders. In 1980, many had run as “anti-Tip” Democrats. Belatedly, O’Neill and then–House Majority Leader Jim Wright tried to make amends in 1981 by putting Boll Weevil Phil Gramm on the House Budget Committee and Kent Hance, another conservative Texan, on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. The idea was to rope in Boll Weevils by letting them help draft Democratic legislation. But the move came too late; Gramm and Hance defected and became cosponsors of Reagan proposals. O’Neill felt betrayed, asserting that Gramm had promised to support the Democratic bill on the floor. “He broke his word—no question about it,” O’Neill insisted bitterly.13 And Boll Weevil defections were the speaker’s downfall in 1981.

  Moreover, O’Neill underestimated Reagan. O’Neill viewed the 1980 election not as a sweeping mandate for conservativism, but mainly as a rejection of Jimmy Carter. “I think there was a small minority, ten or fifteen percent, who voted for Reagan, who really wanted to deliver a mandate,” O’Neill declared in May 1981. “But we know why we lost the election. We had an unpopular presidential candidate, inflation was too high, and so was unemployment.”14 He also blamed Carter’s Iranian hostage crisis. But O’Neill failed to reckon on Reagan’s skill at interpreting the election results as a policy mandate and selling that interpretation to the press and country. O’Neill made a classic opposition mistake: He did not argue vigorously for his interpretation of the election. By default, he left Reagan’s claim largely unchallenged.

  The speaker also underestimated Reagan’s political mastery of Congress, his capacity to charm and intimid
ate the members and bend them to his will. Initially O’Neill, the veteran, patronized Reagan as another amateur newcomer, another hinterlander like Jimmy Carter, who would have to be taught the ways of Washington. When Reagan paid a courtesy call on the speaker after his election, O’Neill was condescending. “You were governor of a state, but a governor plays in the minor leagues,” he told Reagan. “Now you’re in the big leagues. Things might not move as quickly as you would like.”

  The speaker stressed the institutional pride of Congress, especially jealousy over powers regained since the Vietnam War and Watergate. “You know, you’ve run a state legislature, you’ve been governor, you can appreciate it,” O’Neill opined. “The Congress will really fight for its rights. We want to cooperate. We want to do everything you want. [But] there was an eroding of the power of the Congress. We just got back our powers. They [the members] are feeling pretty good about that right now, and we want to be treated as equals.”

  “Oh, you know, no problem there,” Reagan replied, no hint of his blitz to come.15

  On Inauguration Day, Reagan was again in the speaker’s office, two minutes after the inauguration ceremony. Ebulliently, Reagan gestured at a nameplate for President Grover Cleveland.