Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  The highly partisan 1984 campaign had snuffed out the brief period of bipartisan cooperation in 1983. The one issue where Reagan and O’Neill agreed in 1985 was tax reform. But in the aftermath of Reagan’s landslide, O’Neill deflected White House assaults on the deficit issue, and protected his Democratic majority by letting Republicans feud among themselves. By Reagan’s second term, Senate Republican leaders and House Democratic leaders had moved closer together on economic issues, and the gap had widened between Reagan and the entire Congress.

  For congressional Democrats, the 1984 election had been a tactical and moral victory. Despite low inflation, economic recovery, and Reagan’s enormous popularity, Democrats picked up two seats in the Senate and lost only fourteen in the House, much less than Republicans had been gunning for. As O’Neill pointed out, Reagan won the presidency by 16 million votes, but Democrats outpolled Republicans for the House by 5.7 million votes.

  Nonetheless, after his painful beatings in 1981, Tip O’Neill was wary of President Reagan, riding high again after his landslide. Mondale’s disaster had damaged the Democratic party’s national image, and O’Neill had to adapt his strategy to that fact. Like Reagan, he was relying on pollsters to coach his opposition game. Right after the 1984 election, O’Neill had Bill Hamilton, a widely respected Democratic pollster, survey public attitudes toward the Democratic party. Years of Reagan’s attacks, as well as Mondale’s campaign, had taken their toll. Hamilton found that Democrats had the image of big taxers and big spenders who were soft on defense. Moreover, the speaker was hearing from little people in his home district.

  “I went around to some places, walked a few mills,” he told me, voice rising in surprise. “Jesus, this lady stops me and she’s packing sausages, minimum wage: ‘Tip, I love you. I voted for you for fifty years. I’m sorry you’re gonna leave [retire].’ She says, ‘I love the president. Tip, don’t be mean with him.’ ”34

  That kind of talk, plus Hamilton’s advice, persuaded O’Neill to change his tune. In 1981, he had tried to defend social programs and to limit retrenchment. After the 1982 election, he had pushed through a couple of modest jobs programs. Now, in early February 1985, he did an about-face. He publicly called for cutting government programs—programs for which he had never had great love, such as Nixon’s federal revenue sharing with state and local governments, Small Business Administration, and Economic Development Administration, as well as Jimmy Carter’s urban development grant program. Reagan wanted to go much further. His budget proposed killing more than twenty programs and slashing a score of others. O’Neill’s tried damage control: Go with the flow, but channel it to protect your favorites.

  Just as important, O’Neill was determined to keep Democrats from stepping on a political landmine by pushing a tax hike to lower the deficit. He wanted to erase that bogey from the Mondale campaign and to force Reagan to take the initiative. Majority Leader Jim Wright took the opposite tack. “We owe it to the future generations to start paying our way,” Wright asserted, “and we ought to be responsible enough to go ahead and recommend … the minimum tax on the successful corporations, the most profitable businesses, and individuals of the country, and devote the proceeds of that tax to deficit reduction.”35 As speaker in 1987–88 and with the Senate back in Democratic hands, Wright played hardball against Reagan on taxes. But in 1985, O’Neill overruled Wright; he gave orders to kill all Democratic proposals to raise taxes. It was tactics, not conviction.

  O’Neill felt Reagan had demagogued the tax issue in 1984 against Mondale (as Democrats had demagogued Social Security against Republicans), even though Reagan had signed tax increases in 1982, 1983, and 1984. In 1985 he was not going to give Reagan ammunition. “Do I personally think the nation needs taxes? Sure, I think the nation needs taxes,” O’Neill told me in 1985. “I think we’re on a temporary economic surge, that down the road eighteen months or two years from now we can be in one hell of a recession and ultimately a depression. We’re living on borrowed funds.… We get investments from all over the world, and that’s keeping our economy fluid at the present time. So our nation needs a tax bill, but we’re not gonna give you a tax bill until the president of the United States says, ‘Hey, the time has come. My policy has been wrong.’ ”36

  O’Neill still sharply disagreed with Reagan’s spending priorities, but by laying back he did not dramatize the confrontation. On defense and Social Security, he let the Senate Republicans touch the hot wires of controversy first. O’Neill insisted that Republicans take the responsibility for governing. Long clashes between Senate Republicans and Weinberger over the Senate demands to restrain military spending spared Democrats the political cost of looking soft on defense.

  That was O’Neill’s new game: opposition by damage control. In the spring, he let Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole take the flak for trying to push Reagan into a politically realistic policy on defense and for tackling Social Security COLAs. In the fall, when Senate Republicans came up with the Gramm-Rudman six-year scheme to balance the budget, O’Neill swallowed hard and went along—up to a point. He faced down Democratic liberals, blacks, and committee chairmen, who feared that their programs would be decimated. Then he empowered two leading centrists, Tom Foley and Dick Gephardt, to negotiate changes in the bill to protect the Democrats’ most precious social programs. The Democratic maneuver cut the Pentagon hard and pressed Reagan to raise taxes. Thus, on what became a touchstone of responsible governing, the Democratic leadership matched the Republicans. As Kirk O’Donnell put it, the Speaker managed “to preserve the status quo without getting blamed for the status quo.”37

  So it went in 1985 and 1986. The speaker turned confrontational when he found openings for a Democratic agenda. It was easy to push through economic sanctions against South Africa, get the Senate to go along, and to force Reagan to turn around. On trade, the Democrats adopted protectionist legislation that was either blocked in the Senate or vetoed by the president, and thus scored political points in the Southeast and elsewhere, helping Democrats in the 1986 elections—especially in the Senate. Under O’Neill’s pressure, Reagan had to adjust.

  No issue was more emotional to O’Neill than aid to Nicaraguan contras. He feared another Vietnam. Over breakfast in February 1981, Secretary of State Alexander Haig had alarmed O’Neill by advocating forceful American action in Central America. This was before the contra operation. “What Tip heard, and this is not what Haig said, is that we’ll go in and take Grenada and Nicaragua, even if it means using American boys,” recalled Tom Foley.38 O’Neill never forgot Haig’s bellicose blustering and remained convinced that Reagan’s policy would lead to American troops in Nicaragua. “In my opinion,” he would say, “the president of the United States will not be satisfied or happy until the United States troops are in there.”

  In 1984, O’Neill’s House Democrats killed military aid to the contras. In 1985, O’Neill staved off Reagan for a while, then had to bow to $27 million in nonlethal aid. Finally in 1986, Reagan pushed through $100 million in aid, including military aid, by sheer doggedness. Long after the fact, O’Neill could savor some satisfaction when Reagan ran into stormy bipartisan criticism in 1987 for his efforts to circumvent the two-year congressional ban on military aid, with secret Saudi funding aid and Oliver North’s private money-raising.

  In sum, against an immensely popular president, O’Neill’s tough, combative opposition paid off surprisingly well. Not only did the “fairness issue” set up Republican defeat in 1982, but it so embarrassed the White House that Reagan toned down his second inaugural from the mink-and-limousine first inaugural. On policy, Reagan did slow the growth of government, but O’Neill and company prevented the outright shutdown of many programs. Year by year, O’Neill’s opposition game—in tandem with Senate Republicans—shifted the priorities of Reagan’s budgets, so that Reagan’s military buildup became the prime target of controversy.

  O’Neill proved himself the most powerful speaker since Rayburn. As O’Neill approac
hed retirement, his approval rating in opinion polls (67 percent approval, 23 percent disapproval on November 1, 1986) was on a par with Reagan’s (66 percent approval, 33 percent disapproval).39 The public had come to see them both as partisans, forceful leaders, sincere in their convictions—likable, recognizable, opposite political poles. Most important to O’Neill, his six years of standing toe to toe against Reagan had blunted the Republican drive for realignment and protected his party.

  Ever aware of comparisons to Rayburn, O’Neill remarked to me that Rayburn had been speaker much longer than he had. But then O’Neill added proudly: “He lost the House twice [to Republicans]. I’ve never lost the House.”40

  The Swapping Game: Bridge, Not Poker

  The polarized politics that Reagan and O’Neill played most of the time is what mathematicians call a zero-sum game: winner takes all. Like two stud-poker players facing each other across the table, both went for the jackpot. Usually, when Reagan won, O’Neill lost, and vice versa. In a zero-sum game no chips are left on the table. The wins cancel out the losses. The balance is zero.

  The other basic game is the positive-sum game—in which there can be more than one winner. Players on opposite sides can form a partnership, as in bridge. By joining, they can both have a positive outcome. It is a different style of game.

  That works in politics, too. Some very sharp Democrats played a positive-sum opposition game with Reagan during the titanic fights over the MX missile in 1983. This kind of game often emerges when a political stalemate has developed; that happened in the case of the MX. By shrewdly leveraging their political strength at a time of Reagan’s weakness, a band of swing Democrats changed administration policy. Rather than trying to match Reagan blow for blow, Tip O’Neill style, these moderates bargained. Instead of poker, they played bridge. They traded with Reagan. Their votes helped Reagan get money for the MX, and in return, they injected their policy concepts into Reagan’s military buildup and his arms proposals. Each side won something.

  Both in style and substance, these moderate House Democrats played a brand of opposition game radically different from Tip O’Neill’s. In their 1983 maneuver on MX and arms control, they had the conceptual initiative. They played an intellectual game. Reagan was not only politically stymied on MX, but at a loss for ideas on how to sell it. New-breed Democrats such as Albert Gore, Jr., and Les Aspin filled the intellectual vaccuum, operating as entrepreneurs of policy. They developed new policies and worked these ideas into the policy mainstream with media politics, speeches, op-ed articles, and press interviews. Their group was inchoate, bound together by outlook, but largely independent of the standard bases of power in Congress: the House leadership, regional groups, and the committee structure. But their game succeeded, even without a formal power base.

  Their basic game plan was simple: Reagan badly wanted the MX (for Missile Experimental) as the centerpiece of his military buildup. It would be by far the biggest missile in the American inventory, with ten warheads and sharp enough accuracy to knock out Soviet ICBMs in their concrete silos. Normally, Congress goes along with a president on a big weapons system. But the MX, and especially its basing mode, had become so controversial that Congress resisted Reagan on MX. Deadlock enabled the House moderates to hold Reagan’s pet missile hostage.

  The story begins on December 7, 1982—the day Reagan and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger lost political control of the MX issue. A congressional mutiny of 195 Democrats and 50 Republicans voted 245–176 to block MX production. Reagan protested that this vote offered comfort to Moscow, but he had to retreat. On December 20, he bowed when Congress voted to appropriate $560 million for full development of MX—short of actual production and with the critical condition that the money could not be spent until Congress approved a basing mode for MX. In legislative lingo, the MX money was “fenced.” This restriction gave leverage to the centrist Democrats for a trading game.

  For nearly two years, Weinberger had wrestled with trying to devise an acceptable alternative to Jimmy Carter’s mobile basing for the MX. In all, the Air Force and various Pentagon commissions conjured up thirty-four basing schemes: plans to cart the big missiles around in trucks, put them on trains, hang them from dirigibles, or base them in tunnels. Weinberger favored deep underground basing or flying the MX on huge C-5 A cargo planes, but these were technically impractical. When he suggested putting the MX in existing American missile silos, even Senator John Tower, a pro-MX hawk from Texas, scoffed that MX would be a sitting duck to the Soviets. Another Weinberger scheme, called Dense Pack, was widely ridiculed. The idea was to jam a lot of MX missiles in small areas so that Soviet warheads would blow up in each other’s way; theoretically MX would survive. Three of the five Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed Dense Pack.

  The MX became the Pentagon’s albatross. Defense planners could not devise a way to make it invulnerable and survivable. Moreover, the pressures of the nuclear-freeze movement and losses in the 1982 congressional elections had thrown Reagan on the political defensive by December 1982. Compromise was in the air.

  Enter the Democratic moderates, about thirty strong and bent on compromise. They were mainly issue-oriented new-breed politicians, relatively young power brokers. Their pragmatism offended liberals who wanted to kill the MX missile, arguing that it was expensive, unworkable, and would appear as a menacing first-strike weapon. The moderates also disliked the MX but they saw a chance to bargain. Like the liberals, they were suspicious that Reagan was not serious about arms control—that he was making excessive negotiating demands to avoid real give-and-take with Moscow. They wanted him to be more flexible and realistic.

  Their game succeeded for five key reasons: First, the MX deadlock was a lever for moving policy in their direction. Second, their political instinct was to find a way out of the impasse, rather than to score partisan points or to maintain ideological purity. Third, they had enough votes in the House to swing the balance of power on MX. Fourth, legislative procedure enabled them to force Reagan to ransom the MX with policy concessions, not just once but several times, because every year the MX faced at least two votes: one on authorizing each new step in the MX program and another on appropriating funds. Finally, their leaders had real mastery of the staggering intricacies of weapons and arms control. They could not only dicker politically, but they could match wits with administration experts.

  The moderate ringleaders were Les Aspin, AI Gore, and Norman Dicks. Gore, a tall, telegenic political golden boy from Tennessee, and Dicks, a burly, curly-haired, chubby-cheeked football star from the University of Washington, had arrived in the class of ’76. They became buddies playing basketball in the House gym. Gore, son of a well-known liberal Tennessee senator, had Ivy League credentials. Cerebral and serious, he had gone to Harvard, Vanderbilt University divinity school, and had served in Vietnam as a draftee. For five years, he had worked as a newspaper reporter before winning a House seat at age twenty-eight. Dicks, tutored in inside politics as an aide for eight years to Washington’s powerful Senator Warren Magnuson, was a more rough-and-tumble politician than Gore. At forty-three, he was savvy and brimming with energy, and he sat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which voted on funding the MX.

  Aspin, elected from Wisconsin in 1970, was the trio’s senior partner. His bland face, folksy style, and middle-age paunch belied a whiz-kid résumé—Yale, Oxford, MIT Ph.D. in economics, service in the Kennedy administration, first as an aide to Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and then working on systems analysis in Robert McNamara’s Pentagon. He had also been an economics professor at Marquette University. In Congress, Aspin quickly became known as a gadfly critic of the Pentagon, hot on exposing military waste.

  By 1983, Aspin had emerged as a defense strategist and chairman of a House Armed Services subcommittee. He had voted against the MX in 1980 and 1982 and in favor of the nuclear freeze in 1982 and 1983, though he helped water down the 1983 freeze resolution so that it did not tie R
eagan’s hands. In short, Aspin was more hawkish than his liberal image. He knew how to work both sides of an issue, and he was ambitious. In 1981, he had called for overthrowing Tip O’Neill as speaker, and in 1985, he would stage a new-breed revolt to leap over six senior Democrats to become Armed Services Committee chairman.

  Aspin’s Opposition game was pragmatic. He mocked the MX as the “homeless waif of weapons,” asserting that it could not be fully deployed. But he also said it could not be wholly blocked; so it was time to strike a deal. What’s more, Aspin felt it was a tactical mistake for Democrats to appear soft and negative on defense. What Democrats needed, Aspin said, was a credible defense strategy, instead of merely playing “Doctor No.”

  “For the Democrats to just blindly oppose Ronald Reagan and all defense was politically a losing game,” Aspin told me in early 1986. “We had an antidefense image in ’83–’84 and still do, to a certain extent. But that’s not the way to play the game. The way to play the game is to agree with Reagan on some things and to oppose him and argue against him on some things. That meant, you know, arguing our point of view, which was that the vulnerability of [U.S.] land-based missiles was an important issue but what Reagan wanted to do [with MX] was crazy. You couldn’t come up with a survivable MX. We tried thirty-four basing modes over the years and none of them worked. Either they were too expensive, they were still vulnerable, or you ran into opposition of farmers or somebody [who] didn’t like where MX was [being put]. You couldn’t find a solution to the problem. We think what we want to do is a better way to get there.”41

  Aspin and other Democratic moderates wanted a smaller, mobile ICBM with one warhead known as Midgetman because it was about one sixth the size of the MX. That notion had been advocated in the mid-1970s by Paul Nitze, a conservative Wall Street banker who had been Kennedy’s deputy Defense secretary and then an arms negotiator for both Nixon and Reagan.