Instead, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed, in December 1987, to eliminate medium- and short-range nuclear missiles—a much more modest idea, originally broached by Reagan in 1982.
On zero BM, as on SDI and the Iranian affair, vital national policy was made from the top down, bypassing the more careful, thoughtful, and sometimes deadlocked policy game. Normally, policy develops from the bottom up, a range of officials prudently examining the options, winnowing out bad ideas, gauging the consequences of better ones. The president taps every important branch of expertise, giving top policy advisers time to think things through and lay their case before him. But Reagan liked going for Utopian policies with a popular ring—bypassing long internal debate—and then advertising his ideas so widely that they became hard to reverse or revise. Once Reagan proclaimed his programs, they became a touchstone of loyalty, inhibiting internal debate of pros and cons. At times, his decision-making style was more that of a king than of a late-twentieth-century president.
Whenever Reagan or some other president makes policy unilaterally, it delights his partisans and temporarily gives the president his way. But no leader can end-run the system for long. After Reykjavík, Reagan’s zero-BM proposals simply withered. On SDI, the ultimate political verdict awaits the next presidency. On the contra war and the Iranian operation, Reagan’s efforts to impose his policy by stealth—using Saudi money to finance the contras, and the NSC staff to avoid Congress— ran aground. Not only did Congress chastise the president, but it stymied his new efforts to renew military aid.
No foreign policy is possible to sustain without a broad political partnership. The backdoor, end-run foreign policy game cuts against the grain of democracy, because it requires more deceit and subterfuge than our political system will tolerate—especially when covert policy directly contradicts the stated public policy.
“We cannot advance United States interest if public officials who testify before the Congress resort to legalism’s and word games, claim ignorance about things they either know about or should know about, and at critical points tell the Congress things that are not true,” declared Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Committee investigating the Iran-contra affair. “The Congress cannot play its constitutional role if it cannot trust the testimony of representatives of the president as truthful and fully informed. The president cannot sustain his policy, if he tries to carry that policy out secretly and his representatives mislead the Congress and the American people.”70
Significantly, an understanding echo came from a chastened member of Reagan’s inner circle, former National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane. With hindsight, McFarlane explained why it had been a disastrous mistake to rely on a covert operation in Nicaragua—especially since President Reagan saw Central America as a vital arena for checking Soviet influence.
“If we had such a large strategic stake, it was clearly unwise to rely on covert activity as the core of our policy,” said McFarlane. “First, you can never achieve a sufficient level of resources through a covert policy to cope with a determined effort backed by the Soviet Union. The Congress views covert actions—properly, in my opinion—as an instrument to be used with great selectivity, as an adjunct of policy, not as its foundation, and surely not as a vehicle for waging war with a Soviet proxy.
“The other reason … is that you cannot get popular and congressional support for such a policy,” McFarlane said. “If you decide to engage in conflict with a Soviet client in whom the Russians are prepared to make a substantial investment, you must have the American people and the U.S. Congress solidly behind you. Yet it is virtually impossible, almost as a matter of definition, to rally the public behind a policy you cannot even talk about.”71
* The National Security Council is the president’s cabinet-level advisory group—usually the vice president, secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury, the Attorney General, director of Central Intelligence, chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff, and the national security adviser. The national security staff serves the council, working under the national security adviser. Technically, the NSC is the cabinet group; but when Washington insiders refer to “the NSC,” they often mean the staff.
PART IV
Governing: Why It Doesn’t Work Better
Governing: Why It Doesn’t Work Better
The temptation in the world beyond the beltway is to blame the failures of government on the self-serving tactics of the games politicians play in Washington, without considering larger flaws in our political system.
Clearly, the collusion of the power networks in the Pentagon Iron Triangle, the tribal warfare of baronial bureaucracies, the pull of PAC money, or the imperatives of the constant campaign often frustrate sensible and coherent policy-making.
But there are more fundamental obstacles to effective governing in the election system and in the ticket-splitting habits of modern American voters. Any president is severely handicapped when he faces a Congress controlled by his political opposition. And yet partisan divided government has become the rule for Republican presidents, because Democrats have an incumbency lock on the House of Representatives.
Beyond that, the zigzags and deadlocks of Washington reflect the ambivalence of the electorate and the lack of a clear majority party since the breakup of the old New Deal coalition. At the presidential level, there is a mismatch between the talents needed for campaigning and the skills needed for governing. Political amateurism in the White House is one product of a primary system that rewards anti-Washington showmanship more than it does a proven capacity to forge the coalitions necessary to govern.
Reforms exist for dealing with structural maladies. But they stand little chance of enactment, unless there is a national calamity that makes them imperative. Even then, improvement lies mainly in the hands of voters—voters more alert to the impact their actions have, on how our government works.
17. Divided Government: Gridlock and the Blame Game
I’ve never seen a Congress yet that didn’t eventually take the measure of the president it was dealing with.
—President Lyndon Johnson
As Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, it was fashionable for political commentators to cite the litany of five flawed presidencies. Five leaders had been driven from office before their time: John Kennedy assassinated; Lyndon Johnson hounded into retirement by the nation’s trauma over Vietnam; Richard Nixon forced to resign because of Watergate and other abuses of power; Gerald Ford, the appointed president, doomed by his pardoning of Nixon; and Jimmy Carter, humiliated by Iran and rejected by the voters. Five political tragedies that dramatized the crumbling authority of the presidency.
But focusing on the personal misfortunes of our presidents misses the structural maladies in our system. As we have seen, any president is less powerful than his TV image suggests. Power floats away from the White House; other players in the power game steal the leadership role from time to time. In Congress, the earthquake of the early 1970s shook the old power structure. Television helped spawn a new political culture and a new breed of politician, irreverent toward the old power barons, impatient with the old channels of power. The independence of this new generation, combined with new ways of financing campaigns, fueled the explosion of special interest politics. All these centrifugal forces loosened the cohesion of political parties in the 1970s and tore at the fabric of the old system.
Voters added the most fractious division of all: the gridlock of divided government. Often they gave the White House to one party and control of Congress to the opposite party. The Constitution had ordained permanent struggle between the legislative and executive branches. James Madison justified giving the president and Congress separate powers and constituencies, arguing that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”1 But the conflicts built into our system of checks and balances have been exacerbated to the point of periodic paralysis in the past three decades—by split partisan control of government.
The partisan division of governme
nt is a crucible for repeated stalemate unless there emerge leaders of uncommon wisdom and political skill, both in Congress and the White House. Normally we seem doomed to inconclusive quarrels; no struggle, however great, settles policy permanently. Year in, year out, we are burdened with endless ventilation of the same spent themes: the deficit, defense versus social spending, arms control, abortion, free trade versus protectionism, military intervention abroad, the role and size of government.
“Issues are like snakes—they just refuse to die!” Howard Baker blurted out. “They keep coming back, time after time.”
This pattern predates the Reagan presidency and will endure after Reagan leaves the White House. Our national political irresolution derives from the ambivalence of voters on many central issues and from the lack of an overarching political force to organize and manage government. It takes an effective, durable governing coalition to make our government work. But over the past three decades, governing coalitions have been exceptional interludes, not the norm of American politics. Our recent history is a story of episodic spurts of cohesive action followed by long periods of stalemate and disarray. Governing has become a political football game of grunting line play fought between the forty-yard lines. Touchdowns are rare.
One basic problem is that we have no majority party. The old New Deal Democratic coalition has been broken up without being replaced by a solid Republican majority. Effective political parties are vital to governing, to giving shape and coherence to policy-making. Yet the public disdains and discounts parties, the Constitution does not mention them, and the Founding Fathers were wary of what James Madison called the “dangerous vice” of partisanship and “sinister combinations.” The separation of powers was devised to foil the tyranny of the majority, namely, a government in the hands of a single party.
Yet American history shows that our system of separated powers functions most effectively when there is a single party to articulate a cohesive program and carry it out with sustained majorities over several years. And in practice, even the founders divided quickly into the Adams-Hamilton Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans.
In the first 160 years of our Constitutional history, responsible, single-party government was the norm eighty percent of the time. Only three presidents, John Quincy Adams in 1825, Zachary Taylor in 1849, and Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877, took office facing a different party in control of part or all of Congress, and each was hampered seriously. But mostly, our governmental system thrived on party rule—until the past third of a century.
Consider our six most recent presidents: Confronted by Democratic majorities in both houses, Richard Nixon was often embattled on domestic policy, especially on spending issues and his impounding of funds appropriated by Congress. Gerald Ford, after a lifetime on Capitol Hill, began his presidency by telling Congress, “I do not want a honeymoon with you—I want a good marriage.” But Ford wound up in a war of vetoes, sixty-nine in just two and a half years, many overridden. Ronald Reagan, too, after his stunning 1981 victories, had to backtrack on taxes and job-creation bills in 1982 and 1983 and fought Congress in his second term on budgets and foreign policy, especially after the Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1986. Even Jack Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, armed with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, had little success in passing their programs because they were not good at coalition building.
That overall record moved Ford to write in late 1980, “We have not an Imperial Presidency but an imperiled presidency.”2
In three decades, there were only two periods of strong president-led coalitions. One was in 1964–65, when Lyndon Johnson masterfully marshaled Democrats to pass Kennedy’s unfinished legislative agenda and his own Great Society program. The other, of course, was Reagan’s conservative coalition, which bent history in the opposite direction, cutting taxes and checking the growth of government. Reagan had a brief reprise with the tax-reform bill of 1986, when tax rates were cut still further. Until the Iran-contra scandal broke, Reagan had restored enough vigor to the presidency to rebut the Cassandras lamenting that our system of government had become unworkable.
But it is also striking that this very popular president failed to institutionalize his agenda. Reagan’s great personal popularity did not engender enduring public agreement with his positions on defense spending, Social Security, military aid to the contras, or abortion. Indeed, opinion polls showed that Reagan not only failed to pull the public to the right during his presidency but that the electorate actually drifted leftward: The consensus for a big defense buildup melted away; support for governmental activism in areas like education rose; people came to feel that deregulation had gone too far on health, safety, and the airlines.
Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, who embedded the New Deal legacy in the American system, Reagan failed to embed the opposite legacy of erasing government programs or pushing policy into the private sector. His dream of shifting big federal programs to the states did not materialize. In sum, Reagan bowed to perpetuation of almost all government programs, and David Stockman accused him of being less radical than he sounded—of waging a “phony war on spending.”3
Hugh Heclo, a Harvard University political scientist, rendered a more temperate verdict: “Reaganism is devoted to reducing the domestic presence of the federal government. The paradox is that Ronald Reagan’s genial exertions may have served only to entrench and in some cases expand that presence.… Much as F.D.R. and the New Deal had the effect of conserving capitalism, so Reaganism will eventually be seen to have helped conserve a predominantly status quo, middle-class welfare state.”4
Paul Weyrich, a leading New Right conservative, agreed that there had been “no Reagan Revolution,” but he suggested that divided government was the real reason: “The Republican Party spent $1 billion on national elections during the past decade,” he said. “The conservative movement spent another $200 million, and business PACs and individual contributors over $300 million, supporting national Republican candidates during the same period. That is more than $1.5 billion spent on national elections with very little to show for it. Why? The first reason is that many conservatives are monarchists at heart. They love the Presidency. They think that if you own the Presidency, that is all that really counts.… A few conservatives have now come to the conclusion that Congress is just as important.”5
For eight years Reagan faced Democratic majorities in the House (from 51 to 103 votes), majorities largely committed to protecting the status quo or to snip government only at the margins. In Reagan’s first year, Congress supported him on eighty-two percent of his issues—a high success rate, though less than Eisenhower and Johnson in their heydays. Despite his landslide reelection, Congressional support for Reagan in 1985 and 1986 fell below sixty percent, almost as poor as for Nixon and Ford at their low ebbs.6 In retreat in 1982 and 1983, Reagan struck some one-shot bipartisan compromises on Social Security, the MX missile, and tax increases. But from then on, his ideological rhetoric and his uncompromising position sharpened the combative instincts in Congress, tightening the vise of stalemate.
My purpose is not to dwell on Reagan’s problems but to suggest that they are endemic to our system. Reagan’s conflicts with Congress did not originate with him, nor will they end with him. The gridlocks of divided government are now almost inevitable under a Republican president.
On January 20, 1989, Republicans will have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty years. The Democrats ruled the House for that entire period. Going further back, Eisenhower enjoyed Republican majorities in both House and Senate for his first two years, and then had six years of opposition control of Congress. The pattern was the same under Nixon and Ford.
“At such times, the normal tendency of the U.S. system toward deadlock becomes irresistible,” political scientist James Sundquist commented. “Harmonious collaboration, barring national crisis, is out of the question. The President and Congress are compelled to quarrel. No presidentia
l proposal can be accepted by the legislature without raising the stature of the President as leader. Similarly, no initiative of Congress can be approved by the President without conceding wisdom to his enemies. The conflict, bickering, tension, and stalemate that characterized the 14 years of divided government were inevitable.”7
Sundquist was writing not long before Reagan took office. Reagan’s two terms made it not fourteen—but twenty-two—years of partisan division during the last thirty-six years, nearly two thirds of the time. Democratic presidents have other problems holding together the factions of their diverse party and forming governing coalitions. But since 1952 Republicans have been better than Democrats at winning the White House, and if that continues, the pattern of divided government is likely to persist—unless significant changes are made in our political system.
Blame-Game Politics
Divided government leaves a Republican president and a Democratic Congress with two basic options: bipartisan collaboration or partisan warfare and blame-game politics. It takes a sustained commitment to bipartisan compromise both by the president and congressional leaders to overcome divided government. During the Reagan presidency, which bears lessons for the future, bipartisanship withered and partisan divisions became more intense—hardening the arteries of government.
Politics is like physics, action begets reaction. As political scientist Thomas Mann observed, any president “shapes the climate of politics in Congress.”8 Eisenhower, as a moderate Republican, not only worked with Democratic leaders but often set a climate of tolerance and cooperation. Richard Nixon sharpened the partisan edge, Reagan even more so. As an ideological president, bent on imposing his agenda and scoring partisan points, quick to blame Congress for stalemates, and more rigid in his second term than in his first term, Reagan polarized the politics of Congress. His highly partisan style aggravated the deeper neuralgias of divided government.
Power Game Page 88