Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  But Reagan had no monopoly on partisanship. Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill struck back with partisan war cries and maneuvers aimed at blocking or embarrassing Reagan. Except for one-shot compromises on MX, Social Security, tax reform, or putting Marines into Lebanon, Speaker Tip O’Neill challenged Reagan head-on for six years. Jim Wright, as speaker in the 100th Congress (1987–88), was even more aggressive in opposing Reagan. Moreover, with Democrats back in control of the Senate, Wright had a powerful ally in Majority Leader Robert Byrd.

  According to Congressional Quarterly, the Congress that faced Reagan in 1985–86 was the “most partisan in at least three decades.”9 Partisan majorities fought each other more frequently than at anytime since the Truman presidency. Reagan had scored well in 1981 by combining highly partisan voting by Republicans with the defections of thirty or more Democrats. But further into the Reagan presidency, fewer and fewer Democrats defected to Reagan.

  The brutal 1986 battle for control of the Senate and the onset of the 1988 presidential campaign deepened the partisan divide in 1987. Whenever they could, Speaker Wright and Majority Leader Byrd garnered Republican support to override Reagan’s vetoes of an $87.5 billion, five-year highway bill and a $20 billion clean water bill in 1987, to oppose Reagan on trade measures, or to press Reagan to accept a tax increase to finance his defense buildup. But the Democratic leaders also pushed partisan causes: bills to reform campaign financing or to oppose Reagan’s use of the Navy to protect Kuwait’s Persian Gulf shipping, or the battle over Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. The Democratic leaders knew Reagan could veto their bills, but they pushed ahead anyway—just as Reagan had long pushed a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, knowing it would not pass. The purpose on both sides was less to solve the issues than to reap credit with the voters and put blame on the other side.

  The very fact of divided government invites politicians to play the blame game—to engage in maneuvers which have little chance of implementation but which dramatize their side’s virtue and the opposition’s villainy. With power politically divided, it is hard for voters to know whom to hold responsible for failure: the president or Congress, Republicans or Democrats. In this situation, the incentives of the power game reward tactical squeeze plays, finger pointing, damage control, and partisan posturing. The temptation for both sides is to protect their sacred cows and to gore the other side’s oxen. The gambits have become familiar: budgets passed at the eleventh hour, Congress forcing the president to swallow unpalatable provisions in omnibus bills, or the president melodramatically shutting down government so that TV networks can dramatize “congressional irresponsibility.” These are blame-game politics staged for the fans at home.

  The blame game usually distorts sensible government, because its goal is not solving problems but scoring political points. A favorite tactic is known as “positioning.” It is rampant in election years. To pick one memorable example: After the highly publicized deaths of two athletes in mid-1986, the public panicked over crack, a new form of cocaine. Fighting drugs became the hot issue. All sides genuinely wanted to do something about drug abuse, but rather than jointly developing a sensible program, the rival parties maneuvered for maximum public credit. House Republicans, eager to divert attention from a sagging economy, picked the war on drugs as their campaign issue. Then Democrats, led by Speaker O’Neill, one-upped the Republicans with a bigger program. Finally, President and Mrs. Reagan tried to top the Democrats with a joint appearance on nationwide TV. The politics of fighting drugs made daily headlines in the campaign homestretch. But after the election, the issue dropped out of sight and very little new action was taken to fight drug abuse, despite all the hoopla. By early 1987, even Republicans were berating Reagan for penny-pinching on the drug war.

  Obviously, blame-game tactics are not an invention of the 1980s. In an earlier era of divided government, Harry Truman won reelection in 1948 by attacking the “do nothing” Republican Eightieth Congress for refusing to cooperate on anti-inflationary measures. In the mid-1970s, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford had blame-game spats with Democratic congresses. Ford lashed out at the “whining and whimpering” of the Democratic “can’t-do Congress.”

  But Ronald Reagan has been the most skillful blame-game politician in the past three decades. Until the Iran-contra affair, he was masterful at ducking or deflecting the blame for failures, such as the breakdown of his toxic-waste program in 1982 or the forced withdrawal of American Marines from Lebanon. His cabinet officials (Interior Secretary James Watt or Chief of Staff Donald Regan) became lightning rods, absorbing public outrage. Although Reagan often delivered inaccurate or disingenuous accounts in speeches or press conferences, he was rarely blamed or distrusted by most of the public, until the Iran-contra affair. And he got swing Democrats to support aid for the contras for fear of being blamed for Communism in Nicaragua.

  The normal disarray of Congress makes it a far easier whipping boy than the presidency; Reagan made the most of that. He rode into office savaging Congress for wild spending, though nonpartisan studies show that is a bum rap. Over time, deficits have been driven mainly by wars and presidential activism. (In Reagan’s case, military spending, farm programs, and interest on the national debt have pushed up the deficit.)

  “Historically, Congress was certainly an accomplice [in creating deficits]—but Presidents were the masterminds,” asserts Norman Ornstein of the conservative American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.10

  Reagan constantly browbeat Congress, especially the Democrats, by trumpeting a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance the budget, though Reagan did not live by that standard himself. When Senate Democrats submitted proposals requiring Reagan and future presidents to submit a balanced budget starting in 1984, the Reagan White House fought and defeated these requirements.11 Typical blame-game politics.

  A study by Paul Peterson of the Brookings Institution shows that over a thirty-seven-year period, from 1947 to 1984, Congress has spent less on average than presidents requested.12 In the Reagan years, Congress showed more political courage than the president in taking unpopular steps to curb the deficit. Despite the maxim that Congress never raises taxes in election years for fear of angering voters, congressional leaders such as Howard Baker and Bob Dole, on the Republican side, and Tip O’Neill, on the Democratic side, pushed tax increases through in 1982, 1983, and 1984—ultimately signed by Reagan—lowering Reagan’s deficits by about $75 billion a year, from 1986 onward.13

  But blame-game tactics kept both sides from later taking major steps to reduce the national deficit. Reagan scalded the Democrats so harshly as the party of “tax and tax, spend and spend” that most Democrats dared not support a tax increase to reduce the deficit. Some Republicans openly asserted that a tax increase was necessary. But Speaker O’Neill had been so burned by President Reagan that in 1985 he decreed that no Democrat could push a tax increase until Reagan took the initiative. But Reagan, stung by Walter Mondale’s 1984 campaign charge that Reagan would ultimately have to raise taxes, stubbornly refused to let Mondale be proven right. The blame game dictated policy.

  Democrats indulged in demagoguery, too, with exaggerated attacks on Republicans on the Social Security issue. Privately, many congressional Democrats conceded that any serious attempt to reduce the budget deficit would require cutting Social Security COLAs. But Democratic campaign ads blistered Republicans as a party bent on tampering with the financial lifeline of the elderly—Social Security—so most Republicans dared not mention Social Security as part of a budget-control package. Again, the blame game dictated policy.

  Blame-game politics are not always bad. Such tactics played a constructive role in passing the major tax-reform bill of 1986. Public resentment against the existing tax code was so strong that both the Democratic House and Republican Senate were afraid to let the tax-reform bill die on their doorsteps. The tax bill was not popular with most members of Congress, but they
feared the wrath of voters. President Reagan and congressional leaders such as Dan Rostenkowski and Bob Packwood used that fear to prod Congress to act at crucial moments.

  The dynamics of blame-game politics also provided the stimulus for action on the federal budget deficit in late 1985. Congressional Democrats were raw from Reagan’s attacks and eager to take some action. Republicans, especially Senate Republicans, were worried about being saddled with responsibility for the mounting national debt. In October 1985, the debt was going over $2 trillion—more than double its size when Reagan took office and the Republican majority took over the Senate, both promising to balance the budget. A vote to raise the debt ceiling above $2 trillion would dramatize Republican failure.

  Reagan too was feeling political heat. In 1984, his private polls done by Richard Wirthlin had shown that voters felt Reagan was soft on the deficit. But Wirthlin told Reagan not to worry, because only two to three percent of the public listed the deficit as the nation’s most important problem. But by September 1985, Wirthlin told Reagan this issue “just could no longer be ignored.”14 With the 1985 deficit projected at $180 billion, Wirthlin’s polls found that a substantial fourteen to fifteen percent of the public saw the deficit as problem number one. Reagan had “very negative” ratings—the public disapproved of his handling of the deficit by nearly 2–1.

  In short, fear of political blame for the ballooning deficit propelled all sides toward compromise.

  The Double Veto and Power Karate

  The congressional initiative in late 1985 to bring down deficits, later joined by President Reagan and both parties in Congress, is a case study in divided government and blame-game politics. A lot of serious effort went into the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings bill, named for its main sponsors, Republican senators Phil Gramm and Warren Rudman and Democrat Fritz Hollings. House Democrats such as Whip Tom Foley and Caucus Chairman Richard Gephardt worked hard to improve the bill. But the blame-game climate produced false rather than genuine bipartisanship.

  It was a shame, because the elements for bipartisan compromise on the budget were obvious by mid-1985, and so was the need for collaboration. Even with three years of economic growth, government spending was 24 percent of GNP and tax revenues only 18.6 percent, leaving a gaping structural deficit. The political situation dictated a “three-legged” approach: defense, entitlements, and taxes.* The bipartisan consensus in Washington, except for Reagan, was that a politically fair and viable antideficit package should include a tax increase, a slowdown in Reagan’s defense buildup, plus spending caps and reduced COLAs for multibillion-dollar entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and government pensions.

  Some congressional leaders wanted a “domestic economic summit” to join with President Reagan in forging a grand compromise. But Reagan refused, and a tricky blame-game ensued.

  What emerged in late 1985 was a shotgun coalition—consummated at political gunpoint—not a durable political marriage. Instead of willing cooperation to beat the deficit, the White House, Senate Republicans, and House Democrats got into a game of political chicken. The legislation that emerged was a symbol of the impasse it was supposed to resolve. Opposing parties and factions latched onto the Gramm-Rudman scheme at cross-purposes and for conflicting motives. The 1985 Gramm-Rudman bill came to illustrate what plagues the governing of America.

  The budget deficit epitomizes the main defect of divided government: the “double veto.” Presidents have a constitutional veto power to block anything that does not command a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress. But either house of Congress has the power to veto or block what a president wants. On the deficit, Reagan wanted to kill and shrink domestic programs and to keep expanding military spending, but House Democrats, and a lot of Senate Republicans, wanted almost exactly the opposite: to protect most domestic programs and stop the growth of Pentagon spending. Neither side had the political courage to make modest cuts in the big entitlement programs popular with middle-class voters.

  To get around the basic deadlock, senators Phil Gramm and Warren Rudman devised a mechanism for imposing automatic cuts on all programs, regardless of their merit or the impact of the cuts. It was a desperate attempt to force all sides to take unpleasant political medicine for the good of the country.

  Gramm dreamed up the scheme as a way to revive the Reagan Revolution and to squeeze down the federal government. Few modern politicians have a faster trigger finger and a more jugular instinct than Gramm has. His political game is power karate: numbing foes with an unexpected chop and then outmaneuvering them while they are still dazed. As a renegade sophomore Democrat in 1981, Gramm colluded with the Reagan team to whisk a final round of overnight budget cuts through the House of Representatives before most members could even read his package. Later, he openly defected—becoming a Republican.

  Gramm’s receding, mid-forties hairline, his soft Texas drawl, and his professorial theorizing belie his lust for partisan combat. But Gramm exudes energy. On his desk, he parades the symbols of a brash and aggressive political style: a miniature Texas flag, the first American flag (a curling snake and the words DON’T TREAD ON ME) and a silvered bullet made by an admirer. The bullet was inspired by Gramm’s warning to the House in 1981 that the Reagan-Stockman-Gramm budget package was no paper exercise but spelled real cutbacks for many people. “We are shooting real bullets,” Gramm declared dramatically, garnering big TV play.

  Gramm’s passion for free-market economics has never been a secret. As an economist at Texas A&M University, he described his research topic as “How to get rid of government.” And Gramm is a supremely clever legislative schemer, skilled at throwing opponents into disarray. Gramm thinks harder than most politicians, (“Ideas have consequences,” he is fond of saying, “Ideas dominate the agenda.”) But he is no abstract thinker; he is a bare-knuckled political plotter. He ruminates powerfully on the means to his ends, ready to pounce when he spots a partisan opening, usually when Congress is mired in deadlock. “You immobilize politicians when you give them a problem without a solution,” Gramm advises. “So one of the things I have always tried to do is to bring the problem and the solution together.”15

  The Gramm-Rudman plan to balance the federal budget by 1991 through legislating automatic across-the-board budget cuts, year by year, was intended to impose a legislative straitjacket so uncomfortable that it would force all political factions to behave more responsibly on the deficit to avoid decimation of their favorite programs. It was an ingenious mechanism. Some Democrats ridiculed it as “government by Veg-O-Matic,” chopping up programs willy-nilly. David Stockman derided it as “mindless, destructive gimmickry.” Defending the bill, Gramm said, “It puts the fat in the fire” and forces decisions.

  In the quagmire of congressional paralysis, the Gramm-Rudman scheme caught the public’s fancy. To voters uninterested in the nitty-gritty of budget priorities, Gramm’s formula had the appeal of an easy solution. And with voters enamored, Congress found it well-nigh irresistible. All sides proclaimed their support and then played blame-game politics over the fine print.

  Phil Gramm’s timing in the fall of 1985 was brilliant. It helped extricate the Republicans from a bad political jam and put a partisan squeeze on the Democrats. Up to then, Reagan had been faring badly in his fifth year. The Reagan Revolution was mired in deadlock. Democrats were basking in Republican fratricide. Gramm saw a chance to breathe new fire into Reaganism and throw Democrats on the defensive. Although he was only eight months a senator, his elixir sold fast to his elders.

  In the fall of 1985, most Senate Republicans were seething with fury at President Reagan and desperate to show action on the deficit before the 1986 election. Forty-nine Senate Republicans (eighteen up for reelection in 1986) had gone out on a political limb to fight the deficit in May 1985. They had risked angering millions of senior citizens by voting to cut COLAs for Social Security and other entitlement programs. That act of political courage was undercut by Reagan, who
had endorsed it initially and then backed away. Even Reagan’s closest allies felt double-crossed, and wanted to get political cover.

  Warren Rudman, who has the build, bark, and tenacity of a bulldog, typified the Republican frustration. “The problem is that you have a Republican president, a Republican Senate, and a strong Democratic-controlled House, and there’s nothing in there for compromise as long as you can add everything onto the deficit,” he grumped. “That’s what we’ve done the last four years.” Rudman was so sick of the deadlocks of divided government and so irate with Reagan that he joined forces with Gramm.

  But he was less ideological and more pragmatic than Gramm—and more intent on conquering the deficit than on reviving the Reagan Revolution. He wanted to squeeze Reagan as well as House Democrats. So he insisted that the Pentagon be included in the automatic budget cuts. His theory was that holding the Pentagon hostage would compel Reagan to raise taxes. “It will force the president to face up to the fact that if we want all of the increases that he wants in defense, we may have to have new taxes to finance them,” Rudman told me.16 That thinking appealed to both Republican and Democratic moderates, and some liberals (Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy) who saw a chance to squeeze Reagan. House Democratic Whip Tom Foley later quipped that Congress was “kidnapping the president’s favorite son [the Pentagon], and we’re going to make him pay ransom.”

  Reagan had different motives for going along with the scheme. He was still trying to use high deficits to force Congress to cut the size of government. Many Democrats believed that Reagan had purposely built up the deficit as a leash on Congress. Indeed, Reagan compared dealing with Congress to a father cutting his son’s allowance to stop him from spending money foolishly. In his 1987 budget message, Reagan bluntly declared that “the deficit problem is also an opportunity—an opportunity to construct a new, leaner, better focused, and better managed federal structure.” That is, to cut programs.