Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  But there are less radical steps—short of changing the basic balance of the Constitution—to strengthen political parties and the links between presidents and their party members in Congress. They involve changes in the presidential nominating system and the rules of campaign financing.

  OPTION 3: BRING BACK THE PROS

  Option 3 is to give more say in the selection of presidential nominees to each party’s leaders and officeholders across the country: senators, governors, members of Congress, mayors of big cities. The aim is to move professional politicians back into the nominating process, balancing delegates chosen in popular primaries. Under this option, the party’s officeholders, and nominees for major offices, would automatically be unpledged delegates to party conventions, free to throw their weight to whichever candidate they felt best served the party. Their involvement would require the contenders to take more time to develop networks of support among professional politicians. Also, with more voice in picking the nominee, the elected politicians would have more reason to cooperate with him as president.

  The Democrats have already moved part way in this direction because of their bad experience in 1980. President Carter wrapped up the 1980 nomination by winning a majority of delegates in the primaries. But by the Democratic convention in the summer of 1980, congressional Democrats felt certain that with Carter leading the ticket, their party was headed for heavy losses—and it was. Many senators and House members, fearing for their seats, wanted another nominee. But under the party rules, there was no way to pick another nominee. If there had been several hundred uncommitted delegates, mainly officeholders, change would have been possible. After this episode, the Democratic party rules were changed for the 1984 convention, so that eighty percent of the Democratic members in Congress got seats as uncommitted delegates. It would be better to make it one hundred percent, and to add governors, big-city mayors, and party nominees for important offices, perhaps giving them all double-weighted votes.

  Another approach, assuming that the country is moving toward a national political primary, is to give the party pros a voice before the primary. Thomas Cronin, a Democratic activist and political scientist at Colorado College, has suggested that the parties hold national conventions in the summer of election years. At these conventions, elected politicians and party activists would screen would-be contenders and pick two or three to run in the primary. That way, the ultimate victor would have the support of political peers and of the popular vote.7

  Obviously, such steps would make it harder for an outsider such as Carter to win the nomination. But they would help insure that any nominee had solid backing from the party network and improve the links between a president and his party leadership.

  OPTION 4: STRENGTHEN PARTIES

  Option 4 is to strengthen the role and cohesive force of political parties by changing campaign finance laws so that more campaign funding is routed through the parties and less through political action committees. There are all kinds of changes that could be made to achieve that. One is to restore the one-hundred-percent tax credit for small donations to parties by individual voters (up to one hundred dollars); another is to raise the current ($20,000) ceiling on individual donations to parties by individuals; a third is to raise the limit on how much parties can donate to individual Senate and House candidates. In each case, the point is to give the parties more money and more leeway in using it, to increase their importance to their candidates and their potential for cohesive influence on candidates after the election.

  OPTION 5: TELEVISION SUBSIDIES

  Option 5 is to use parties as the major conduits for a “television subsidy” to candidates. Television time is the gold coin of the modern campaign. Some reformers have recommended setting up a television fund: a bank of hundreds of hours of television time, gathered by a levy on TV stations across the country as a public service cost of their lucrative operating licenses.8 To strengthen the national parties by making members of Congress more dependent on them, the Committee on the Constitutional System recommended that half of each party’s television time be allotted to the national parties, to distribute among their candidates, and half given to the candidates—both incumbents and challengers.

  A “television subsidy” would strike at one of the most alarming problems in our political system today: the enormous electoral advantages of incumbents, especially in the House of Representatives, an advantage heavily tilted for Democrats.

  The single most important step to break the prevalent pattern of divided government is to restore genuine, two-party competition across the country for seats in the House. With good reason, Tom Mann cites the argument that a “responsive and responsible government requires at least an occasional change in party control of the House.”9

  The present incumbency advantage of House members is so great and there are so many safe seats that fewer than fifteen percent of the nation’s 435 congressional districts produce a serious contest in most elections. This situation largely insulates the House from national political trends. It guarantees the continued Democratic lock on the House—now thirty-four years in duration. Control of the House is unaffected by partisan changes in voter sentiment nationwide, and that insures a partisan divided government every time a Republican is elected president. Beyond that, the lack of authentic competition in so many elections undermines the essence of representative government.

  The automatic advantages of incumbents are well known by now: large staffs, free mailing privilege, congressional radio and television studios, and TV satellite feeds. Political consultants reckon that package is worth $500,000 in campaign funds for each incumbent, not to mention the heavy pro-incumbent tilt of donations by political action committees.

  If genuine competition is to be restored to House elections, some subsidies are necessary for challengers—for example, some postal privilege and a partial financial subsidy to offset the built-in subsidies of incumbents. But the single most important need of challengers is visibility—simple exposure to the voters. Without it, challengers are licked before they start.

  No medium is more important to challengers than television, and probably no step would be more important in creating a genuine choice for voters than a television subsidy to challengers as well as incumbents. For example, each congressional district could be allotted a subsidy of an hour or two in prime time for each major candidate, during the final month before the election, to be used solely for live appearances (no media spots) of no less than ten minutes each, in order to insure some discourse on issues.10

  Such an approach is especially important in the House because so few House races are real contests. If incumbents were less confident of reelection, they might be more loyal to their parties—especially if their parties had more funds and television time to spread around.

  Flushing Out “Partisan Cholesterol”

  The institutional fixes that I have mentioned—and of course, there are more—are unlikely to materialize soon. Even if there were a Democratic sweep in 1988, the odds are strong that the ills of divided government will resume over the longer run. In that case, the experience of the past few decades, and particularly the Reagan presidency, teaches that the vital process of coalition making requires a more genuine commitment to collaboration across party lines on the most important issues: in short, old-fashioned bipartisanship.

  Bryce Harlow used to say that excessive partisanship was the “cholesterol” that clogged the arteries of the American system because of the enmities and bad tempers it produced. Harlow, a gruff, battle-scarred Texan, had personal ties across party lines with Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn, the Democratic leaders in Congress. Often during Eisenhower’s final two years, Harlow made a point of getting the president to invite Johnson and Rayburn for some quiet talk over a drink.

  “The second floor of the White House, just the four of us,” Harlow recalled to me, not too long before he died. “Yeah. I’d bring ’em down about once every six weeks to flush out the polit
ical plumbing so that the president and the leaders of Congress could do business if they had to in a crisis.”11

  Admittedly, that was the old power game, where fewer hands had more control. But the lesson of those quiet sessions in the White House is still important. During his two terms, Ronald Reagan did not huddle regularly with the House speaker or the Senate majority leader to work out genuine compromises on major issues, whether the budget or sending the Navy into the Persian Gulf. Nor did Carter or Nixon do it much. And therein lie many of our political problems: the failures of presidents more consistently to forge durable compromises with congressional leaders.

  It is not sufficient, as Carter did, simply to declare an energy policy and then try to force it on Congress; or to try, as Reagan did, to impose budget priorities, Iranian arms deals, the contra war or strategic defenses. That merely activates political high blood pressure and blame-game politics.

  Frustration with the stalemates and trench warfare of divided government prompted Theodore Sorensen, former aide to President Kennedy, to propose what he called A Different Kind of Presidency in 1984. Sorensen advocated bridging the stalemates of government with a bipartisan ticket in presidential campaigns: president from one party, vice president from the other party, cabinet drawn from both. As a precedent, he cited Abraham Lincoln’s tapping Andrew Johnson, the Democratic governor of Tennessee, for his Republican running mate in 1864, to help heal the political schisms of that era. “Our problems require more than partisan answers,” Sorensen argued. “They are more important than party labels. Both parties share the blame for our present plight. Neither can solve the problems alone.”12

  One difficulty with Sorensen’s proposal is that Andrew Johnson’s experiences as president, warring with a recalcitrant and militant Republican cabinet and Congress, is hardly an inspiring model. As for modern times, Republican John Anderson, running as an independent candidate, tried a bipartisan ticket in 1980, with Democrat Patrick Lucey as his running mate; they came in a distant third. Short of a national calamity as severe as the Civil War, it is hard to imagine either the politicians or the public adopting Sorensen’s bipartisan ticket.

  The basic notion behind Sorensen’s proposal, however, is sound. The most prickly and difficult issues almost invariably require unpopular decisions, and bipartisan agreement is needed. Neither political party wants to bear the onus alone for inflicting the pain of raising taxes or for checking growth of massive, popular middle-class programs. The result is that those necessary steps do not get taken.

  “Which political party, which branch of government, which president, wants to be held responsible for cutting the expansion of or eligibility for the indexed middle-class entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, or the funds for repairing our crumbling infrastructure, or the pay and pensions of those who serve in our armed forces?” Sorensen asked. “Who will change the popular tax and credit laws that encourage borrowing and consumption at the expense of U.S. savings accumulation and capital formation …? Who will accept the domestic political pressures involved in galvanizing the industrialized nations into harmonizing their economic, monetary, trade, credit, subsidy, exchange rate and development assistance projects?”13

  It is a truism worth remembering that the paramount national issues—American intervention abroad, curbing the federal deficit, strategic defenses and arms control, insuring American economic competitiveness—are not going to be settled by one president, by one round of congressional voting, or by one party. Very few purely partisan victories stand the test of time when no single party is predominant. The big issues take a prolonged effort, year in and year out, usually from one presidency to the next and beyond. And that requires some central consensus and collaboration across party lines. Even in eight years, Reagan could not guarantee the success of his Nicaraguan policy or the implementation of his strategic defense program, without the cooperation of his successors or a bipartisan consensus. But Reagan’s success with the 1983 bipartisan commission on Social Security offers a model for future presidents. New York’s Governor Mario Cuomo has talked of a bipartisan commission on the deficit to help the next president. On the paramount issues, such steps are necessary.

  Not a Spectator Sport

  In this book, my purpose is not to promote institutional remedies. We do need some reforms in campaign rules and in our governmental institutions. But tinkering with our laws and institutions will only go so far unless voters, too, accept some responsibility for the mess they blame on politicians.

  My purpose is to explain the way the power game is played so that voters can see what changes, if any, they want to bring about, not only in politicians and institutions, but in their own behavior—because the problems in our government are rooted in our behavior and in our thinking about government. We blame the politicians, but by and large politicians deliver what voters collectively show they want—either by deliberate choice, by inaction or by ambivalence. We get the kind of Congress, the kind of president, the kind of campaign system that we want.

  The popular gripe about presidential campaigns, for example, is that they are too long and too boring. But these problems are direct consequences of popular pressures for more democracy and for the spread of primaries. Campaigns are long because voters in so many states want to vote in primaries. The public wanted to throw out party bosses and stop having candidates picked in smoke-filled backrooms. Smart campaigners such as Jack Kennedy, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter used that populist mood to storm the old citadels of power.

  Now the 1988 presidential race has thirty-six primaries scheduled, seven more than in 1984. The money for that marathon gauntlet has to be raised by candidates well before the actual primaries begin. Once the voting starts, there is precious little time for raising money (that tripped up Gary Hart in 1984—he wasn’t organizationally ready to capitalize on his early strength). The political pros have calculated that it takes from $10 million to $20 million to make a run for the nomination in all those states (plus the party-caucus states). And to raise all that money normally requires from eighteen months to four years. By law, nominations require petitions in every primary state and fund-raising in twenty states for matching federal funds. That is slow, back-breaking organizational work. Repeaters have a head start. Reagan tried three times, in 1968, 1976, and 1980, before he made it. Mondale announced his candidacy 511 days before his party’s convention and later acknowledged that he had actually decided to run on January 21, 1981, the day after he left the vice presidency.

  During the long preliminary work, most voter’s are paying little attention. The main patterns of support and public impressions are formed during the critical season from the Iowa caucuses through the cluster of primaries on Super Tuesday—one frenzied month. It may please voters to see the regional clustering of primaries, theoretically shortening the campaign, but that compressed scheduling, with candidates darting from state to state, leaves little time for thoughtful discussion of issues. The sudden publicity earned by early victory or surprise strength bestows extraordinary advantage to the candidate who gains momentum in that period, however small the margin of victory or surprise. Actually, a slower pace of the primary season would give voters more time to gauge the candidates and to make more thoughtful choices.

  Another public peeve is the enormous power of television as the medium of modern campaigns and the superficiality of televised campaigns. It is a daunting problem. Certainly, the television news industry—and political reporters in general—could do better at making campaign coverage less superficial, at more analysis, and at delving more seriously into the revealing side of candidates’ records, rather than focussing on visual fluff, gaffes, and the tactics of campaigning.

  But unless the voters are prepared to give up political primaries as the main vehicle for nominating presidential candidates—and there is no sign of that—television will remain the principal medium for campaigns. In the old power game, local party leaders were important in picking
the nominees; labor leaders, church leaders, business leaders, and civic leaders shared their assessments of the contenders with voters. Now voters want to make up their own minds, based on impressions from short snippets on television and from the print media. These gut impressions are light on the record and performance of candidates; more weight goes to wit, ease, and the appearance of sincerity on camera.

  With primaries proliferating, campaigns are bound to remain superficial because a host of candidates want to reach a mass of voters quickly. Television is the fast mass medium, and the attention span of most voters is very short. Change will come only if voter groups find organizational ways of pressing candidates to be more substantive, or if voters turn away from candidates whose campaigns are superficial and evasive. Politicians will start being more honest and substantive when they see that honesty and substance pay with the voters.

  This year, an experimental effort has been mounted to force the presidential candidates to inject more substance into their stump appearances at two early stops on the campaign trail. The nonpartisan, nonprofit Roosevelt Center for American Policy Studies in Washington has spent about $1 million to give “crash courses” to thousands of voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. The idea is to prep the grass-roots voters on issues such as the budget deficit, farm programs, the global spread of nuclear weapons, Central America, and international trade, so that they can test presidential candidates with tough substantive questions, rather than let the candidates merely wheel through prepared spiels. The purpose, said Roger Molander, president of the Roosevelt Center, is to “foster a far more robust election” because people were embarrassed by the shallowness of the last two elections.