Power Game

by Hedrick Smith

  But, as I have contended, our fixation on the president is exaggerated, and it is time for more people to recognize that our elections are for an entire government, not just a president. Any president has less power than most people imagine. The capacity to form a coalition is crucial. Any Republican president faces divided government and must be able to deal well across party lines in Congress. But most voters do not stop to think that divided government is their doing, that rampant ticket splitting is likely to produce shouting deadlocks and blame-game politics between Congress and the president. It is silly to call for strong presidential leadership, to vote a split ticket, and then to blame the politicians because they could not get their act together. Split-ticket voting feeds political deadlock.

  By and large, politicians represent the public pretty accurately, its views and its lack of interest in the political process. Celebrity politics, feel-good rhetoric, bumper-sticker slogans, and negative commercials reflect what the candidates and their high-priced media consultants see voters responding to. The product is geared to the marketplace and unless the customers become more discriminating, they are in for more of the same.

  It is time, for example, to pay greater attention to the capacity of presidential candidates for making our government work. On this, their political past is more important than their inevitably self-serving stump rhetoric. In short, it is time to stop knocking competence and experience in government, and time to stop believing that some newcomer can transform the world inside the beltway and the world at large, with an untested magic. It is time to discount Washington bashers and visionaries, and time to value the professional politicians whose records show that they can balance the issues, sort out priorities, rally their ranks, and reach across party lines—and keep reaching across—to draw support there, too. It is certainly time to put aside the hokum that either party can rule for long without help from the other.

  This means casting a skeptical eye at glamour candidates, at visions of a bright American future, and at glib promises of dazzling presidential performance. Divided government and weak parties are a fact of political life. Personality politics and communications charm are a help, but they will only go so far in coping with the nation’s most testing problems. Whatever their philosophies, the winning candidates on both sides in 1988, and beyond, will need the craft of sensible compromise to make our government work. All three—competence, credibility, and compromise—are crucial to governing effectively.

  Finally, it must be said that the policy deadlocks in Washington over spending priorities, arms control, and Central America reflect the public’s ambivalence on these issues.

  The budget is symptomatic of the basic problem. People are tempted to seek solutions by imposing institutional fixes: constitutional amendments to require a balanced budget or to give the president a line-item veto. The effectiveness of a line-item veto is questionable. Governors of forty-three states have that power, seven do not, and spending levels are lower on average in state governments without line-item veto power, than in states which have it.14 A procrustean requirement for a balanced budget could in the years ahead plunge a faltering economy into depression by killing programs or forcing massive tax increases just when the economy can ill sustain such action. Almost inevitably, a balanced budget amendment would be taken to the courts for interpretation—an invitation to judicial policy-making of the broadest sort. A safer, saner route is through gradual deficit reductions sincerely backed by both president and Congress.

  The real problem on the deficit, as on other central questions, is the lack of a clear public consensus—in this case, on the size and role of government. The electorate sends politicians contradictory signals: Cut the budget, but don’t cut popular programs—the ones that would have to be cut in order to cure the deficit. Opinion poll after opinion poll has shown majorities of people dislike “big government” in principle but not in practice. In the lingo of political science, such voters are “ideologically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” This basic inconsistency encourages the politics of evasion and hypocrisy in Washington. It fuels the partisan blame game.

  Similarily, on American policy in Central America, the message from the voters is ambivalent—”no more Cubas” (no more Communist-ruled countries in the Americas) but “no more Vietnams” (no more American intervention and defeat). Or again, on the arms race: Be strong enough, but don’t spend too much; try to get the Russians to give up their most threatening weapons, but don’t give up our areas of advantage.

  Of course, politicians who shy away from hard decisions bear responsibility for our unresolved problems. But it is not their responsibility alone. Unlike many games, the power game is not a spectator sport. It goes without saying—yet it needs saying: In a system of direct primaries, voters must become more intelligently involved and more realistic, both about the structural problems in our system and their own role in it.

  Politicians and reformers can tinker with the system, but major changes that affect both policy and the way the game is played also have to come from the grass roots beyond the beltway. When voters straddle, most politicians straddle. When the electorate does not throw its support behind a single majority party that can give clear direction to government, the government reflects that indecision in the nation. When the country lacks a consensus, the president and Congress lack a consensus. When the public has no overriding philosophy, the government lacks what Walter Lippmann called a “public philosophy.”

  At this point, as the partisan combat rises again, it is well worth remembering that after the tumult is over, the nation needs a rejuvenated spirit of comity and compromise. It needs not only purposeful leadership but a realistic acceptance of the limits of power and insistence that the power game be played by the rules. No party, faction, president, or Congress can impose its will on this cumbersome, brawling five-ring political circus of ours, or ignore the rules for long—without being humbled. When the American power game was organized two centuries ago, the Founding Fathers deliberately spread the chips around so widely that no single political force could drive the others out of the game. The chips have been scattered even more widely in recent years—by reform, money, television, weak parties, and split-ticket voting—and we now need political leadership that can provide not only vision but cohesion.

  From a leader, from all of us, what is required is a tolerance for the untidiness of democracy, even genuine enjoyment in democracy’s untidiness. “Speed of action,” Senator William Cohen observed near the end of the Iran-contra hearings, “was never the absolute goal of democracy, because a king is faster than a congressman on any given day.” Our political system needs some neatening up. The power game will never be tidy. The competition will never quit. The ruckus will never quiet. But things will work better when people are encouraged to coalesce.

  In his dismay over the Iran-contra affair, George Shultz framed the problem and the solution with simple clarity. “We have this very difficult task,” he said, “of having a separation of powers that means we have to learn how to share power. Sharing power is harder, and we need to work at it harder than we do. But that’s the only way.”15

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  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Max Lerner, foreword to Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. xxvi.

  2. One of the most perceptive scholars of American government, Richard Neustadt of Harvard University, wrote. “The substance is important, never doubt it, for that is what the game is all about. But so is the personal element.… The personal is tightly interwoven with the institutional. It is a rare player who can keep the two distinct, much less view both apart from substance.” See Richard E. Neustadt, Alliance Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 76, 78.

  1. THE POWER FLOAT

  1. John F. Kennedy, in Theodore C. Sorensen, Decision-Making in The White House: The Olive Branch or the Arrows (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), foreword.

  2. Howard Baker, interview with the author, January 14, 1986.

  3. Larry Crowley and Charlie W
elch, interviews with the author’s researcher Lauren Simon Ostrow, April 22, 1986.

  4. Many Americans assume this military aide is a mythical figure, but reporters traveling with the president do see him, and White House aides talk of his presence matter-of-factly.

  5. Oneida (Tennessee) Independent, May 6, 1982, p. 1.

  6. Strange as these security precautions may strike the ordinary reader, this account comes directly from my interview with Senator Baker, January 14, 1986.

  7. These details on the size of the presidential traveling caravan came from the Reagan White House Press Office and the White House Transportation Office.

  8. Michael Deaver, interview with the author, February 4, 1986.

  9. Al Kingon, interview with the author, April 9, 1986.

  10. Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (New York: William Morrow, 1973), pp. 551–552.

  11. Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976), p. 101.

  12. Newt Gingrich, interview with the author, January 29, 1986.

  13. The Washington Post. December 15, 1985, p. C1

  14. Richard Darman, interview with the author, April 5, 1985. Walter Bagehot is a nineteenth-century British political essayist.

  2. THE POWER EARTHQUAKE OF 1974

  1. The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 1973, p. 10.

  2. Stuart Eizenstat, interview with the author, August 8, 1986.

  3. See Michael Malbin, Unelected Representatives: Congressional Staff and the Future of Representative Government (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp. 10–19; and Norman J. Ornstein et al., Vital Statistics on Congress, 1984–85 Edition (Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy, 1984), pp. 116–127