“At least it must have given you a sense of satisfaction,” I suggested. “‘The Cox Report.’ Not many people get that kind of billing.”
Chris smiled sadly, as if he were dealing with an idiot child. After all that the press had done to the Cox Report, he explained, he almost wished that his name had never been associated with it.
Chris stood from the sofa to walk to his desk. He picked up a newspaper clipping. “This is an editorial from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune,” Chris said. He skimmed the clipping, searching for a particular sentence. “Here it is,” he said. “Listen to this. ‘The report is subtly but palpably partisan.’
“Partisan?” Chris said, exasperated. He tossed the clipping back onto his desk. “ ‘Partisan’ is exactly what the report is not. It’s completely bipartisan. But since they didn’t like what the report said, they ignored the facts and called it ‘partisan’ anyway.”
The newspaper that galled Chris the most was the Los Angeles Times, partly because it was the dominant newspaper in his region of the country, Southern California, partly because he had gone to the trouble of driving to Los Angeles to meet the newspaper’s editorial board not long before the Cox Report was published. The editors of the Los Angeles Times knew, because Chris had told them so himself, that the Cox Report was completely bipartisan, based on meticulous research, and intended only to report on the theft of American nuclear secrets, not to demean any ethnic group. The Los Angeles Times had nevertheless run one story after another suggesting that the Cox Report was racist. “These people have so screwed me,” Chris said. “I mean, you’re taping this, and I don’t want to sound paranoid. But if we can’t go after a few spies without being accused of being anti-Chinese, I mean, I just don’t know how all of this is supposed to work.”
* * *
Listening to Chris, I thought back to a conversation I had had with David Brady. In David’s view Republicans seldom felt as much at home in the House of Representatives as did Democrats. He named two reasons for the Republicans’ discomfort. The first was the nature of the work itself.
“Democrats like the process for its own sake,” David argued. “What Republicans like is getting things done. To them, the process just gets in the way.
“Turn on C-Span and watch a hearing sometime,” David said. When the camera pans to the Democratic side, you’ll see congressmen who were enjoying themselves. They’d be passing notes back and forth to their staffs. They’d be exchanging whispered asides and chuckling. But when the camera pans to the Republican side, you’ll see a different picture.
“You watch them,” David said. “The Republicans will all have their chins in their hands and a glassy look in their eyes. They’ll be wondering why they ran for Congress in the first place.” Calling witnesses, raising points of order, posturing for television cameras, holding votes—Democrats tend to thrive on it, Republicans to see it as claptrap.
Christopher Cox bore David out, disliking congressional claptrap so much that, as we have seen, he had avoided holding any public hearings at all.
The second reason Republicans seldom felt as much at home in the House as did Democrats, David believed, was that it cost Republicans so much to be there. David told me about the Lincoln Club of Northern California. Made up mostly of businesspeople, the Lincoln Club recruits Republicans to run for office, giving them financial backing. “Do you have any idea how hard it is for the Lincoln Club to find people to run for Congress?” David asked. “They have to beg—literally beg.”
When the Lincoln Club found an executive who was Republican, well-spoken, and interested in public policy, it would send several of its members to his office. Attempting to persuade this capable, intelligent individual to abandon his career in business, they would explain that if he won his race for Congress he would earn a congressional salary of $136,700 a year. The reaction of the executive was nearly always the same. For a moment he would look at them. Then he would burst out laughing. The Lincoln Club had acquired a considerable reputation as a local source of merriment.
The Lincoln Club’s Democratic counterpart, a group of businesspeople who, like the members of the Lincoln Club, provide candidates with financial backing, found itself facing the opposite problem, not too few candidates for Congress but too many. “We’re talking social workers, schoolteachers, public defenders, associate pastors of Unitarian churches—professional do-gooders,” David said. “Every election cycle there are dozens of them, all desperate to run for Congress as Democrats. For people like that, getting into Congress would be a big step up.” Democrats in Silicon Valley had to interview one prospect after another before they could even begin to winnow the list.
Of course Silicon Valley represents an extreme. “You haven’t got middle-level talent pulling down the big bucks in Kansas that middle-level talent pulls down out there,” David said. But the GOP faces the same problem throughout the country even so. The owner of a car dealership in Topeka, the surgeon in Moline, the McDonald’s franchisee in Mason City—to serve in Congress, each would have to accept a pay cut.
“At least on the Senate side you get a little prestige out of the job,” David said. “But Republicans in the House? It’s only one voter in five who can even name his member of Congress.”
Here, too, Christopher Cox bore David out. After all, he had been elected to Congress as a man in his middle thirties, just entering his prime. He had now spent a dozen of the most dazzling years in the history of the American economy on a government paycheck. If instead of going home to Southern California to run for Congress he had gone home to join a law firm (when we worked at the White House, I always pictured Chris as the managing partner of a major firm), his income would have been—well, you get the idea. Chris certainly did. His face sank as I asked him about it.
“I have to say that I’ve asked myself that many times,” Chris replied. It wasn’t as if he derived no satisfaction from serving in the House, Chris explained. He was proud of the legislation he had authored. He was certain the Cox Report had made the nation more secure. But make the House his entire career? Forgo the private sector entirely? The income? The ability to get things done, unencumbered by politics? “If I died tomorrow and it were my epitaph that I had been a member of Congress, I’d feel horrible about it. I’d be dead, of course, so I’m not sure what I’d feel. But you see what I mean.”
Indeed I did. Any Republican would.
* * *
Not long after I left Washington, D.C., Republicans in the House of Representatives managed to pass a ten-year, $800 billion tax cut. Speaker Denny Hastert trumpeted the tax cut as a historic achievement, and for a while I thought I was going to have to take back everything I had written in my notes about the dazed mien of the House Republicans. I needn’t have worried.
When the Republican tax cut reached the president he vetoed it, claiming the cut was so big that it would have returned us to the days of massive federal deficits. By then Republican budget experts outside Congress had had time to study the measure. They learned that over the first several years it would have cut taxes scarcely at all. When the measure finally did begin cutting taxes, the tax cuts would have been modest—and contingent on the ability of the economy to provide the federal government with revenues at certain prescribed rates. While the president was denouncing the House Republicans for their rashness, knowledgeable Republicans were thus denouncing the House Republicans for their timidity. The tax cuts, intended to demonstrate that the House Republicans still had an agenda, demonstrated only their fecklessness instead.
Now, you would think that if Republicans in the House have become feckless, Republican governors and mayors would have done the same. They haven’t. While over the past several years Republicans in the House have accomplished little but the impeachment of the president, Republican governors and mayors have produced a remarkable string of accomplishments. Governor Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin has instituted sweeping welfare reforms. Governors George Pataki of New York, Tom Ridge of Pennsyl
vania, John Engler of Michigan, and others have cut taxes. Mayor Richard Riordan of Los Angeles has overseen improvements in his city’s schools. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York has presided over a drop in the crime rate that has helped to make New York, still a dangerous metropolis when Giuliani took office, into the safest large city in the country. Republican governors and mayors seem to have a knack for getting things done. To find out why, I visited Bret Schundler, the mayor of Jersey City, who has compiled one of the most impressive records of any Republican in the nation.
RICH MAN, POOR CITY
To prepare for my interview with Mayor Schundler, I looked over Jersey City’s Web site. One item in particular arrested my attention: Mayor Schundler’s second inaugural address. It was unlike the remarks of any politician I had ever seen. The address wasn’t folksy. It made no attempt to establish a rapport between the speaker and his audience. It offered no particular call to action. Instead it laid out the mayor’s governing philosophy, delving into the history of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, and quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Running to several thousand words, the address read like a lecture at a divinity school, and the fourth time I found the mayor quoting Nietzsche I began to wonder whether someone in his audience might have considered circulating a recall petition just to get him to stop speaking. Yet in a city that is more than half black and Hispanic, with a total Republican registration a minuscule 9 percent, Bret Schundler, a white man from the suburbs who likes to give long, earnest speeches, has been elected mayor three times.
Walking around Jersey City before meeting Bret Schundler, I found one block on Grove Street that shows how the city looked before Schundler became mayor. A decade ago a developer made a bid for the properties on the west side of the block (the east side is occupied by city hall). Then the developer ran into financial trouble, tying the properties up in legal proceedings ever since. The properties are dilapidated buildings of brownstone and brick. At ground level several of the buildings contain small businesses—Grove Liquor and Deli, Olympic Cleaners, Tangles Hair Studio, Carlascio Orthopedic (“Prosthetics, Orthotics, and Footwear Prescriptions Filled”). Above ground level, however, most of the buildings are unoccupied, their windows smashed or boarded over. A scant decade ago all of Jersey City was just like this—derelict and half deserted.
Jersey City still isn’t a garden spot, but it is visibly a city that works. On the blocks surrounding the dilapidated buildings, I found well-maintained grocery stores, drugstores, and restaurants lining every street. The upper stories of buildings were occupied, curtains fluttering in the windows. The sidewalks were crowded with African-Americans, Hispanics, Indians, and Pakistanis, all of whom seemed at ease in each other’s company and all of whom walked purposefully, like people with jobs. The long economic boom of the 1990s of course played a role in Jersey City’s revival. But if the economy were entirely responsible, then nearby towns should have changed for the better just as dramatically. They haven’t. The difference is Mayor Schundler.
Schundler, 41, works in a small office on the second floor of city hall. His office has a vault built into the wall. “The mayor’s office used to be on the other side of the building,” Schundler explained with a smile. “Then one of my predecessors realized it would make his life simpler if he just worked next to the money.” In 1991, Mayor Gerald McCann, who controlled Jersey City’s Democratic machine, was convicted of defrauding a Florida savings and loan. Three months later, in 1992, a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling forced McCann from office. Schundler won the special election that followed. He immediately embarked on half a dozen initiatives, first using skills he had learned on Wall Street to monetize the city’s tax receipts, bringing in desperately needed cash. His most dramatic initiative involved city hall itself. A large, handsome granite building dedicated in 1896, city hall had been one of the proudest structures in Jersey City until 1979, when a fire burned out the roof. The government of Jersey City then did just what residents of burned-out homes throughout Jersey City had gotten into the habit of doing—it had learned to live in a decaying hulk. Schundler renovated city hall, rebuilding the roof and cleaning the place up. It was his way of letting people know that Jersey City was going to become a self-respecting municipality again.
Schundler grew up in Westfield, a middle-class, suburban New Jersey town, one of nine children whose father made an impression on all of them. “My father would say, ‘Of him to whom much has been given, much is expected,’ ” Schundler told me. “He would ask us questions at the dinner table. ‘The middle class has moved out of New York City. Is that good or bad?’ ‘There’s litter on the streets. What can be done about it?’ He was always pushing us for ways to make the world a little bit better.”
For all his high-mindedness, Schundler is relaxed and engaging. He has bright eyes set in a face that, even though his sandy hair is already flecked with gray, is round enough to make him look younger than he is. He smiles easily. He laughs a lot. Even when he is talking about his aspirations for making the world better, which he does constantly, it is a pleasure listening to him.
Schundler obtained his first exposure to politics after graduating from Harvard. Convinced that he wanted to become an urban minister, he moved to Washington, D.C., to write a thesis about an inner-city church. A Democrat—he believed that Democrats cared more about the poor than did Republicans—Schundler found that he had enough free time to take a job in the office of a Democratic congressman. On Capitol Hill he met people close to Senator Gary Hart, and soon Schundler moved to Iowa as a volunteer on Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign.
Schundler found Hart disappointing. While the candidate’s elevated ideals may have looked admirable to people outside the campaign, to people inside the campaign they looked arrogant. “We were there, sacrificing like crazy, working like dogs,” Schundler said. “But Hart had the sense that all he was going to do was think of some good ideas, and it would be up to everybody else to achieve them. We’d ask him to sit on a bale of hay for a photo op. He wouldn’t do it. We’d ask him to call up a contributor to say thank you. He wouldn’t do it. If you’re going to move the country forward, it’s worth paying some price.”
(When photographs of Hart frolicking on a cabin cruiser with a young woman were published four years later, during Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign, the incident struck Schundler as merely one more example of Hart’s self-indulgence. “Our call is to try to think about others and make this a better society. If you’re going to accept that responsibility, it’s going to involve some sacrifice. Some men died in battle for a better world. All Hart had to do was remain faithful to his wife.”)
When Hart lost the 1984 Democratic nomination to Walter Mondale, a politician that Schundler considered in thrall to the unions, Schundler was left without a candidate. Wondering whom to support, he found himself listening to the speeches of the presidential candidate he had heretofore ignored, Ronald Reagan.
Schundler still believed that Republicans cared only about the haves, not about the have-nots. Yet Schundler noticed a strain in Reagan’s message that he found appealing. “Reagan gave people a sense of personal responsibility,” Schundler said. “I believe in telling people they have not just the ability but the obligation to overcome the obstacles in their lives. If you sit around and wallow in self-pity, you’re going to be perfectly useless to others. Reagan was communicating that message.”
Disheartened with Democratic politics and broke after paying his own expenses while he volunteered for Gary Hart, Schundler sat down with a pen and a pad of paper to think about what he wanted to do next. After listing the characteristics he wanted in a job, including “something that keeps me in touch with what’s happening in the world,” “being entrepreneurial,” and “working with sharp people,” Schundler decided to go into the securities industry. An intelligent, ambitious young man, Schundler joined Salomon Brothers in 1984, landing on Wall Street at the precise moment wh
en intelligent, ambitious young men could make more money than ever before. In 1987 Schundler left Salomon Brothers for C. J. Lawrence Securities, to switch from selling bonds, which he found boring and lucrative, to selling equities, which he found fascinating and lucrative. In 1990, with millions of dollars in the bank, Schundler retired. He was thirty.
During his brief Wall Street career, Schundler and his wife had lived in Jersey City. They had done so for the sake of convenience. From Jersey City, Schundler’s wife had an easy commute across Newark Bay to Newark proper, where she was attending law school, while Schundler himself had an easy commute across the Hudson River to Wall Street. Yet Schundler had soon made the derelict city the object of his altruistic impulses. He helped to operate a food pantry at the Old Bergen Church and became president of the Downtown Coalition of Neighborhood Associations. Thus when Mayor McCann was indicted in 1991, Schundler found the prospect of running for mayor himself irresistible.
Before entering the race, Schundler had one matter to tidy up. He was still a registered Democrat. In a city in which more than 80 percent of the voters were themselves registered Democrats this hardly placed Schundler at a disadvantage. Yet some time ago—he couldn’t say just when—he had recognized that on the big issues the Republicans were right. Cutting taxes really did promote economic growth. Economic growth really did mean more jobs for everybody, including the poor. “It was guys like Jack Kemp and Newt Gingrich who were talking about rolling up our sleeves and actually trying to address poverty,” Schundler explained. The Republican registration of Jersey City was then just 6 percent, even lower than today’s 9 percent. But if he was going to be honest with Jersey City’s voters, Schundler had no choice but to change his registration. He did so, ran for mayor as a Republican—and, to his surprise, won.
Schundler has replaced a political machine with a municipal government of utter rectitude. He has expanded the tax base, presiding over a project in which half a dozen attractive new skyscrapers have gone up on the edge of the Hudson, thereby expanding the waterfront’s share of Jersey City’s tax revenues from a tiny portion to 30 percent. He has cut taxes and reduced the welfare rolls. He has established good relations between the police and the populace—Schundler presides over a city, indeed, that appears to be positively glowing with good race relations. One reason is that the mayor has used tax revenues from the waterfront, which is largely white, to redevelop Martin Luther King Boulevard, which is almost entirely black. Twenty blocks of abandoned buildings when Schundler took office, today Martin Luther King Plaza is the center of a thriving neighborhood with a new supermarket, new restaurants, a new auto supply store. “And all these are African-American-owned businesses,” Schundler told me proudly.
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