Remember that big July rally on the West Front of the Capitol? Well, Ronald Reagan had gotten such a kick out of it he now was coming back for an encore. Unfortunately for him, his previous crowd-pleasing act—his call for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution—was beginning to wear thin. What he hoped to do was trap Democratic members of Congress who could be accused of being against a balanced budget. The problem was, even true believers were now more driven by the country’s real economic predicament than the ideological appeal of constitutional change.
To his chagrin, the president saw the balanced-budget amendment now fail to win the two-thirds vote needed before it could be submitted to the fifty states for ratification. Twenty independent-minded Republicans had joined the Democrats to kill its chances.
As anticipated, Reagan tried turning the legislative lemon he’d just been handed into lemonade—what else could he do? He played the aggrieved crusader. “Voters across America should count heads and take names. In November we must elect Representatives who will support the amendment when we propose it again in the spring. Today I share the deep burning anger, I think, of millions of Americans.” He attacked what he called the “stonewalling” by O’Neill and other Democrats who’d kept the House from having scheduled the vote earlier.
Since the Washington Post pronounced that the vote denying Reagan the balanced-budget amendment “boosted the stock” of O’Neill, I was happy with the result. Yet at the same time, I remained uncertain how this upset actually was going to play in the coming election. Here’s how I framed it in my journal: “The problem is that the Democrats never really made a public case against the constitutional amendment. We needed some hook, some easily understood and accepted reason why the amendment was not the answer. I don’t think there is one.” In the voters’ minds, why shouldn’t there be a mechanism forcing politicians to do what they themselves have to do at home, balance the checkbook?
I further worried that Reagan could make the election about the refusal of the Congress—“Washington!”—to let him make the big changes he’d called for. Again, it was about not being the roadblock to voter intentions. Basically, I was fretting that the vote on November 2 wouldn’t hinge on the worsening economy—the jobless rate was now above 10 percent—but on Reagan’s righteous presidential anger at an unbending Congress.
But if morale was any guidepost, matters were suddenly looking up for the Democrats. Here’s the Speaker describing how he saw his success story in fighting Reagan: “I was the only voice that was really criticizing them. I kept hammering away and hammering away and hammering away. A lot of my people were running away, frightened of ’em, scared stiff of ’em.”
But for Reagan’s speechwriters, the Speaker still remained a target. Here’s the president at a campaign rally in Irving, Texas, unkindly equating Tip O’Neill with Pac-Man: “Somebody told me it was a round thing that gobbled up money. I thought that was Tip O’Neill.”
During his swing through the Southwest, a script had called for Reagan to be much rougher. A copy of a speech released earlier to the press had him saying, “In Washington, the nine heavenly bodies are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, Neptune and Tip O’Neill.” Reagan was either too nice or too prudish to imply that his sometime buddy—after 6 p.m.—was known as “Uranus.” He’d not been willing to go that far.
Tip, too, preferred to tease rather than insult. During a White House briefing on foreign policy, for example, Reagan had to excuse himself. He told the Speaker and the other congressional leaders present that he was going to get his picture taken with a group of handicapped children. “Your heart would die for them,” he said as he left the room. O’Neill saw his opening. “Mr. President, don’t forget to tell them that Tip O’Neill is fighting for their budgets!” he called after the departing Reagan.
In mid-October, during his regular Saturday radio address, Reagan spoke of his early presidential hero, Franklin Roosevelt. He explained that “fear” was now again the country’s real problem, just as it had been in the 1930s. However, he wanted to be sure his listeners knew that, this time around, the Democrats weren’t the solution but rather the problem itself.
But the president wasn’t to go unchallenged. Until this moment Tip had delegated other House Democrats to broadcast the official opposition reply. Now, finally, he was going to do it himself. It was a great moment for us corner men. I planned to have the Speaker tape his five-minute address on Friday in Boston, then send the transcript to the wires and major newspapers that afternoon with an embargo. That meant they couldn’t publish or broadcast the Speaker’s remarks until the next morning.
From my journal: “By letting the wires go with the story at 9 AM—and also letting the radio stations begin running it then, we created a story that TPO was on offense and Reagan on defense. I called Peter Milius, an editor at the Washington Post, on Saturday and asked if they could put TPO in the lead and Reagan in the jump. He said, ‘You can kiss my ass.’ ”
But he was just kidding. In the end, the strategy worked and we got the story we wanted: Tip and the Gipper fighting on even terms.
Here’s how it played in the Post:
Democrats took the offensive yesterday for the first time in their weekly radio battle with President Reagan, bringing in House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) to elevate and sharpen the dispute over who should be blamed for the condition of the economy.
In a taped message released three hours before the president’s live broadcast, O’Neill charged that the administration’s program “is not working because the program is not fair—and just as important, because the people themselves know it is not fair.”
It was the first time a Democrat of O’Neill’s stature had taken part in the Saturday broadcasts and the first time the party launched a political assault rather than responding to Reagan’s remarks.
Steven Weisman’s coverage for the Times, topping the front page, was even better in setting up the match.
REAGAN AND O’NEILL EXCHANGE CHARGES OVER THE ECONOMY
President Reagan and the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., exchanged accusations on the economy today as the off-year election campaign went into its final 10 days.
Sounding their principal themes in a campaign that is viewed by both sides as a referendum on the Reagan Administration’s economic policies, Mr. Reagan charged the Democrats with proffering “fairy tales” and Mr. O’Neill said the Administration had deliberately thrown people out of work. . . .
Just as Mr. Reagan appealed for patience, Mr. O’Neill sounded the principal theme of the Democrats this fall: that the Administration’s policies were unfair.
The Speaker’s rare appearance on the airwaves did what we’d hoped: put him out in front where, suddenly, he sounded as impressive as I was convinced he deserved to be.
An election eve account by the Associated Press’s Tom Raum recognized both the strategy and its effectiveness:
Not long ago, some members of his own party dismissed O’Neill as ineffective and politically over the hill, as he lost one budget battle after another to Reagan. Today, the speaker seems to have reclaimed his status as the Democratic Party’s chief spokesman.
He is making more radio and television appearances, and his enlarged press staff is cranking out almost daily O’Neill attacks on Reaganomics. One was a poster that carried this message: “Voodoo Economics: Stay the Curse.”
Kirk O’Donnell had a favorite political maxim, which I’ve quoted before—you make your breaks. We would prove that rule in the final days of the 1982 midterm campaign. With the entire House of Representatives, and a third of the U.S. Senate, up for reelection, we now did what was absolutely mandatory if we were going to prevail. We came up with a way to put the red-hot Social Security issue front and center, where it couldn’t be missed.
As I said, it was a break we’d made in the final week before America went to the polls. I’d been working to make good use of what appeared
a highly exploitable leak from the White House. Word was that the Reagan people might use the congressional “lame duck” session following the election to attempt once again to downgrade the role of Social Security as it was known and loved. This was obviously worth every second I could put into following up the truth of it, and I was highly motivated, wanting to be careful to pitch it to the right person for a thoroughgoing follow-up.
I decided on the Post’s Spencer Rich, who often wrote about government agencies. As I tried to convince him to run with the story, I wound up listening as he asked me to help find a mass letter sent out by the National Republican Congressional Committee, one that discussed Social Security. I steered him to Eric Berkman, a House Democratic staffer who I knew could get ahold of anything, and who had contacts even in the White House.
On the Wednesday before the election, Spencer called and said he’d received the Republican mailing from Eric and was intending to go with the story for Thursday. Incredibly, that GOP fund-raising letter he now had his hands on included a questionnaire that suggested ways Congress might reform Social Security. It invited contributors to vote on several options for fixing Social Security. It promised the votes would “let the [bipartisan] Commission know . . . how you want Social Security reformed before they finalize their report.” Ballot choice No. 1 was to make the system “voluntary.”
Eureka.
Could Reagan still claim he’d since changed his mind, that he no longer held such a position? Not anymore. Here was a promotional mailing from his very own party that starkly implied otherwise. It was the Thursday morning before the election. I called Kirk, who said we should instantly get out a statement from Tip demanding that the president “repudiate” the mailer. I reached the Speaker up in Cambridge. When he phoned back from his first stop that morning, I gave him the news. “We got a break on Social Security,” I reported happily.
The Speaker’s stern rebuke to the president, calling for him to disassociate himself from the GOP mailing, made the UPI wire immediately, which in turn triggered the TV networks. The key was, here was Tip pinning the campaign committee’s goof on Reagan himself, making it hard to blame anyone else. That afternoon, as Air Force One arrived in Casper, Wyoming, the press jumped Reagan, demanding he answer the Speaker. The story led the networks’ news programs that night as the top item. From that moment on, our job was to keep Social Security alive and burning as the central, overriding issue through Election Day.
Now there was no more prelude. Our mighty efforts were either going to be rewarded . . . or not. Walking to the Speaker’s office the day before the election, I’d suddenly recalled how, back in 1980, CBS had led its election eve news broadcast by focusing not on the tough battle coming to a close but on the fact that it was the first anniversary of the Iranian hostage crisis. I remembered how it had hurt.
Two years later, on another election eve, my mood was different. This time around, Tip O’Neill’s assault on Ronald Reagan and his party’s problem with Social Security was the lead story on the CBS Evening News. The tables had been turned.
• • •
Tip O’Neill enjoyed a plate of beef stew as the returns began coming in, receiving the election results in his back office. I watched him savor each incoming phone call bringing good news: the young House members he’d been worried about had come through safely and were reporting in.
There’d also been scores to be settled that got taken care of. During the campaign, an arrogant young Republican congressman from Long Island had attacked the Speaker as “big, fat and out of control, just like the federal government.” At one point, he’d gone so far as to pin a REPEAL O’NEILL campaign button right on President Reagan’s lapel.
“I wouldn’t know him from a cord of wood,” the Speaker insisted, pretending to be unbothered. The House, after all, was a very big place, and this guy wasn’t one of his own. But the devoted Leo Diehl felt otherwise. He’d been with Tip through every election since 1936 and had no intention of permitting the offender to go unpunished. The next thing the Democratic hopeful in that district, Bob Mrazek—who hadn’t stood much of a chance before—knew was that large contributions were flowing into his campaign treasury from unexpected sources. Diehl had quietly alerted the Speaker’s friends that a certain disrespectful Republican needed to be taught a lesson.
“For a while there, I had no idea where we would get the money we needed to run a decent campaign,” Mrazek would recall. “Then, out of nowhere, three weeks before election day, the money started pouring in, from Chicago, from everywhere.” The icing on the cake of election night, 1982, was Mrazek’s win. Leo was triumphant. “I think the ‘Repeal O’Neill’ kid got repealed.”
Albert Hunt, then of the Wall Street Journal, would write: “The one clear winner election night was Thomas P. O’Neill. He had suffered more than any other political leader in the past two years. But his strategy . . . paid off on election night.”
As the election results rolled in, Tip couldn’t help declaring, “It’s a great night for the Irish.” He’d fought the election on three issues: the recession, Social Security, and “fairness.” His tactics had paid off. After two years of intense frustration and unwilling accommodations, he’d retaken effective control of his beloved House, picking up twenty-six seats. “We don’t want anyone to eat crow,” he declared once it was all over. “The country is in too tough shape for anything of that nature.” Instead, the Speaker called for “bending” on the part of both Democrats and Republicans. “And so we will extend to him the hand of cooperation to see, whether in the best interest of America, we can turn this unemployment around,” he said.
The evidence of what took place the next morning appears, unadorned, in my journal: “November 3—We won!”
• • •
Later that month, the New York Times columnist James Reston wrote this about Tip and the Gipper. It would prove an excellent testament of the new political order that emerged from the 1982 election. Reston, a world-renowned journalist, had just turned seventy-three.
They are an odd couple, but they have some things in common. Both know they don’t have the votes in the new Congress to put over the programs they prefer. Both are coming to the end of a long political journey. The Speaker will be 70 on Dec. 9, and the President will be 72 next Feb. 6.
What they also have in common is an important chance to do something together in these next two years for the defense of the nation at home and abroad. The Speaker wants to leave behind a Social Security system that will endure, even if he has to amend its benefits, and the President probably wants to depart in peace and get control of both the economy and the nuclear arms race.
Together, they might even do it, and being Irish, they might even try.
Fixing Social Security for the long term in the winter of 1983 was the great bipartisan achievement of the Reagan presidency. It required an elegant choreography that had both the president and Speaker agreeing to the deal in tandem. Here the two celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with Republican leader and Tip pal Bob Michel.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DEAL
“Americans are conservative. What they want to conserve is the New Deal.”
—GEORGE F. WILL
It was Kirk O’Donnell, the Speaker’s counsel, who gave me a way to see how to operate effectively in the political arena. Over the years, the rules of action I first heard from him have evolved and grown into my own everyday primer. From the start I grasped their simple, practical wisdom. They deserved to be at the core of any working pol’s personal handbook—that is, if he knows what’s doing.
It was Kirk who had the smarts to dub Social Security the “third rail” of American politics. He was certainly right, of course—and this brilliant image had a very specific meaning for him. As a kid growing up in Boston, Kirk had been taken from an early age on the old MTA, only to be haunted by those scary signs that warned, NO TRESPASSING. DANGER THIRD RAIL. The prospect of the horrific fate he might suffer should he fal
l onto the tracks gave him nightmares he never forgot.
During the 1982 election, Kirk’s imagined nightmare had become the Republicans’ own. The Democrats had made sure of it. But another of Kirk’s great expressions—which is the key to understanding what next happens—is one I’ve already mentioned (when it equally applied). “Always be able to talk,” he liked to say. And that’s what the two parties started, slowly, to do.
Following the midterm elections, and the gratifying Democratic triumph, I began to sense a positive shift in our dealings with the Republicans on Social Security. “If we are truly to avoid a disaster,” the Speaker had said even before the election, “both sides have to give a little.” November behind him, the calendar now pointed to mid-1983, when the Social Security fund faced its due date. “The old-age trust fund is already operating at a deficit,” the Washington Post had reported the previous month, “and will be able to get through to next July only by borrowing from Medicare.”
Reagan, viewing the same deadline, saw a deal with the Democratic Speaker as a way to silence “Social Security” as the Democratic battle cry in 1984. For this, he was ready to pay a price. Just as he’d been willing to accept a tax increase in 1982, he was now prepared to allow another breach in his no-tax firewall. To stanch the bleeding in the Social Security system, he would make a second compromise: if a hike in the payroll tax that every worker contributes to the retirement fund was essential to a deal, he was ready to do it.
On January 3, the Washington Post reported the following: “Administration sources have suggested that Reagan is signaling his willingness to consider tax increases as part of a bailout, while O’Neill apparently has sanctioned a compromise proposal that postpones benefit increases for three months.” The rough basis for a deal was now on the table: Democrats would get an increase in the payroll tax, while Republicans would get their downward modification of benefits.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 22