by Dick Morris
A political leader should take the temperature and monitor the pulse of the times in which he lives. With humility, he must tailor his style of advocacy to his findings. He need not mute his desire for change or modify his ideas, but he must make sure his style matches the public’s mood.
A political leader can realize far-reaching goals even when the times call for moderation. The far-reaching reform Clinton failed to achieve in his 1994 healthcare legislation happened incrementally through the private sector and through gradual expansion of healthcare coverage to children.
A leader in a conciliatory era need not limit his goals, he must just lower his voice and take smaller steps. The leader who indulges his own personality, whether angry or conciliatory, at the expense of matching the public’s mood, is guilty of hubris.
Eventually, of course, bipartisan consensus runs its course. Once the consensus has been enacted, new problems inevitably arise, leading to new issues and new polarities. Then, Americans will welcome the debate and urge each party to offer its solutions. The style of politics changes, and those who seek consensus and unity will be left behind until the cycle comes back around to them or until they change their styles to fit the public’s mood.
In our own time, after bipartisan agreements to balance the budget, cut taxes, reform welfare, and preserve Social Security are consummated, the politics of moderation and consensus will likely exhaust its mandate. New issues will come to the fore and generate new controversies. Among them will be HMO regulation, IRS supervision, reform of public education and teacher tenure, curbing drug and alcohol use by teenagers, paying for college, expanding leisure time, curbing TV sex and violence, regulating genetic engineering, and a host of others. Democracy will be renewing its relevance.
Chapter 14
How to Lead
IN HIS MEMOIR of the Ford administration, Henry Kissinger articulated the key mandate for any elected official: “A statesman’s job is to bridge the gap between his vision and his nation’s experience. If his vision gets too far out ahead of his country’s experience, he will lose his mandate. But if he hews too close to the conventional, he risks losing control over events.”
Leadership is a dynamic tension between where a politician thinks his country must go and where his voters want it to go.
Bold initiatives that leave the voters behind are not acts of leadership but of self-indulgent arrogance. Clinton’s healthcare reform plan of 1993, Roosevelt’s court-packing proposal of 1937, and Wilson’s League of Nations campaign in 1919 all entombed good ideas because in each case, the president did not consider his constituents’ opinions, only his own.
The answer is not to abjure change but to seek it with political wisdom. Timid, tepid, meek governance leaves the initiative to others—usually enemies—and reduces a political leader to a gambler, dependent on good times and dumb luck to take him where he wants to go. Bush’s economic non-program of 1991 and Clinton’s early non-policy in Bosnia illustrate how presidents who lack an agenda also fail.
The art of leadership is to maintain sufficient forward momentum to control events and steer public policy without losing public support. In the past, politicians had to rely on intuition to succeed in this balancing act. Lincoln needed to figure out when he could emancipate the slaves without losing the border states. Roosevelt had to calibrate finely how he could overcome isolationism and calculate how far he could go to help the Allies without risking a massive backlash. Kennedy had to monitor the extent of public outrage over racial discrimination before he could risk losing the South by advocating civil-rights legislation.
Just as the computer has replaced the abacus, the fax machine has replaced the messenger and the telephone has made the telegraph obsolete, so public-opinion polling is substituting quantification for guesswork in enabling leadership.
Polling does not replace leadership. A politician who “governs by polls” would fail Kissinger’s test. He would “lose control over events.” But one who ignored polls would “lose his mandate.” With our Jeffersonian democracy, voters want to play a larger and larger role in determining the outcomes of our political debate. They expect to be heard, and polling is the way we translate their opinions into a language that politicians can understand.
Political opportunists won’t do anything that is unpopular. Idealists will do unpopular things, but they almost insist on martyrdom. Pragmatists know they often have to embrace positions that the public doesn’t like, but they work hard at articulating their views so as to survive to fight again another day.
The key is to integrate leading and polling in a dialogue to settle on the right proposal in the best form at the proper time. A leader begins by staking out his ultimate objective, such as balancing the budget, giving all Americans health insurance, upgrading public education, building more roads, or cleaning the environment. There is no substitute for a clear vision and a decisive direction. Carter’s and Bush’s domestic policies, for example, lacked this sort of definition and never overcame the defect. Reagan and—after initial failure, Clinton—had clear goals and navigated toward them with great success.
A leader must inventory the alternate ways of reaching his objective. With a totally open mind, he needs to reach out for advice on the programs and measures that will get him where he wants to go.
Once he’s done his homework, he needs to summon his pollster and walk him through the options, possibilities, and alternatives. For each, he must figure which arguments bolster and which damage his proposal. It has been Clinton’s great strength that his endlessly fertile mind is constantly inventing new alternative programs to reach his goals and quickly grasps the possible arguments for and against each idea. He briefs his pollsters for hours on the options he wants them to probe. A good pollster then tests each specific alternative, examining the arguments for and against to measure public support.
An idealistic leader will not hesitate to do something that is unpopular. But a smart idealist will carefully measure public opinion before he does so and will develop a strategy to persuade the electorate. Our sophisticated American electorate will come around if a leader takes the time to understand the concerns of his voters and addresses them articulately and well. In this way, polling makes strong leadership possible.
Frequently, President Clinton’s views differed sharply from those of the American people. For a president said to “govern” by polls, it is ironic how many unpopular positions he has taken. It only seems that he is dominated by surveys because he uses them to figure out, as he did when he sent troops to Bosnia, how to make the unpopular palatable.
When Clinton decided to send twenty-five thousand ground troops to Bosnia to enforce the peace, he knew that his formal power to order them into action meant little. Without a majority behind him, he knew Congress could easily curtail funding or use the War Powers Resolution to force withdrawal. Without the backing of a congressional and popular majority, the commander in chief was the “helpless, pitiful giant” of Nixon’s rhetoric.
So, President Clinton won popular support for the Bosnia deployment using the polling and media of the permanent campaign. Surveys indicated that Americans opposed sending troops by 35 percent to 55 percent. But the polls also showed that voters didn’t know what the troops were going to do once they got there. The voters envisioned search-and-destroy missions through the mountains of Bosnia, summoning the worst memories of the Vietnam War. But polling showed that when voters learned the troops would only police borders, not search the mountains for war criminals, support swelled to a majority. The president used a national TV address to explain the Bosnia mission and to differentiate war-making from peacekeeping. With public support assured, Congress became compliant. Clinton got to send his troops and was reelected anyway.
At times, a leader can use a popular position to counter an unpopular one. When Clinton decided to oppose a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution despite heavy majorities favoring it, he stepped up his efforts to actually balance
the budget. Similarly, Clinton sought to escape blame for his opposition to a very popular school prayer amendment by publicizing to schools the steps they could take right now to enhance spirituality in education without violating the First Amendment and without changing the Constitution. Once school boards realized they could have moments of silence, religious clubs after hours, courses on morality and ethics, and other forms of values education without amending the Constitution, few voters saw the need for a constitutional amendment.
When a policy is unpopular, a leader often has to change it to save it. In 1985, President Reagan had to recant his initial tax-reform proposal to eliminate deductions for state and local taxes in order to win approval of his overall package. In the summer of 1995, Clinton bolstered the effort to preserve racial and gender affirmative action programs by changing them. Realizing that conservative sentiment to repeal affirmative action was on the rise, he bowed to the need for reform. “Mending” the program rather than “ending” it, he prohibited racial or gender quotas, insisted that no dismissals ever be required by affirmative action, and required that all people hired by an employer to comply with affirmative action be fully qualified.
Most frequently, the key to taking unpopular actions is to be precise in justifying them with popular specific arguments. Clinton suffered no damage from twice vetoing welfare-reform legislation because he quite clearly enumerated the defects of the bill before him. By focusing public attention on the lack of day care, cuts in school lunches, and slashes in Medicaid, he rallied political support for a veto of a bill whose essential welfare-to-work provisions were highly popular. When the legislation was amended to eliminate the offending parts, he signed it.
A leader must take care to stand on solid ground when he does something the voters don’t like. Reagan failed to do so when he proposed limiting cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security payments, saying only that we had to cut spending in order to cut taxes. But when Clinton urged a similar reduction, he succeeded by convincing the nation that the cost-of-living index exaggerated inflation and needed to be updated to suit modern economic realities. He succeeded in portraying the cut as a technical correction.
As a senator from the tobacco-producing state of Tennessee, Al Gore supported requiring warning labels on cigarette packs even though the industry fiercely opposed the idea. Gore explained that he based his position on the need to discourage kids from smoking and, with that argument, won the forgiveness of his tobacco farmer constituents. “I’d go out to tobacco country and speak in front of all these farmers in overalls and I’d ask them if they wanted their kids to smoke. They’d shake their heads no and I’d say, ‘That’s why we need these warning labels.’ On that basis, it was okay with them.”
Too often, leaders don’t think carefully before they take unpopular positions. Intellectually lazy, it’s easier to revel in martyrdom (on the one hand) or to resort to demagoguery (on the other hand) than to think out in advance how to take an unpopular position…and survive. A politician can do what he thinks is right, he just has to be sophisticated in how he goes about it.
Those who seek a president who “will disregard the polls and just lead,” ask for the political equivalent of The Charge of the Light Brigade (“…theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die”). It does no service to a cause to fail grandly.
When Clinton called for massive healthcare reform, he failed to use polling and leadership properly. The president understood that managed care had to come to America and that we would have to acquiesce in the abridgment of our historic prerogative of choosing our own doctors and courses of treatment. But Clinton never realized how unpopular this course would be. He should have left it alone. Ironically, a few years after his proposal had died, the private sector forced managed care on America, depriving them by employer fiat of the liberties they had valued so highly in rejecting Clinton’s plan. Had the president focused his case only on the need to cover all uninsured Americans, without monkeying with the entire system, he’d doubtless have passed his program.
This dialogue between the ideal and the possible must extend to the details of each program or initiative. For example, when President Clinton decided to move toward requiring competency tests for students to upgrade national education standards, he found broad public support. Over 80 percent of the voters agreed that students should be tested and promoted only if they passed the test. But there was a problem. Only 60 percent felt that the federal government should require that states adopt such a system. The fact that Washington required the test robbed the idea of the 20 percent who favored the idea of mandatory testing but wanted the states, not the feds, to impose it.
The president continued the dialogue between policy and polling by suggesting that most states and localities would probably use federally prepared tests if they were offered on a voluntary basis. He felt that pressure from parents and voters on each local school board or on each governor would be so intense that most jurisdictions would adopt the test if only the government designed one. In effect, he echoed the sentiment of the movie Field of Dreams, that “if you build it, they will come.”
Polls found that voter support for testing for educational standards jumped back to 80 percent when the proposal called for optional, not mandatory testing. The dialogue between policy and polling had found a way to achieve Clinton’s goal in a way that worked politically.
Sometimes voters distrust polling because they don’t understand it. They think polling is pandering and that disregarding polls is bravery. But this Pickett’s Charge school of politics forces a choice between self-destruction and timidity. Neither option is very good government.
Chapter 15
Defeating Bureaucratic Inertia
THE PERMANENT BUREAUCRACY of the executive branch of a democratic government is dedicated to a single mission: To change nothing. Left or right matters little. They are neither liberal nor conservative. They are in favor of things as they are. In pursuit of that mission they are canny, shrewd, ruthless, and conspiratorial. They infiltrate the ranks of those who want change with the goal of destroying them. They use delay and details to overwhelm new ideas and to force a continuation of the status quo.
But the modern electorate demands change and it will not accept failure. A political figure must learn how to overcome bureaucratic inertia and get the policies and results he wants through the bureaucracy.
Bureaucratic opposition to change is particularly deadly since it usually takes place before an idea has made it out into the public arena. It is in this daunting environment of a permanent implacable bureaucratic hostility to change that the public official must formulate his agenda in the first place. It is amid these wolves with bared fangs that he must cultivate initiatives and nurture creative thinking to fruition. Worse, it is from these very agents of obstruction that he has to get the information, data, technical support, legal opinions, budgetary flexibility, and capacity to move personnel, without which no initiative can survive. It is to them that he must turn for logistical support in his efforts to change the system. It’s like hiring the wolf to babysit the lamb.
The bureaucracy’s weapons to stifle change are truly intimidating. The first line of defense is usually delay and obfuscation. Memos get lost. Demands for information get sidetracked.
Bureaucrats also tend to use crises to block initiatives for change. When a crisis comes at you, all the affirmative changes you seek must wait while a confrontation of someone else’s choosing on someone else’s ground plays out. Do you want to raise educational standards in your schools? First you must face down a looming cut in funding. When you ran for office, did you promise welfare reform? You have to wait while we cope with the latest round of federal budget cuts and the resulting rise in the population of the homeless on our streets.
A crisis is almost always a threat to make life worse than the status quo. By forcing the change-oriented executive to defeat deterioration, he needs to sidetrack his commitment to improvement. Indeed
, if the threat of things getting worse can remain long enough, an incumbent will get to kind of like the old status quo even if he ran promising to reform it.
A government lawyer is the bureaucrat’s bureaucrat. His job is to figure out why change is illegal. Statutes, regulations, and court decisions are his weapons in protecting turf and defeating change.
What the lawyer can’t defeat, the technical expert on the staff will try to debunk. Once the technicians have had their crack at stopping change, budget officials and civil service personnel experts take theirs. The entire process is one vast conspiracy to say no.
It would be a mistake to impute any particular ideological bias to a bureaucracy. It is neither liberal nor conservative, it is just against change. Bureaucrats are suspicious of newness simply because they are employed, paid, and not laid off under the oldness. They know how the current system works and fear any new one.
But much of the bureaucracy’s animosity to innovation springs from established ways of thinking and time-honored approaches. Each element of the status quo was once a change and likely has its share of champions still on the payroll. If reality has proven their innovation wrong or just dated, few civil servants can escape a sense of personal investment in frustrating changes to the status quo they helped design in their youth.
Above all, civil servants or longtime bureaucrats have no incentive to change. As the providers of service to the public, they can’t see the defects in their systems. They won’t acknowledge their shortcomings and are sufficiently isolated from the public not to have to acknowledge its frustrations.