Power Game (124 page)

“Television has transformed the presidential office and also the governmental
process. This is dangerous and potentially disastrous. Congress may be fractionated; it may speak in a cacophonous babble of 535 separate constituencies; but at least its structure is built around the serious consideration of questions of public policy. Not so television. Television is a show-business medium.… More often than not, what is emotionally appealing—and therefore dramatically captivating—is intellectually vacuous and substantively wrong. What makes good television often makes bad policy. Because of the pervasive impact of television, the actions of Presidents are directed increasingly toward the omnipresent cameras, and confined within the distorting prism of television news. Public debate is conducted increasingly in slogans and one-liners.… Television is a fact of life, and a President in the 80’s will have to use television effectively in order to govern effectively. The challenge will be to find a way to use it that enlightens rather than obfuscates.”
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Nixon knew what Reagan proved: the enormous power of television in the hands of a skillful president. Reagan was the first president of the television age to turn the power of media leadership into the enactment of his program, something Kennedy had failed to do. As an actor used to being on stage and on camera all his life, Reagan enlarged Teddy Roosevelt’s bully pulpit; he used television to humble entrenched politicians. He showed that going public, over the heads of Congress, is a powerful way to move political Washington. The opposition bent in 1981 under the avalanche of letters and phone calls that answered Reagan’s televised appeals for cutting the budget and taxes.

It is important to recall that Reagan had two other vital political assets grounded in more orthodox politics. First, he was riding a national consensus of antigovernment populism and in 1980 had won support for a program of tax cutting and budget cutting. Second, he had a strong organizational base. Conservatives had built a strong mass movement over sixteen years and had taken over the Republican party. That army was ready to respond to Reagan’s televised appeals to pressure Congress.

Beyond that, however, Reagan’s personal popularity, built over the years on television, was vital political leverage in the Washington power game. He created a sense of familiarity and intimacy in people’s living rooms that was an extraordinary political force. For the power of leadership is partly illusion and perception—in Reagan’s case, the perception of popularity. Well before the Iran-
contra
scandal, other Washington politicians had grown mistrustful of Reagan’s maneuvers, angry at his stubbornness, and tired of his telling anecdotes when they
wanted hard-headed talk about policies. But to the public he was as likable as a friendly uncle, and his popularity intimidated other politicians. They shied away from taking him on head-on. Without television, he would have been far less formidable.

But over time, the practical impact of Reagan’s popularity wore thin on other Washington players. Few politicians other than Tip O’Neill confronted him, for they feared he could engineer a public backlash against them. But they learned to defy him indirectly, because they saw the public was often not with him on substance. As early as 1982, Reagan’s televised appeals on budget and taxes failed to stir irresistible public groundswells or to revive his governing coalition. His ratings sank with recession, and the opposition made him retreat. Later, even after his 1984 landslide and while the economy was still heading upward, Republicans as well as Democrats killed his budget, forced him to bow on sanctions against South Africa and to bend on trade measures. And no matter how many times he addressed the nation from the Oval Office, Reagan repeatedly failed to swing the public his way on the
contra
war. So his presidency showed both the value of media leadership and its limitations.

There is another—more hidden—price to the public relations presidency. The more any president is preoccupied with public relations and ceremony, the more power over the substance of policy he must turn over to subordinates. No president can do everything; what he chooses to do leaves his other duties to others. Reagan is famous for leaning on staff; future presidents excessively preoccupied with P.R. will be the same. The same thing happens in Congress. Quite often, the most video-minded senators and House members, even those who are substantively able, have to turn over great responsibility to staff aides so that the celebrity politicians can claim the limelight. Think of former Senator Paul Tsongas telling me how he had to let substance suffer, in order to regain public visibility with his voters. That is the campaign game stealing from the work of government.

The Negatives of the Modern Campaign

The modern campaign—with its hyped politics of personality—feeds public cynicism about government, for the modern campaign encourages the illusion of presidential omnipotence. It purveys the false and exaggerated expectation that the ascendance of a new leader will dissolve the knotty deadlocks that hobbled the incumbent. And it invites the pretense that the rest of government and the realities of divided
power can be ignored by candidates, voters, and press. No president can live up to such inflated expectations, and his inevitable shortcomings fuel popular disillusionment with government.

“The regularity of disillusionment follows as the night follows the day,” wrote Duke University’s presidential scholar James David Barber. “Instead of miracles come halting progress and/or crashed hopes, as the President discovers how short a distance his independent powers can take him.… As the country runs through that cycle of uplift and downfall again and again, the force of the story wanes and skepticism sets in.”
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Also, the campaign emphasis on each new president’s promises of a fresh start and dramatic changes produces national policies that zigzag, especially in foreign affairs. Nixon and Ford did not harass the Soviet leadership on human rights, but Carter did, and then Reagan dropped the issue. Presidents from Eisenhower through Carter stood by the doctrine of offensive deterrence, but Reagan shifted to strategic defense, and almost any successor will at least partially reverse that policy.

In primary campaigns, highly organized special interest politics pressure prospective presidents into positions that limit their policy flexibility later. Ideological activists (New Left and New Right) pull Democratic candidates to the left and Republican candidates to the right, making it hard for presidents later to strike the compromises that governing requires. Litmus-test promises to special interests, or telling voters what they want to hear (“No tax increase”), can box in presidents. Indeed, most campaigns sell the notion that compromise is unprincipled, even though experienced politicians know that compromise is the lifeblood of workable government. Sometimes policies are made to be consistent with campaign imagery more than to fashion sensible policy. For example, Reagan scrapped an approved plan for the MX missile, though he had no satisfactory substitute.

Finally, recent campaigns have cut against the work of government because bashing Washington and trashing politicians was so popular. Negative campaigning, of course, is nothing new. George Washington wrote Alexander Hamilton in 1792 to lay off his negative attacks on Thomas Jefferson; Hamilton was undaunted. He fired back a reply that Jefferson was trying to subvert the government and had founded his own newspaper to publish hateful stories about Hamilton.
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But in the 1986 battle for control of the Senate, the barrages of thirty-second political ads, mudslinging and guttersniping hit new lows. “The nadir of nattering negativism,” columnist Charles Krauthammer called it.
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In South Dakota, incumbent Republican James Abdnor
accused challenger Thomas Daschle of associating with Jane Fonda, who advocated meatless diets, an apparent offense against the state’s beef-and-pork industry. In California, challenger Ed Zschau ran a low-ball TV ad—”Crack, Cocaine, and Cranston”—attacking Democrat Alan Cranston as soft on drugs and terrorism. In Maryland, underdog Linda Chavez hurled the sexual slur that front-runner Barbara Mikulski was a “San Francisco Democrat” whose views were “clearly anti-male.”

The most egregious case occurred in Wisconsin. Challenger Ed Garvey accused incumbent Republican Senator Robert Kasten of drinking on the job and Kasten counterattacked with commercials charging that $750,000 in union money had “disappeared” while Garvey headed the National Football Players Association. Garvey filed a $2 million libel suit. Seven months later, Kasten had to backtrack and admit that the union’s public records showed all union funds fully accounted for. “I do not suggest that Mr. Garvey did anything illegal or that union funds were spent for other than valid union purposes,” Kasten said in a statement. “There was no intent to challenge his integrity.”
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Garvey dropped his suit, but he had already suffered the political damage. Kasten had been reelected.

Despite such mudslinging, campaign consultants defend negative ads as “candidate comparison” or as necessary catalysts to get out the vote. “We know from years of work in research psychology that people process negative information more deeply than positive information,” Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, told Paul Taylor of
The Washington Post
. “When we ask people about negative ads, they’ll say they don’t like them. But that’s not the point. The point is that they absorb the information.”
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“It’s much easier to be negative because of the construction of the political message,” added Charles Guggenheim, a media consultant to Democratic candidates. “It’s easier to hit and run and create doubt, fear and suspicion in 30 seconds.”
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Ed Haislmaier, public relations director for the staunchly conservative Free Congress Political Action Committee, asserts that the key to winning is to paint contrasts between candidates. “You’ve got to show the voters there is more than a dime’s worth of difference,” Haislmaier explained. “That can be accomplished very effectively by doing negative advertising. It brings voters to the polls if they get mad enough.”
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But some political scientists and voting experts contend that vicious name-calling is driving voters away from the polls. Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, argues that voter turnout reached a low point of 37.3 percent of the adult
population in 1986—a decline of 20 percent since 1962—because the style of campaign turned off voters. “People voted ‘No’ on the conduct of the campaign,” Gans declared. “What the ad people do by and large is create false and trivial issues in a form and method that is irresponsible.”
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Washington bashing is a special variation of this sport, practiced in scores of congressional races every year. It riles the blood and lets voters vent frustration with government by scapegoating the “ins” as a general class of sinners. Many incumbents use it to protect themselves by lashing others and by seeming to distance themselves from “low-life” professional politicians. Since incumbents keep getting reelected in overwhelming numbers, bashing Washington does not work too well. Its main impact is souring the sour public mood and feeding popular cynicism about politicians.

“If you are a member of Congress, the last thing you want is to be lumped in with all those creeps in Washington,” observed Norman Ornstein, a specialist on congressional politics at the American Enterprise Institute. “The easiest thing to do is say, ‘I’m Wyatt Earp. I’m back here trying to clean up that mess.’ You distance yourself from the Washington crowd, and in the process you reinforce the public’s cynicism about Washington and thus make it harder to mobilize public support for necessary programs later on.”
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In sum, there is a cost to governance from campaigning that leaves scars and wounds without settling fundamental issues. Once the votes are counted, almost every president, senator, and member of Congress has to work across the aisle with the other party or with philosophical foes on some issue. Moreover, campaign rhetoric derogates the very skills of compromise and give-and-take that are essential to the successful functioning of government. Yet the public obviously warms to the partisan sport of black-and-white, good-versus-evil posturing, even if it defies common sense. That deliberate though artificial polarization—like personality politics, glitzy shallowness, and the lack of durable political coalition-building—is an element of the modern campaign. All these facets put the electoral process out of synch with governing.

It is an old American sport to heap opprobrium on politicians. H. L. Mencken loved to beard them as “bloviating bumblers”; such scoffing derision is still in fashion. In frustration, we curse one party or the other for society’s ills, as if our partisan champions had a miraculous monopoly on truth. Some Americans focus their frustration on devils in the White House, condemning the vacillating ineptitude of one president or the deceitful intransigence of the next. Others mock the entire breed in Congress for self-serving evasions and chaotic procrastinations. And there is blame enough to go around—though many individual politicians are far more serious about trying to deal conscientiously with issues than the public credits them.

What my stories from the Carter and Reagan years illustrate is that more than the personal foibles of particular politicians is to blame for failures in governing.

The past dozen years provide a particularily fruitful resource for political autopsy, because this period amply illustrates what works, and what does not work, in our system. Also, most of us can remember
enough about important incidents in this period for the anatomy of achievement and the pathology of failure to emerge, carrying lessons for the future. Either we must do something to alter these patterns, or learn to accept them more gracefully, and with fewer illusions.