Power Game (23 page)

Consider, too, the very rhythm of play. In baseball, a rally can erupt in any inning, a low-scoring tie game can stretch into extra innings with no time limit, or a game can simply peter out in the ninth. But in football, especially pro football, the length of the game is set and the script is usually predictable. As millions of television viewers can testify, you can skip a lot of the early action so long as you’re glued to your set just before halftime and late in the fourth quarter. Then, the offense goes into its two-minute drill, with frantic time-outs, commercials, worried consultations between coach and quarterback, and the inevitable injuries, all building the suspense. In those final seconds, everything goes razzle-dazzle, and those moments determine whether the fans go home in delirium or dragging in despair.

That mirrors the pace of the Congress, slogging through inconclusive months of tedium on the budget, some dull midfield maneuvering on the MX missile, diverted by the distraction of a hostage crisis. With the onset of the summer recess, the tempo quickens, commencing the political razzle-dazzle. Both parties, both houses go into their two-minute drills. New budget and tax formulas emerge. Compromise is in the air. Then a slow period in August and early September, building up to the political equivalent of a frantic fourth quarter. In the melodramatic windup, the president threatens to shut down the government. From the sidelines comes the magic play. Somehow a deal is struck in the final seconds. Congress and the White House play right on the brink. Like football players, they gamble on winning in the final crunch and time their best plays for the deadline.

Government, of course, is a serious game about policy, but as the football metaphor suggests, a lot of it is for show, and the action is fairly well established, year after year. The repetitive gambits and maneuvers make it easier for us spectators to study the players and the playing fields, in order to understand the action better.

Well before the five-hour hearing began one September morning in 1985, there were the telltale signs of a major media event. Unusually large crowds of young people lined the columned hallways of the old Russell Senate Office Building to wait for seats. Several television crews set up video monitors and sound equipment in the hallways. The hearing room quickly filled to overflowing.

Inside, it was almost impossible to move. The press tables were jammed. Capitol guards, in starched white shirts, manned the doors. The audience, which had come for a show, was in a boisterous mood at the prospect of the Senate Commerce Committee scrutinizing the seamy, sinful side of rock music. Senator Jack Danforth, the committee chairman, warned against applause and demonstrations. The hearing, he said, was not to consider legislation but merely “to provide a forum for airing the issue.”

The opening shot was the protest of Susan Baker, the wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker, and Tipper Gore, wife of Senator Albert Gore, Jr., of Tennessee, among others, against “porn rock,” an escalating trend of violent, brutal erotica in rock music (
heavy metal
, in the
argot of its fans). Sexually explicit songs, Mrs. Baker told the committee, were “glorifying rape, sadomasochism, incest, the occult, and suicide” with palpable and pernicious effects on the young. Mrs. Gore, speaking for the Parents Music Resource Center, carefully stopped short of advocating censorship. But she urged record companies voluntarily to label record albums, the way cigarette packages are labeled, with warnings of “violent and sexually explicit lyrics.”
¹

Later, there was a rustle at the appearance of Dee Snider, a heavy-metal singer-composer who was a particular target of the mothers’ criticism. Snider wriggled through the packed crowd in a faded-jeans outfit, a thick shower of stringy long blond curls tumbling well over his shoulders. At the witness table, he jauntily peeled off his jeans jacket to expose a tattoo on his left shoulder and a sleeveless black T-shirt promoting Twisted Sister, his rock group. Bare-armed, he faced the somber-suited senators.

“I don’t know if it’s morning or afternoon,” he said, peering through dark glasses at the dais. “I’ll say both: Good morning and good afternoon.” He flashed a toothy grin at the nearest television camera.

Snider defensively declared himself a husband, a father, and a Christian. Then, he proceeded to accuse Mrs. Gore of “character assassination,” of distorting his lyrics, and of spreading an “outright lie” by claiming that a T-shirt marketed by his group showed “a woman in handcuffs sort of spread-eagled.” His song “Under the Blade,” he contended, was not a parable of rape in bondage but a tale of fear on the operating table, an interpretation that met skepticism from Senator Gore.

Frank Zappa, a rock voice from an earlier, tamer rock era, arrived in jacket and tie, and with lawyer at his side warned against censorship. What the mothers wanted, he cautioned, would be like “treating dandruff by decapitation.”

On the network news that night, the star was none of the above. It was Senator Paula Hawkins of Florida, a petite, politically canny and assertive grandmother, who made drug abuse, child abuse, missing children, and pornography her cornerstone issues in the Senate. Hawkins was not a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, but she has a nose for media events and a knack for attracting publicity that enabled her to upstage the committee. Through senatorial courtesy, Senator Hawkins arranged to be invited and appeared, eye-catching and camera-catching, in a fire-engine-red suit.

Several other senators made predictable statements of moral outrage, but Hawkins had a shrewder gambit. She had her statement, too, but
knowing that words were no match for pictures, she came armed with some near-irresistible visuals crafted by the graphic-arts staff of the Senate Republican Conference. On her own television set, plopped on the dais, she played a couple of sizzling porn-rock videocassettes—one of them “Hot for Teacher” by Eddie van Halen—to demonstrate for one and all that the new raunchiness of rock made Elvis Presley seem as innocent as a choirboy. And she waved aloft the blowup of a lurid, blood-dripping male figure and crude four-letter slogans on the album cover of a heavy-metal group called W.A.S.P.

Hawkins’s performance caught the play on two national networks. But she and her handlers were taking no chances; to be sure of solid coverage in her home state of Florida, where she was engaged in a tough battle for reelection, Senator Hawkins provided “video feeds”—electronic press releases, videotapes of her in action. They were fed to more than thirty Florida television stations on a satellite hookup arranged through the Senate Republican Conference.

Indeed, according to Susan Baker, Paula Hawkins had been the catalyst behind the hearing in the first place. “She contacted me before any talk of a hearing surfaced,” Mrs. Baker recalled. “The idea came from her.” Senator Hawkins’s political instincts were sound. It was a hot topic with wide audience appeal, because one side of the argument was outraged and the other side was titillated.
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The six and a half minutes of network news time given that evening to the Senate’s porn-rock hearing was more coverage than the massive congressional efforts on the budget deficit crisis received in a full month. C-Span, the cable network that covers congressional proceedings, got more requests for copies of the porn-rock hearing than anything else it has covered since it began operating in 1979.

Making political hay out of a televised hearing on a newsy topic is hardly a revolutionary idea. Since Senator Estes Kefauver’s investigations of organized crime in 1951 and the Watergate investigations of Richard Nixon more than two decades later, many leading politicians have used televised hearings to catapult themselves to national prominence. Kefauver made himself a presidential contender partly by his crime probe; the Watergate hearings made Howard Baker, a Tennesseean like Kefauver, a national political figure. Even tapping celebrity entertainers to excite more popular interest is not an original angle—it was one of the many techniques used by Senator Joseph McCarthy during his postwar Communist hunts.

The new wrinkle is that video politics has become a prime vehicle for virtually every incumbent, even a relatively unnoticed freshman
Republican such as Paula Hawkins. What used to be rare is now routine. What used to be the sporadic, often sensational province of a few political heavyweights dealing with major national concerns has now become the regular practice of the rank-and-file backbenchers to publicize their activities and specialized agendas.

Everyone is advertising, trying to establish a successful brand name with the voters. The new breed of television-oriented congressmen and senators use satellite feeds to send their own versions of hearings to home-state television stations. The porn-rock hearing was a juicy enough topic to hit the national networks. But for wider play, three Republicans (Hawkins, Danforth of Missouri and Paul Trible of Virginia) and one Democrat (Fritz Hollings of South Carolina) beamed home their own video feeds in time for the local nightly news. Indeed, the whole point of regular, daily satellite feeds is to bypass the networks and go directly to local stations, often hungry for a Washington angle.

The Five Pillars of Incumbency

Video feeds epitomize the technology of the constant campaign. Above all, what was driving Paula Hawkins at the porn-rock hearing was the politics of survival. Obviously, politicians come to Washington with more than one motive. Most have some particular particular programs or policy lines they want to push; others have policy peeves, injustices they want to correct. Some have ambition to become substantial policymakers and master legislators. Many more are driven by the pursuit of prestige and notoriety, by the chance to be seen on television back home or the hopes of winning celebrity status among a wider audience. But one universal and paramount motive is reelection. All but a few want to continue in office. Many make it a career, running almost constantly to keep themselves in office while they are there.

The campaign has become the perpetual-motion machine. More than ever in our history, elections are an unbroken succession, each following the last without interruption. The techniques, mentality, and mercenary consultants of the campaign follow the winners right into office.

The current power game has given incumbents, especially those in the House of Representatives, enormous advantages. Once they are in Congress, they have a high-technology arsenal that insures that all but a tiny handful will survive any challenge. The five pillars of incumbency are: 1. video feeds; 2. high-tech computerized mail; 3. elaborately staffed casework, involving myriad little favors for constituents; 4. personal
presence back home, often ingeniously publicized; and 5. political money.

Some politicians, especially the new breed in the House, have become extremely skilled at modern survival techniques. The record shows that. Since the mid-1960s, ninety-one percent of the House incumbents who sought reelection were successful. That trend reached a peak of 97.7 percent in 1986. Turnover comes mainly when people retire or in rare years of shock upsets. The Senate has been less secure, with a seventy-eight-percent reelection rate in the 1980s. Overall, the congressional record of survival is far higher than in the 1940s and 1950s, let alone earlier in our history.

The built-in resources of congressional office are so great that they not only give incumbents a nearly unbeatable advantage, but they scare off potential challengers. The costs of campaigning have become so great that there is a declining number of serious challengers who can mount the necessary effort. The result is that the techniques of survival politics, mostly financed at
taxpayer expense
, allow many members in the House to insulate themselves from the swings of the political pendulum in presidential elections.

To a striking degree, recent congressional campaigns have been decoupled from presidential campaigns. Ronald Reagan, even with fifty-nine percent of the popular vote in his 1984 landslide, could not pull many new Republicans into office on his coattails. In the House, 192 Democrats held their seats in districts that went for Reagan. Something similar happened in the Nixon landslide of 1972, prompting one well-known academic specialist on Congress, David Mayhew of Yale University, to comment that the smart House member should ignore national trends and work his district like an old-fashioned ward boss, doing favors, making his presence felt, cutting a visible figure.
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That political catechism has taken on new force in the past decade—and not accidentally. Ohio Congressman Wayne Hays deliberately liberalized the administrative rules of the House from 1971 to 1975 to favor incumbents. Hays served as both head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)—concerned with reelection of House Democrats—and chairman of the House Administration Committee—which writes the housekeeping rules. Hays wanted to make it easier for incumbents to keep getting elected, according to Marty Franks, the DCCC’s executive director; Hays wanted to protect the large Democratic class of ’74, many of whom had won normally Republican seats and were especially vulnerable in 1976.
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So Hays granted House members larger allowances, enabling them to expand
their staffs and do more casework, and he liberalized accounting rules so that House members could spend more money on travel home and mail to constituents. These changes were a boon to the constant campaign and the Democratic House majority.