Authors: Hedrick Smith
Finally, Aspin is unusual in this era of video politics because he prefers written press releases over televised press conferences for two reasons: First, his issues are complicated, and only print reporters have space to explain them fully; if they get good play in print, TV will follow. Second, with a written release accompanied by a fairly detailed study, Aspin sees greater chance that the story will emerge the way he originally cast it. Press conferences can take unpredictable bounces.
“I don’t think press conferences work worth a damn,” Aspin told the
Washington Journalism Review
. “Somebody will ask a cockamamie question, and that will be the story. A well-lobbied study and press release are worth twenty press conferences.”
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Among House Republicans, the new-breed guru with a knack for publicity, who has gotten attention far beyond his legislative power and station, is Newt Gingrich, a bullish, abrasive former history professor from West Georgia College with an original turn of mind and a zest for intellectual combat. Gingrich has his own special flair for video politics and his own slant on playing the game: be splashy; be original; be outrageous; be strident, even be inflammatory. He is a classic show horse, more interested in promoting confrontations and ideas than in passing legislation.
Gingrich is a boyish forty-five-year-old with boundless energy, a mop of bushy gray hair on a lion-sized head, and a machine-gun tongue. He is given to grandiose pronouncements: “We need to rethink government”; “We are creating a revolution”; “I have an enormous personal ambition: I want to shift the entire planet and I’m doing it.” His vision, limned in a book,
Window of Opportunity
, is a curious mix of Adam Smith and high tech, of slashing government on earth but promoting a government-financed space program with manned moon factories and voyaging to the “Hiltons and Marriotts of the solar system.”
Politically, Gingrich has not only savaged Jimmy Carter, Speaker O’Neill, and the “liberal welfare state,” he has blasted Republicans, too. A purist Reaganite, Gingrich in 1978 scored Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford for “a terrible job, a pathetic job” and declared that in his lifetime the Republican party had “not had a competent leader,” including Barry Goldwater. Later, Gingrich roasted Robert Dole, Senate Finance Committee chairman, as “the tax collector of the welfare state.” (Dole fired back that Gingrich was “making a lot of noise, but I haven’t seen any impact.”) Many times, he has derided the House Republican leadership for being “eunuchs” with “a defeatist, minority mentality.”
Gingrich arrived in the House in 1978 in a class of thirty-six Republican
freshmen, the vanguard of a New Right swing toward Reaganite conservativism; their ranks were swelled by more young Republicans in the Reagan sweep of 1980. These were Reagan’s shock troops in his triumphant 1981 year.
The political champion of these upstart Republicans is Jack Kemp, the handsome, ebullient apostle of tax cutting and the creed of economic growth and opportunity. Around the country, Kemp has led the new-breed attack on the traditional budget-balancing, austerity politics of old-breed Republicans. But in the House, Kemp’s approach has been fairly tame; Gingrich took the lead in brawling with Speaker Tip O’Neill and seizing the limelight.
Gingrich stole a leaf from Aspin’s book—pick a slack time to grab attention. He made his mark by capitalizing ingeniously on some dead hours in the House schedule. At about seven
P.M
., after the regular order of business ends, the House goes into “special orders,” where individual members can give long speeches because the rest have gone home. Gingrich gathered a band of like-minded Republican right-wingers such as Vin Weber of Minnesota and Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, in the Conservative Opportunity Society. With the C-Span cable network still broadcasting House proceedings, they would preach their brand of Reaganism in these quiet evening hours. Cameras were focused on the lectern, leaving viewers unaware that the House chamber was empty. Gingrich claimed a C-Span audience of 250,000 plus daily.
Gingrich’s tactic was to provoke a Democratic response and to get a fight going. In May 1984, Gingrich drew blood, causing a huge uproar and vaulting into public view. On May 8, Gingrich and Walker used special-order time to read a report by the conservative Republican Study Committee slamming the foreign-policy views of about fifty House Democrats, by name, accusing these Democrats of defeatism from the Vietnam War to Central America. Some were outraged and accused Gingrich and Company of innuendos reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy. Without warning, two days later, Speaker O’Neill ordered the House cameras to pan the chamber, showing the home audience that the Democrats were not present in the chamber to defend themselves against Gingrich’s charges. O’Neill denounced the Republican speechmaking as “a sham … for home consumption.”
On a point of personal privilege, Gingrich demanded the right of reply and got the showdown for which he had been angling. He was given an hour of time on the House floor on May 15. During that hour, Speaker O’Neill asked Gingrich to let him speak and Gingrich agreed.
But O’Neill got no more than two sentences out before Gingrich reclaimed his control of the floor, a slight to the speaker. In a few quick exchanges, O’Neill’s rage rose and suddenly he burst out: “My personal opinion is this:”—and the massive, accusing arm went up, finger out-stretched—“you deliberately stood in that well before an empty House and challenged these people, and you challenged their Americanism, and it’s the lowest thing I’ve ever seen in my thirty-two years in Congress.”
In a shot, Trent Lott, the Republican whip, was on his feet demanding that the clerk “take down” the words of the speaker. That is a procedure requiring that the words be repeated and the parliamentarian decide whether Speaker O’Neill’s attack on Gingrich had violated House rules, which forbid personal attacks and insults. The parliamentarian ruled that O’Neill was out of order. Joe Moakley, a Massachusetts Democrat and a close ally of O’Neill, was in the chair; he was forced by the rules to issue a reproach against the speaker. It made headline and network news.
By his cool, calculating style of video politics, Gingrich had gotten the better of the speaker and also won a national audience. Brash video politics had put Gingrich on the political map.
It would be wrong to leave the impression that new-breed politicians are all talk and little legislative action. That might fit Gingrich, or Paula Hawkins and other one-term Republican senators who lost in 1986, and a goodly number of House members. But the best of the new breed have become effective legislators as well as communicators—none more influential and effective than Dick Gephardt of Missouri, a serious presidential contender in 1988.
By many estimates, Gephardt has a rare blend of the skills of both inside and outside politics, better than John F. Kennedy at a similar stage in his career. More than any other new-breed Democrat in the House, Gephardt has come to personify the generational divide—on substance as well as on tactics. He can not only play the outside game of video politics but also work the inside game of coalition politics that is vital to making Congress function. On television, he has been an articulate Democratic spokesman on national issues; in Congress, he has often been at the heart of prolonged negotiations over tough, intricate, technical legislation.
If Congress is like high school, then Dick Gephardt is a classic student-council president: all-American good looks, intelligent, thoughtful, committed to public service. Under his sandy, close-cropped
hair is a straight, sincere, direct gaze of the eyes, a firm jaw, and an open, receptive face.
Gephardt has volumes of energy and patience. He is a born organizer, a born leader, who manages to be everywhere at once and yet seems to do it all with ease. He is so purposeful, so results oriented that it is hard to imagine him just whiling away the time. Yet one of his favorite pastimes is listening to St. Louis Cardinals baseball games on the radio. He is such a fanatic that he will often go out in the evening and sit in his darkened car in the driveway listening to a play-by-play account because the car radio gets better reception than the radios in the house. Once or twice, he has even gone in the announcer’s box to try a bit of play-by-play announcing himself.
Like other new breeders—he is forty-seven and was first elected in 1978—Gephardt has been eager to see his generation take over leadership. He has pressed the generational divide against older leaders. In late 1984, for example, Gephardt and Tony Coelho of California organized meetings of younger House Democrats, which became gripe sessions against the House Democratic leadership. That angered Speaker O’Neill. Gephardt even let out word that he might challenge Jim Wright for the speakership after O’Neill retired; wisely, Gephardt decided against a confrontation. He made an easy peace with O’Neill, whose wrath fell on Coehlo, but Gephardt later clashed with Wright on tax and protectionist issues. Organizationally, Gephardt went after and got the number four leadership position, Democratic caucus chairman. That was typical of Gephardt, for he is an agent of gradual change rather than sharp revolt. He is a compromiser, a coalition builder who waits for the best openings.
A favorite complaint of the old breed is that the new breed lack finesse at one-to-one politicking, at melding clashing factions in order to pass legislation, at sensing where the winds are blowing, at counting votes accurately ahead of time. They make an exception of Gephardt. “He’s the best vote counter and vote getter of that group” was the admiring appraisal of Kirk O’Donnell, a Tip O’Neill lieutenant. “He’s someone who has an excellent sense of the House. I think he’s a good vote counter because he’s a good listener, and people respect his political instincts, his political judgment. He is not an ideologue who is going to allow an issue to get in the way of his personal relations with other members. But Gephardt is a lot tougher than people think.”
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Gephardt is emphatic that the generational divide among Democrats is a matter of substance as well as technique. The two generations, he told me as we walked from his office to the Capitol one morning,
are defined by economic experience: the older Democratic leaders shaped by the searing shock of the Depression and mass unemployment, the new breed forged by the high inflation and the stagnant growth of the 1970s.
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That has left Gephardt and his peers wary of big deficits and renewed inflation, quick to combine with conservative southerners on economic issues and trimming programs. While Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs were being passed, Gephardt reminded me he was an alderman in St. Louis, and he remembers the federal regulations being too intrusive and restrictive. That left him not opposed to federal programs, but inclined to go sparingly and give more leeway to local governments.
Typical of the new breed, Gephardt is a centrist, both by temperament and by geography. Coming from a border state like Missouri makes him a natural bridge between North and South. On the budget, he has pressed Snowbelt liberals to accept more cuts than they wanted, but he has also gotten Sunbelt conservatives to help protect safety net programs.
In 1981, when the Democrats were floundering before Reagan’s onslaught, Gephardt combined with Timothy Wirth and others to develop a Democratic economic policy. They focused on ways to make American industry more competitive by funding research and education and promoting high-tech industries. More fruitfully, Gephardt joined Senator Bill Bradley as cosponsor of the plan to cut tax rates and close loopholes that was adopted by Reagan and passed by Congress in 1986.
In the spring of 1987, Gephardt made his trademark tough protectionist legislation—an amendment requiring tariff reprisals against countries, such as Japan, if they did not reduce excessive trade surpluses with the United States. He showed his mastery of the inside power game by rallying 201 House Democrats, despite the combined opposition of Speaker Jim Wright, Majority Leader Tom Foley, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Danny Rostenkowski, plus the Reagan White House and Republican leaders. Gephardt’s amendment won 218–214, a testament to his pull among peers.
“If the amendment was not offered by Dick Gephardt, we would have beaten it,” Rostenkowski told my
New York Times
colleague Jonathan Fuerbringer. “Dick Gephardt is a popular young man.”
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Gephardt had mastered the technical details of his legislation, and he spoke with passion. His amendment was doomed in the Senate. But more costly to Gephardt, he was knocked, mainly by the Reagan White House and in the press, for what was seen as a blatant pitch for support
from organized labor with a harsh protectionist formula that risked starting a disastrous trade war.
Generally, Gephardt’s stand on issues and his tactics mark him as new breed—less ideological and diehard than the old breed. For example, in 1985, Gephardt, fearing some southern Democrats were getting ready to bolt the party after Reagan’s landslide reelection, took the lead in forming the new Democratic Leadership Council, a group of rising politicians, mostly from the South and West, to help keep them in the party. With a core group of Gephardt, former Governor Charles Robb of Virginia, Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, and former Governor Bruce Babbit of Arizona, this largely new-breed group deliberately set out to show independence from the old, established, northern-dominated party leadership. Its hallmark was new-breed-style television campaigning and organizing and new-breed issues.
The formation of this group and Gephardt’s leadership role, moreover, underscored his turning increasingly from the work of governing and the inside game of Congress to the outside game of the constant campaign, this time at a higher level—for the presidency. By 1985, three years ahead of the 1988 election, the campaign pulled Gephardt away from his legislative duties in Washington sixty percent of the time, more in later years. He was gone so much in 1987 that his press secretary, Don Foley, remarked in mid-May, “Last week, Dick was in Washington three and a half days, and that was a major exception,” because his trade amendment was up for a vote. Otherwise, he would have been on the road even more.
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