Authors: Hedrick Smith
What is more, Republicans had been in the minority in both houses for so long that they had fallen into a “minority mentality.” They were not trained or conditioned to govern. Instead, they had developed the habits of a permanent opposition. They were practiced in the arts of
negative politics: how to stall, how to filibuster, how to resist, how to block. Newt Gingrich, a bright light among younger Reaganites, gloomily declared, “The House Republican party, as a culture, has a defeatist, minority mentality that either did nothing, or opposed for so long, that it has no internal habits of inventing a coherent strategy or following it through for any length of time.”
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When Orrin Hatch, a staunch Utah conservative, took over from Ted Kennedy, the Massachussetts liberal, as chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Committee, his staff had to train him to work legislation through his committee. “His mind-set of what you do in the Labor Committee is oppose Ted Kennedy,” a senior Republican aide said. “Suddenly he had a big chunk of the Reagan program thrust on him, and he didn’t know what to do.” Other Republicans were accustomed to cutting personal deals with Democratic chairmen, but not to passing bills. Newcomers such as Alfonse D’Amato of New York, Robert Kasten of Wisconsin, or Paula Hawkins of Florida were suddenly thrust into being subcommittee chairs without a single day’s experience in the Senate.
“The first thought on my personal agenda was whether or not we can turn these folks into a real majority, a functioning majority, instead of a numerical majority,” Howard Baker told me later. “No single person in the Republican branch had ever been a committee chairman or a subcommittee chairman before. Brand new. We were going to have to reinvent the role of the majority party in the Senate. We were going to have to figure out if we have a permanent minority mind-set or whether we can pull together.… I perceived the greatest responsibility I had [was] to make the place work, because it could quickly have devolved into chaos if we had two minority parties.”
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That is rule number two in forming a functioning coalition:
Inculcate the mindset of governing
. It is a subtle, intangible notion—one that comes naturally to parties long in power, but not to parties long out of power. Without that governing mind-set, little can be accomplished in our system; parties clash, factions stalemate each other, individual members of Congress push their agendas, selfish interests overwhelm the common interest, and the machinery of government is immobilized.
Fortunately, politics is like sports: There are electric moments which transform group psychology, dramatically altering the dynamics of the game. When the lead suddenly changes hands, emotions swing from one team to another. Elan soars; partisan juices flow; the other side is thrown off balance. A team or a party, once faltering, gains inspiration;
it is suddenly energized. Riding a collective high, individual players pick up tempo and confidence. Shrewd leaders keep the roll going. Winning generates its own momentum.
Early 1981 was one of those heady, pivotal moments for Republicans in Congress. Politically starved for a generation, they soared on an incredible crest of enthusiasm, emboldened as much by their own newfound muscle as by having a Republican president. After all, by 1984, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan had won five presidential elections since 1952 (to just three for the Democrats). Now, the sudden net gain of twelve seats in the Senate, plus thirty-three in the House, created a surge of partisan optimism.
Some Republicans, sniffing a massive sea change in American politics, felt on the brink of a national political realignment. They believed American political history was crossing one of those major fault lines that come every generation or two. They sensed the end of the national hegemony of the Democratic party, begun half a century before, and they hungered for a new era—with Republicans as a majority party into the next century. Eisenhower and Nixon had won the White House, but Congress had eluded the GOP. Now full realignment finally seemed at hand. Partisan esprit was rampant among the Reaganite Young Turk Republicans elected in 1978 and 1980.
“The freshman and sophomore classes make up almost half of our 192 members,” Max Friedersdorf, Reagan’s chief congressional liaison, observed in 1981. “They are extremely aggressive to make their mark. They want to win and they are fully aware that they have power in unity. They have an influence on the more senior Republicans who have developed a minority complex over the years. They sense that they’re getting close to having a majority in the House. This makes for an esprit that I’ve never seen before.”
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King of the Hill
It takes more than enthusiasm to consolidate power. In the king of the hill game, rule number three is:
Strike quickly for a win, during the early rush of power
. That helps establish momentum and an aura of success. Lyndon Johnson had a colorful maxim for such moments. “Johnson operated under the philosophy with Congress—if you’re not doing it to them, they’re doing it to you. And frequently, he used a more vivid word than
doing
,” recalled Douglass Cater, one of Johnson’s White House advisers.
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Winning is power, was the gut summation given me by Jim Baker.
“I’ve always felt that it is extremely important in terms of a president’s power—power as opposed to popularity—that presidents succeed on the Hill with what they undertake up there,” Baker asserted. “And I really believe that one reason that Ronald Reagan has been so successful is that he succeeded in the high-profile issues that he jumped on in the first term. The way presidents govern is to translate their philosophy into policy by working with Congress. That’s why Carter failed in my view. Because he never learned that lesson.”
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The image of success is crucial, as Dick Darman pointed out in a White House memo. On February 21, 1981, Darman told me that he had urged crafting a “plan for the preservation of the appearance of the president’s continuing strength and effectiveness—the avoidance of association with losses,’ the association with a planned string of ‘successes.’ ”
Political gamesmanship required quickly tapping Republican optimism to translate electoral victory into legislative power and a governing majority. Otherwise, momentum could slip away.
But as Carter learned, there are no automatic legislative victories for a new president. Carter lost his first battles, on water projects, and Reagan was nearly upset by his own troops in the very first test—long before his celebrated victories.
In the Senate, Howard Baker faced a Republican revolt that threatened to shatter his narrow 53–47 majority before it would ever taste victory. That first test was critical, because Reagan had to make the Senate his coalition cornerstone. If he could not hold the Republican Senate majority in line, it would dash his hopes for a coalition with conservative House Democrats; if Reagan lost in the Senate, why should these House Democrats defy their own party leaders in the House to join forces with Reagan?
What forced Reagan’s hand was the need to raise the legal ceiling on the national debt to $985 billion by February 6—so the government could borrow money to finance deficits and keep running. Democrats had long voted routinely to raise the debt ceiling because they believed in government programs, but conservative Republicans hated these votes. They opposed raising the debt ceiling because they opposed the government programs, and on principle they rejected deficit spending. Reagan too had felt that way, but now it was his responsibility to run the government. That meant getting conservative Republicans to bend their ideology to help him govern. In the House, Democrats and Republicans combined to pass the debt-ceiling bill.
But in the Senate, the Democrats played rougher. Initially, many
voted against the bill to force the distasteful chore on the Republican majority. Very quickly, the debt-ceiling vote became a test of Reagan’s and Howard Baker’s ability to secure their partisan base. There was strong resistance.
Almost all thirteen Republican freshmen were opposed. Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Mack Mattingly of Georgia, Slade Gorton of Washington, Steve Symms of Idaho, and Paula Hawkins of Florida protested to Howard Baker. These Reaganites believed ardently in budget balancing. “We’ve told our constituents we’re never going to vote to increase the debt limit,” they told Baker. “We’re dead set against it. It is an article of faith with us.” Their rebellion left Baker shy of votes to pass the measure.
Another obstacle was posed by William Armstrong of Colorado, one of the brightest, most vigorous Senate conservatives on economic issues. In 1981, he vowed to vote against the debt bill unless it carried an amendment giving the president power to cut spending unilaterally. Armstrong saw the deadline pressure of the debt bill as a chance to restore to Reagan and future presidents power taken away by Congress in 1974. This was the power of “recision”—the power of a president to notify Congress he will not spend certain funds. As the law stood in 1981, a president’s recision required congressional approval—winning majorities in both houses. But under Armstrong’s amendment, the president could act and his cuts would stick—unless Congress overrode him within forty-five days. That put the burden of veto action on Congress.
The day before the debt vote, Armstrong was summoned to Baker’s office to meet with Baker and Vice President Bush. Baker, fearing filibusters from Democrats, wanted a clean debt bill with no amendments, to help get Reagan a quick victory.
“This is no time to rock the boat,” Baker declared. “We’ve got a new president. We ought not to buck him.”
“But this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” objected Armstrong. “To dissipate it on making nickel-and-dime changes in the budget instead of going for institutional reforms would be a terrible mistake.” He appealed to Bush: “The honeymoon lasts only so long. If the president asks for it, think of the leverage he has. Don’t you think this is a golden opportunity?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Bush replied. “The president wants a clean debt-ceiling bill. So please back off.”
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Armstrong relented, feeling it was ridiculous for a single senator to try to force on Reagan a power he did not want.
But that still left the rebellious freshmen. Baker had played high cards—senior conservatives such as Barry Goldwater of Arizona and John Tower of Texas—to try to persuade them. The president had them to the White House in ones and twos. That softened them up, but it did not change their minds.
Howard Baker’s ace in the hole was Strom Thurmond, the senior Senate Republican. Thurmond epitomized tight-fisted austerity and fierce independence. He had stood against the federal establishment as the segregationist governor of South Carolina and the Dixiecrat candidate for president in 1948. He had staged a one-man filibuster for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In twenty-seven years as a senator, first as a Democrat and then as a Republican, Thurmond had
never
voted to raise the debt ceiling.
Baker ran into Thurmond on the Senate floor, found him willing to help, and quickly rounded up the Republican freshmen.
“I sat them down around the conference table, brought in Strom, and Strom started slow and low in that measured South Carolina cadence,” Baker recalled. “He started working up, and at the end of three or four minutes—it wasn’t very long—he said: ‘Now some of you in this room say that you have promised never to vote for a debt-limit increase, and I understand that. And you ought to understand that I’ve never in my whole career voted to increase the debt limit before. But I’ve never had Ronald Reagan as president before either. And I’m going to vote for the debt-limit increase. And so are you.’ And there was a deathly silence. Strom got up and left. And there was some grumbling and grousing and leaning back in the chairs, and they got up and wandered out.”
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The Democrats, stung by Reagan’s charges that they were big spenders, made the vote painful for the Republicans. One by one, they voted against the bill to force Republicans to swallow their ideology and their campaign promises, to show solidarity with the president. One by one, the Republicans voted aye. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the veteran Democrat from Washington state was so tickled to see Republicans squirm that he danced a jig on the floor. Ultimately, all but three Republicans—Armstrong, Mattingly, and John East of North Carolina—supported Reagan. Baker let out a “whew” when he had fifty votes; then a score of Democrats switched sides to pass the measure, 73–18.
The public never grasped how narrowly Baker’s control of the Senate had ridden in the balance. After the vote, Baker told Thurmond, “I never owed a greater debt of political gratitude to anybody than I do to you.”
Because defeat that early, due to Republican defections, would have derailed the Reagan program. Had Republican ranks shattered just seventeen days after Reagan’s inauguration, the initial momentum of Reagan’s presidency would have been lost. Baker felt it vital to demonstrate command and to get Republicans to make sacrifices for the sake of unity behind Reagan. “Strom, more than just about anybody else, maybe except me, understood how important it was that we act like a majority,” Baker said.
That debt-ceiling victory, seemingly minor, did three things: It forged Republican unity, it inculcated a governing mentality, and it established a winning momentum.
The President—Being Loved and Feared
Success in the coalition game depends enormously on presidential influence with the individual members of Congress; a president can pull enough reluctant votes his way if he has the right political touch. It is an old maxim of politics that an effective leader, mayor, governor, and above all, president, must be both loved and feared. That is how a president marshals support from his natural followers and deters attack from his natural enemies. Issues matter, of course, but so does human chemistry. A president has to make clear there are benefits for supporting him and consequences for opposing him.