Authors: Hedrick Smith
Reagan was doubly armed for this strategy by his election victory and by surging public sympathy after the attempt on his life. Communications Director David Gergen shrewdly proposed that Reagan capitalize on the outpouring of public goodwill to make what amounted to a second Inaugural Address in 1981, to a joint session of Congress on April 28. It was a very powerful gambit. I remember Reagan that evening, striding confidently into the House, the picture of manly vigor and purpose, bathed in applause, acknowledging it with a frisky toss of his head. Democrats as well as Republicans were cheered by his recovery, warmed by his ruddy good humor. The country was so pro-Reagan then that it was easy for Reagan’s lieutenants to frame virtually every vote for another hundred days on Reagan personally: Are you with Reagan or against him?
Republican control of the Senate in 1981 gave Reagan an excellent arena to work that strategy and an important advantage over Nixon, Ford, and Eisenhower, who had faced Democratic control of Congress—except in Eisenhower’s first two years.
In the Senate, it fell to Majority Leader Howard Baker to translate the “up-or-down strategy”—the strategy of a yes or no vote for Reagan—into tactics.
As a legislative leader, Howard Baker is a chess player, planning moves far ahead, watching many pieces on the board. His method ws to draw all fifteen Republican committee chairmen into what became known as the “committee of dukes and earls,” to let them feel a part of his team. But he would personally work out Senate strategy, sharing it only with close aides and surfacing it gradually, even to President Reagan. “Baker is extremely logical, extremely firm-minded,” said one Senate staffer. “It is a mark of Baker’s boldness—which most people do not give him credit for—that he handled Reagan’s budget the way he did in 1981.”
By 1981, Howard Baker had become impatient with the Senate, frustrated that it was no longer a great forum for debate and action but crippled by delaying tactics and filibusters. Not only were there filibusters on the issues, he blurted out to me, but filibusters on the leader’s motion to start debate, filibusters on various amendments, and filibusters after a vote of cloture that theoretically cut off filibusters. Moreover, on most legislation, amendments were unlimited and often totally unrelated to the bill at hand. That meant bills could be strangled by endless amendments. Senators with one pet topic, especially a deadlocking issue such as abortion, could stalemate the Senate repeatedly.
In Baker’s southern colloquialism, anybody could “sprague the wheel”—put a stick in the spokes. Getting the Senate to act, he groused, was like “pushing a wet noodle.”
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That frustration welled up in Baker as he crafted a legislative strategy. Because Baker is so likable, so patient in stroking the egos of other politicians, many misjudged his grit in ramming through Reagan’s economic program. The legislative instrument he adopted was a blunt weapon to impose discipline—“high-handed and draconian,” he admitted.
Baker built his coalition around making all key votes a test of loyalty to the president, up or down. That was essential for pushing Reagan’s ambitious budget cutting through Congress, for a budget is not just abstract figures—it is flesh-and-blood programs. A budget is a chart of national priorities, a menu of spending choices—missiles vs. Medicare, Star Wars vs. student loans, aircraft carriers vs. Amtrak, farm-price supports and food stamps vs. F-18 jet fighters. In theory, everyone in Congress is for cutting the budget and the deficit, but in practice, all resist cutting programs that help their states or districts. That was the political habit that Baker wanted to override.
Left to the normal procedures of Congress, a budget gets lost in a swamp of turf battles and rival committees’ protecting pet programs. What Baker needed was a procedural club to crack legislative heads. He needed technical leverage—the technicalities of congressional procedure are an important form of power when shrewdly used—to force the Senate to place the common interest over special interests, the common interest of budget cutting over the special interests of budget protecting. He needed a legislative vehicle for forcing an up-or-down vote on Reagan’s budget—in short, on Reagan.
At the urging of Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici and his staff director, Steve Bell, Howard Baker decided on a very strict procedure known as reconciliation. Without it, Reagan’s dramatic
1981 budget victory would have been impossible. As it was, Reagan won the crucial test in the House by only four votes—and the issue on that vote was whether to apply a tight version of reconciliation. So the tactic of reconciliation became central to the whole Reagan legislative strategy.
The reconciliation procedure had been written into the 1974 budget act but never used as Baker intended to use it. For Baker, its attraction was this: Normally, budget committees in both houses draft a budget resolution which is a guideline for the tax-writing committees that raise revenue, the appropriating committees that vote funds, and the thirteen substantive committees that approve various programs: defense, agriculture, labor and human resources, interior, public works, and so on. But a normal budget resolution lacks the power of law, and those other committees, protective of their programs, are not tightly bound by its guidelines. The total of their individual budgets invariably adds up to more than the budget committee target. So there is a second budget resolution, and a third, as Congress tries again and again. If the totals are not in line by the third budget resolution, it can include reconciliation—that is, reconciling the different committee spending totals with the overall target. On this third round, reconciliation has the force of law—it imposes a specific target on each committee and can require that programs be cut to meet those targets.
In the Senate, which normally allows unlimited debate, reconciliation puts a flat lid of fifty hours on debate—that is, a debate on the full federal budget, a process which normally takes weeks upon weeks; reconciliation restricts filibusters. Finally, reconciliation forbids any amendment not germane to the budget—no wandering off into abortion, school prayer, or other issues that can paralyze the Senate; and it demands that whatever spending is added must be matched by tax increases or by spending cuts in other programs.
Howard Baker liked the idea of using the steamroller tactic of reconciliation right off the bat on Reagan’s budget—on the
first
budget resolution—skipping months of maneuvering. Reagan’s strategists embraced this tactic because it offered one big vote of confidence on Reagan and on joining his coalition. Democrats screamed that this tactic made David Stockman, as budget director, a legislative tyrant and turned Congress into a rubber stamp, shorn of institutional powers. Years later, Stockman agreed with them.
“We did not coronate Mr. Stockman as king,” bellowed Jim Wright, then House majority leader. Privately, some Republicans, including House Republican Leader Robert Michel, worried about looking like
“Reagan robots.” Bruce Vento, a militant Minnesota liberal Democrat, mocked the Republicans. “When Commander in Chief Stockman says jump, you do not ask why,” Vento hooted. “You do not ask if it will be good for your district. You only ask
how high
and
how often
!”
Once the steamroller got going in the Senate, it was impossible to stop. Pete Domenici, the no-nonsense Budget Committee chairman, protested that in the headlong push for victory, the substance of the budget was getting lost. Domenici did not believe Reagan’s Rosy Scenario, which promised huge tax cuts in 1981 and a balanced budget by 1984. Domenici, a laconic, plain-spoken father of eight from an Italian immigrant family, plays his politics the way he pitched minor league baseball in the West Texas–New Mexico league: straight and hard.
Using estimates of the Congressional Budget Office, Domenici disputed the economic claims of Reagan and Stockman. At a minimum, he warned, Reagan’s tax cuts would leave a deficit of $44 billion in 1984 (actually, it would be $185.3 billion). Stockman promised to find another $44 billion of budget cuts for 1984—but later. “That’s a pig in the poke!” Domenici protested. He led the Budget Committee to vote against Reagan’s budget, on grounds that it broke faith with Republican pledges to balance the budget. But a few weeks later, at a White House strategy meeting, Howard Baker overruled Domenici—in one of the most critical decisions of 1981. As Reagan’s loyal lieutenant, Baker accepted Stockman’s promise to cut $44 billion and suggested that budget documents designate the cuts with a “magic asterisk.” On paper that meant the Reagan program showed a balanced budget in 1984, making it more palatable to Senate Republicans. Domenici was conscience stricken, but he acquiesced.
“I knew the Rosy Scenario wasn’t going to happen,” Domenici told me much later. “It stuck in my craw.”
When I asked Domenici why he had gone against his better judgment, his response showed how the bandwagon mentality swept Republicans along. “Here we have a new president, a new team, a new theory, a new set of committee chairmen,” Domenici explained. “We just had to go along and say, ‘We’ll try to work with the president. Let’s give the president and his team a chance.’ We thought there would be a chance to correct the first resolution later, but there never was. It didn’t take us too long before we started saying, ‘The deficit is going to go haywire.’ ”
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Howard Baker swung Domenici in line—indeed, it is impossible to exaggerate the importance to Reagan’s success of Howard Baker’s
personal influence with Senate Republicans or of his relationship to Jim Baker at the White House.
Rule number six:
Building a governing coalition hinges on a close working link between the president’s top strategist and his party’s congressional leaders
. The failures of Carter’s aides, Hamilton Jordan and Frank Moore, demonstrated the cost of ignoring this link. In 1985, Reagan paid a high price for touchy relations between his new chief of staff, Don Regan, and Bob Dole, the new Senate majority leader. In his first term, Reagan had superb legislative liaisons led by Max Friedersdorf, a smooth diplomat from the Ford White House, and Ken Duberstein, an amiable, voluble political persuader, who worked the House. Reagan had a warm personal relationship with Howard Baker. But the crucial working alliance was between the two Bakers, Howard and Jim, who were constantly in touch.
“Jim Baker has a lot of great traits, but one is he can carry on a thirty-second conversation,” Howard Baker said. “I place great value on the thirty-second conversation because my days were made up of hundreds of thirty-second conversations.”
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Both Jim and Howard Baker—no relation to each other—are main-stream Republicans, temperamentally disposed to compromise and to making the legislative system work. Both Bakers have that vital sense of what was politically doable and what was not. They loyally carried Reagan’s water in public, but they argued with him in private, trying to save him from lost causes. Their pragmatic cast of mind made them natural allies and natural coalition makers. Neither was a true Reaganite; both had worked for Gerald Ford against Reagan in 1976 and had initially opposed Reagan in 1980. They had ties with other Republicans and could widen the circle of Reagan’s support. Indeed, if it had been left to hard-core Reaganite ideologues such as Edwin Meese, William Clark, Lyn Nofziger, or Pat Buchanan to pass the first Reagan program, it probably would have been defeated. For ideological rigidity can derail even a partisan coalition, and both Bakers were masterful at bending at the margins and helping Reagan corral the final few votes needed for victory.
Howard Baker gained national fame during the televised Watergate hearings as a symbol of Republican integrity. Actually, however, he lacks the charisma or phrase-making glibness of most media politicians. His natural terrain is legislative politics; three terms in the Senate made him a creature of Congress and its master. In 1981, he united Republicans who were as philosophically incompatible as arch-conservative Jesse Helms of North Carolina and outspokenly liberal Lowell Weicker
of Connecticut. He got Helms to swallow a long delay before pushing against abortion and for school prayer, to allow Reagan’s economic program first crack. When Republican committee chairmen got into a tug-of-war over who would handle the guts of the Reagan program, Baker massaged egos with charm and patience. Even Democrats liked him as leader.
“If you had a secret ballot for majority leader, I suspect Democrats would have picked him,” observed Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd. “We wanted to see the place function.”
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Unusual for a politician, Baker is a listener, attentive to his colleagues. “Baker led by a combination of intellect—being four steps ahead of everybody—and humanness and warmth,” enthused Warren Rudman. “He had patience and compassion. When Howard Baker listened to you, you had the feeling that all that was going on for him was what you were saying at that moment.”
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“He spent his whole day on the phone holding people’s hands,” added James Miller, one of Baker’s aides. “He knew that if you beat someone, you might need him again. He knew the most important time to stroke some senator was right after you’d beaten him. Baker would roll [defeat] Jesse Helms on a cloture vote, and then he’d sit Helms down in the cloakroom and have a talk with him afterwards.”
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In the Senate, declared Colorado’s William Armstrong, “the success that Reagan had was sixty percent Reagan and forty percent Howard Baker. When you look at those first couple of years, you’ve got to admire the way Baker held the Republicans together, over and over. There was a selfless quality to his leadership. Everybody knew he was doing it to support the president and not to advance his own ideas. Baker is a beloved leader. He gets the break: People will vote with him because they love him. Not when they think he is dead wrong, but if there is reasonable room for maneuver or reasonable doubt, as so often there is, then they will support him.”
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