Authors: Hedrick Smith
Hardball: Inside and Outside Politics
The Senate provided Reagan with the cornerstone for his 1981 coalition, but the real challenge lay in the House, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans 243–192. How the Reaganites forged a House majority is a lesson in modern coalition building. To the steamroller tactic of reconciliation, the Reagan team added another tactic: the grass-roots-lobbying blitz. Rule number seven of the coalition game is:
Use the muscle of the president’s nationwide political apparatus to swing
votes into line for his legislative coalition
. The Reagan operation in 1981 was a textbook case of how to use campaign and lobbying techniques to produce a functioning coalition in Congress.
The arithmetic of the Democratic majority in the House left Reagan with two options—both common to Republican presidents: He could either strike a deal with the House Democratic leadership to form a grand bipartisan coalition on budget cutting or go for a much narrower coalition by holding all the Republicans in line and chipping off a block of at least twenty-six Democratic votes, to reach a majority of 218. Although House Democratic leaders were willing to go along with some budget cuts, that would not satisfy Reagan. He disagreed philosophically with Speaker Tip O’Neill and he wanted a visible Republican victory. So Reagan played partisan hardball; in the argot of Congress, he decided to “roll Tip”—topple the speaker. That strategy required forging a conservative coalition—the kind of alliance between Republicans and conservative southern Democrats that had helped Eisenhower and Nixon.
In the House, the key to Reagan’s victory lay with two groups. “Very seldom do you get one vote at a time in the House,” explained Ken Duberstein, Reagan’s likable, street-smart House lobbyist, who has the chutzpah and humor to deal with big-city Democrats as well as Republicans. “You usually get blocks of votes. You usually get state delegations, say, the Democrats from Tennessee or the Republicans from Oklahoma, or the oil-state boys, or you get the Cotton Clubbers, or you get the tobacco boys, or you get the textile guys or the timber folks or the Gypsy Moths [the Northeast-Midwest Republicans]. So you see wholesale merchandising in the House, even if you’re meeting with them one by one or in small groups, whereas in the Senate it’s really one by one.”
22
The first key group was the Boll Weevils—about fifty conservative Democrats from Virginia to Texas who had clashed for years with their national party leaders on defense spending and budget deficits. They styled themselves Boll Weevils because they were boring from within the Democratic party, just as insect weevils bore inside the cotton boll. Many won elections by running against their party and Speaker Tip O’Neill; they came largely from districts where Reagan solidly thumped Carter. These Democrats were lineal descendants of the former Democratic allies of Eisenhower and Nixon—with one big difference. In the old days, the Republican White House usually teamed up with the “barons”—conservative southern committee chairmen. But in 1981, most top committee posts were held by mainstream
Democrats and the southerners were mainly junior members relegated to the back benches. That left them in a renegade mood, ripe for recruitment by the Reagan forces.
The second key group was the Gypsy Moths, some fifteen to twenty liberal Republicans from the Northeast and Midwest. Their name was a parody on the Boll Weevils, making the point that they ate at the leaves of the Republican tree, just as real gypsy moths do. The Gypsy Moths were habitual defectors from Republican ranks, joining centrist and liberal Democrats in legislative coalitions. In 1981, Gypsy Moths, such as Manhattan liberal Bill Green or Iowa’s progressive Republicans Jim Leach and Tom Tauke, were philosophically at odds with Reagan. They sympathized with some efficiencies in government, but not deep budget slashing. Reagan’s coalition required every single Gypsy Moth vote.
That task fell mainly to Bob Michel, the hearty Republican leader from Peoria, a popular legislator given to
gol darn, geeminy Chrismus
, and barbershop harmonizing. “Look,” Michel told his troops, “there’s no way you can really convince some good votes on the other side [Boll Weevils] if we can’t stick together on our own side. In unity, there is strength. We are still a minority party, but if we stick together and begin anew with a new president, we can accomplish great things.”
23
In 1980, the conservative coalition had a test run before Reagan won the presidency. The Republican–Boll Weevil alliance had produced 170 votes, thirty of them Democrats, for a Reagan-style program of deep budget cuts and supply-side, growth-oriented tax cuts. Moreover, smelling Reagan’s victory and a chance to increase their leverage, the Boll Weevils formally organized as the Conservative Democratic Forum.
Reagan’s basic approach delighted the Boll Weevils. In fact, some were more zealous for budget cuts than Reagan. After Reagan’s State of the Union address, Ken Duberstein asked Charlie Stenholm, the Boll Weevil spokesman, “How’d we do? Did the president give you the cuts you were talking about?” Stenholm, a homey Texan from farm country near Abilene, wryly observed, “The president did fine, but I think he’s a cheapskate—he could have gone with $10 billion or $15 billion more in cuts.”
But House Democratic leaders were not prepared to give up Boll Weevil votes without a fight. Budget Committee Chairman James Jones of Oklahoma, put together a conservative Democratic budget that embraced nearly eighty percent of the Reagan budget cuts. (It had only a one-year tax cut; Reagan’s had a three-year cut.) Jones probed
Stockman about chances for a broad bipartisan compromise, but Reagan flatly rejected any deal. “I’m convinced that the American people strongly support my program and don’t want it watered down,” he declared. In 1981, that strategy paid off, but it was unwise for the long run. By holding out for a total victory, Reagan sowed resentment among moderate Democrats such as House Democratic Whip Thomas Foley, and their resentments later tripped Reagan on other issues.
In 1981, the threat to Reagan’s coalition strategy was that some Boll Weevils wanted to stick with their party if possible, and they were attracted to Jones’s budget. In early May, the Boll Weevils had a showdown meeting, one after another praising Jones’s package as a reasonable, workable compromise, consistent with Reagan’s goals. But a rift opened: Phil Gramm, a firebrand free-market Texas conservative, insisted that Jones’s budget “flunked” criteria the Boll Weevils had adopted earlier: no deficit bigger than Reagan’s, no less savings on the big benefit-entitlement programs, and no less money for defense.
“It’s time to draw the line in the sand,” Gramm insisted. “I’m voting against this budget even if I have to stand alone, like the people at the Alamo.”
Amidst the shouting that ensued, John Hightower reminded Gramm of Texas history: “Remember what happened to those people who crossed the line at the Alamo. They all got killed.”
Marvin Leath, a third Texan, challenged Hightower. “The other people who didn’t cross the line also got killed,” Leath coldly countered. “Only no one remembers their names. By God, I’m going with Gramm. So there’ll be two of us.”
24
The Boll Weevil revolt was launched, but it was unclear whether Reagan could capture enough defectors to win.
In the game of political persuasion, the Reagan White House took no chances. It played outside as well as inside politics, and it played hardball. Stockman lobbied his former allies in the Boll Weevil group. Reagan went public, stirring up popular support with nationally televised addresses. He sharpened the sense of economic crisis, focusing on the gloomy statistics of high inflation and economic stagnation. He bluntly reminded Congress on April 28 that it had been six months since his election and the people wanted action.
“The American people are slow to wrath but when their wrath is once kindled, it burns like a consuming flame,” Reagan declared, quoting Theodore Roosevelt. “Well, perhaps that kind of wrath will be deserved,” Reagan warned, if Congress resorted to “the old and comfortable
way … to shave a little here and add a little there.” His speech touched off an avalanche of mail to Congress.
For maximum leverage, the Reagan team mounted a massive political pressure operation against the Boll Weevils that must go down as one of the most effective grass-roots-lobbying campaigns of any modern presidency. It is an example to be studied by future presidents, for Jim Baker and Lyn Nofziger, Reagan’s key political strategists, had properly fathomed the significance of the breakup of the old congressional power structure. No bargain could be struck with a few leaders; there were no barons in the House to deliver the southern Democratic votes. The defections of Gramm and Leath did not guarantee support of other Boll Weevils. That would take heat from back home, and the White House turned up the flame.
The concept was not new, but the Reaganites applied it with new sophistication. Under Lyndon Johnson in 1965, White House political chief Larry O’Brien had mobilized Democratic activists across the country to pressure Congress to pass Johnson’s Great Society legislation. But the Reagan operation had new technology—computerized lists of campaign insiders and contributors to House members—so it knew precisely who could squeeze congressional waverers. In addition, Reagan had a better-organized national mass movement than any previous Republican president. In fifteen years of crisscrossing the country, he had built a network of conservative activists. His campaign volunteers were still in place, itching to show their muscle.
Reagan’s political operation was masterminded by Lyn Nofziger, a rumpled California conservative with a black Charlie Chan mustache and goatee; and Lee Atwater, a bright, intense, young South Carolinian (later campaign manager for George Bush in 1988). Nofziger and Atwater ran a political blitz in fifty-four swing congressional districts, forty-five in the South. They used scare tactics on congressmen by getting their campaign contributors to threaten to oppose them in 1982 if they bucked the president now.
The Reagan team, working like a presidential campaign, generated direct mail, phone banks, radio and television ads, and sent out top speakers to put heat on targeted congressmen. They mobilized the Republican National Committee, Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, National Conservative Political Action Committee, Moral Majority, Fund for a Conservative Majority, and political action committees linked to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, Business Roundtable, American Medical
Association, and scores of groups interested in cutting federal spending and taxes.
“The premise of the whole operation is that political reforms and the impact of media have made it so that a congressman’s behavior on legislation can be affected more by pressure from within his own district than by lobbying here in Washington,” Atwater told me during the operation. “The way we operate, within forty-eight hours any congressman will know he has had a major strike in his district. All of a sudden, Vice President Bush is in your district; Congressman Jack Kemp is in your district. Ten of your top contributors are calling you, the head of the local AMA, the head of the local realtors’ group, local officials. Twenty letters come in. Within forty-eight hours, you’re hit by paid media, free media, mail, phone calls, all asking you to support the president.”
25
It was the nice-cop/tough-cop routine, with Reagan working the soft sell and his minions the hard sell. In the ten days leading up to the first House budget vote on May 7, Reagan met personally with a dozen Republicans and sixty Democrats, while the grass-roots blitz hit them from back home. A typical target was Butler Derrick, a South Carolina moderate Democrat.
“I’ve been here since 1974, and I’ve never seen an operation as well orchestrated as the way the Reagan administration has handled this budget battle,” Derrick told Haynes Johnson of
The Washington Post
. “The president invited me down to the White House one morning with five other congressmen. It was very pleasant conversation. There wasn’t any pushing. He was giving his views—kind of good-guy conversation.”
Back home, Derrick said: “They have apparently gone back through my contributor files and pulled off prominent conservatives that have contributed to my campaign over the years and also probably have supported the national Republican ticket. They have gotten in touch with them. It’s been very effective in the business community … probably sixty or seventy percent of the large-business people in my district have contacted me. And of course, I have had many small businessmen contact me. I don’t recall that I’ve ever been lobbied quite as hard from the district.”
26
The Reagan hardballers jolted other congressional fence-sitters. Ronnie Flippo, an Alabama Boll Weevil, got hit with a call from then-Governor Forrest “Fob” James, a pro-Reagan Democrat. Dan Mica, another Democrat from Palm Beach, Florida, was pressured by his former campaign manager. “I had a call, too, from a local mayor, a
Democrat very active in the party and associated with liberal causes, and he asked me to vote with the president,” Mica revealed. “That surprised me that they would get to him.”
“Reagan had a big enough stick so that all we had to do is organize the support and no Boll Weevil would stand up to him,” Atwater later boasted.
27
Indeed, Derrick, Mica, and Flippo were among sixty-three Democrats who voted on May 7 for the Reagan budget.
Similar lobbying tactics were used on liberal northern Gypsy Moth Republicans. “I got a call from Henry Kissinger,” Manhattan’s Bill Green told me, “and when I started arguing about the budget numbers, Kissinger said, ‘I don’t know anything about that. Let me just say that after four years where we have lost international leadership, it’s important that we be seen as having someone who can lead the country. It’s important from an international point of view that the president win this first key vote.’ ”
28
That intense lobbying, behind Reagan’s personal appeals, gave the new president a sweeping victory, 253–176. Every single Republican voted for his package. That was an extraordinary feat.