Authors: Hedrick Smith
Johnson-Style Horsetrading
Forming the coalition is only the first step; sustaining it long enough to lock up final legislative victory is much harder. In the American system, victory rarely ends the fight—it marks the start of the next battle. This time, it was not Reagan’s charm treatment or the grassroots blitz that rescued the Reagan coalition. It was old-fashioned, Lyndon Johnson-style barter politics: buying votes by doling out favors—what some call “running the soup kitchen.” Rule number eight of the coalition game is:
Bend at the margins and wheedle votes where you can; don’t get hung up on ideological purity
. Horse-trading is the way the battle is fought in the final clinches.
Reagan’s battle was not over because entrenched committees of Congress resorted to intricate, arcane maneuvers to undo the effects of that first budget vote. The reconciliation measure passed required implementing by regular committees, and they had a field day with the fine print of the legislation, molding it their way. The White House was shocked to see conservative Republicans and Boll Weevils engaging in legislative chicanery along with liberal Democrats, all protecting their favorite programs. Many of the “cuts” enacted were empty numbers that reduced spending only in theory.
“Sabotage!” shouted David Stockman, himself no slouch at fudging
budget numbers and tilting estimates when it suited him. In June 1981, he accused the committees of shady bookkeeping, false arithmetic, and phony cutbacks. Pro-Reagan Republicans and the Congressional Budget Office estimated that House committees cut $55 billion for the year 1984, but Stockman reckoned only $25 billion was valid.
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In alarm, Stockman persuaded the president that he had to send another whole budget to Congress. “The committees have broken faith with the first budget resolution,” Stockman told Reagan in mid-June. “It could jeopardize your entire economic program. We have to make a major fight to restore the provisions in your first budget. If you want to balance the budget in ’84, you can’t live with the cuts they’ve made.”
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Stockman secretly prepared a massive new reconciliation measure, a line-by-line substitute for the congressional bill. It was a high-handed tactic, because Congress—not the budget bureau—is supposed to draft money bills. It meant rejecting the congressional bills and making a fresh effort. Reagan went along with the plan, still counting on one up-or-down vote and the pull of his own popularity to preserve his coalition.
But it was now summer and the Reagan coalition had begun to fray. Moral appeals were not enough to restore it. The White House was short of votes. Gypsy Moths were threatening to bolt unless some modest programs favored in the urban East and Midwest were restored. New York’s Bill Green wanted $50 million more for the National Endowment for the Arts, a higher cap on Medicaid for the poor, and guaranteed student loans provided to more families; Jim Leach of Iowa sought $100 million in family planning; Carl Pursell of Michigan wanted $30 million for nurses’ training. Others wanted $100 million more for Amtrak and Conrail, another $400 million in energy subsidies for the poor, restoration of economic development grants, and so on. The White House paid their price to get their votes for the final budget package.
The Boll Weevils were demanding sweeteners, too. Georgia Democrats got state-owned cotton warehouses exempted from a new user fee. Some $400 million in cuts of veterans’ programs were restored to satisfy Mississippi’s Sonny Montgomery, a powerhouse for veterans. Louisiana’s John Breaux was lured aboard with a promise to revive sugar import quotas to protect his home state.
“I went for the best deal,” Breaux crassly admitted afterward. He maintained his vote had not been bought but—he confessed—“I was rented.”
The bargaining was like stock-market bidding, right to the wire. Ironically, to get votes, Stockman had to trade back to Congress things he had objected to in mid-June. The final budget was such a rush job that it reached the floor
after the debate began
, and it mistakenly listed the name and phone number of a congressional staffer—“Rita Seymour, 555–4844”—which someone had scribbled in the margin of a draft copy. Clearly, no one had proofread the retyped version.
The critical test vote came on procedure, not substance. House Democratic leaders tried to outmaneuver the power of Reagan’s single up-or-down vote. They figured Reagan’s budget would be tougher to pass if it were broken into five packages, forcing Gypsy Moth Republicans and Boll Weevil Democrats to be counted on separate votes—and some of those votes were bound to be unpopular back home. Hoping to break up the Reagan coalition that way, Democratic leaders fashioned a procedural rule which divided the budget into five separate packages.
It was an ingenious tactic, but it backfired, because members wanted to avoid the wrath of constituents who were telling them: Cut the budget, but save our programs. One big vote spared House members that dilemma; it was politically easier to handle. (Rule number nine of the coalition game:
Make votes politically easy
.) Once the big package of cuts was fixed, members could not both cut the budget and save local programs; they had only one choice: yes or no. Since budget cutting was generally popular, they could justify swallowing some distasteful cuts. The Democratic tactic would expose members to cross-pressures to both cut and save programs; so it rankled many House members. As a result, the Gypsy Moths backed Reagan and just enough Boll Weevils defected to beat the Democratic procedural rule by the perilous margin of 217–210. A shift of four votes would have beaten Reagan and radically altered the outcome.
That procedural vote on June 25 was little understood by the public, but it demonstrated the power of technicalities: The vote on the “rule” (for handling the budget bill) framed the ultimate vote on the substance of the budget (one vote or five separate packages).
Defeat of the Democratic rule, moreover, solidified Reagan’s coalition and shattered the Democratic leadership’s control of the House. It cleared the way for Reagan, on the very next day, to win a similarly close victory on the biggest budget cuts ever enacted at one time.
The pattern of coalition building for Reagan’s big tax-cut bill in 1981 was similar—except that it was easier for the Reagan team. Cutting taxes is inherently more popular than cutting the budget, because in
budget cutting some voters’ favorite programs are going to be cut. Also, Reagan had developed such an image of invincibility from his budget victories that the main issue in the tax fight became not whether but how much to cut. Reagan once advocated a thirty-percent cut in individual tax rates over three years, later dropped to twenty-five percent. Business interests and orthodox Republicans insisted on big business tax cuts through an investment tax credit, generous depreciation write-offs, and favorable tax-leasing arrangements. Boll Weevils wanted cuts in estate and gift taxes; those from Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma also wanted to protect oil-depletion allowances.
Democratic leaders argued that a three-year tax cut was very dangerous because it was likely to produce huge deficits—and they were right, as many Republicans later admitted. But playing to win back the Boll Weevils, Dan Rostenkowski, House Ways and Means Committee chairman, tried to outbid Reagan. He never offered more than a two-year cut in individual tax rates, but in other areas, he was very generous. There were so many giveaways that at one point, David Obey, a liberal Wisconsin Democrat, wisecracked, “It would probably be cheaper [for the government] if we gave everybody in the country three wishes.”
Stockman later reckoned the tax-cut package would cut tax revenues by $2 trillion over a decade, but substance got lost in the scramble to win. “The only real numbers being counted were the votes,” Stockman later lamented. “Questions of tax policy and fiscal impact had long since been forgotten. When the final showdown came, it took the form of a raw struggle for political power and control of the House—and the nation’s revenue base was the incidental loser.”
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Once again, Reagan prevailed handsomely, leaving a political model for others on how to mold a majority coalition. Any coalition requires a single central idea with wide appeal, and Reagan’s central core of convictions about less government and lower taxes provided a unifying force for Republicans. Reagan rallied the country and was masterful at courting Congress in twos and threes, while his lieutenants used reconciliation and the grass-roots blitz as instruments of persuasion. And for all his unyielding rhetoric, Reagan showed the tactical wisdom of horse-trading in the eleventh hour in order to paste his coalition together. Tip O’Neill paid him tribute by complaining that “every time you compromise [with Reagan], the president gets eighty percent of what he wants.” And Reagan retorted: “I’ll take eighty percent every time, and I’ll go back the next year for the other twenty percent.”
After a period of eroding party ties, Reagan held the Republicans in Congress together with remarkable unanimity. Only one of 192 House
Republicans had voted against him (James Jeffords of Vermont), and Senate Republicans had gone down the line several times. Democrats were awed. Gary Hymel, a top aide to O’Neill, told Ken Duberstein, Reagan’s House liaison man: “What I admire most about you guys is not the Democratic votes. It’s the fact that you got every single blessed Republican on a major substantive vote. That’s almost unheard of.”
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It was true: Neither Eisenhower, nor Nixon, nor Ford had achieved that party discipline. Such solid Republican voting had not been equaled since the hardheaded rule of “Czar” Joe Cannon, Republican Speaker in 1910. Nor was Reagan ever again able to muster such Republican unity.
August 1981 was the high tide of Reaganism. In just eight months Reagan had pushed through Congress the most massive tax cut in American history and budget cuts far larger than anyone had imagined. Given the monumental deficits that ensued, it was a pyrrhic victory. But that August, political Washington was not heeding economics; it was stunned by Reagan’s triumphant coalition making. His was a performance to match Woodrow Wilson’s after his first election, FDR’s at the start of the New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s in 1965.
“The system works well at only one time—right after a landslide election,” James Sundquist, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution, observed. “This is one of those brief periods in our history when a president comes riding a great tide of personal popularity.”
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1985: The Lost Coalition
Sometimes even that great tide meets with heavy resistance. Nine days before Christmas 1985, President Reagan had to make a desperate pilgrimage to Capitol Hill. House Republicans had mutinied against his efforts to put together a coalition for tax reform, the domestic centerpiece of his second term. Five days earlier, they had stunned the Reagan White House by blocking a tax-reform bill from coming to the House floor for debate. Reagan’s strategy was in tatters. Now, it required Reagan’s personal plea, on bended knee, to revive the bill and to prevent his becoming a lame-duck president less than a year after his landslide reelection.
That personal journey was a mark of Reagan’s tenacity and his personal pull with Republicans, because his appearance turned around just enough House Republicans at the last moment to extricate him from disaster. But the fact that Reagan had to go to Capitol Hill in such desperate straits underscored his troubles in playing the coalition
game as his second term began. Instead of having a secure Republican base, Reagan spent most of the “honeymoon year” of his second term fighting—not with Democrats, but with Republicans. The summer in 1985 was consumed by angry clashes with Senate Republicans over the budget, and late in the year he faced the siege of House Republicans unhappy with tax reform. As the humorist Will Rogers once quipped, “Republicans have their splits right after the election and Democrats have theirs just before an election.”
Other presidents, too, fought more with their own partisans than with the opposition—Lyndon Johnson, for example. After Johnson marshaled large Democratic majorities for his domestic program in 1964 and 1965, he faced an onslaught a few years later on the Vietnam War, clashing more with Democrats than Republicans. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman William Fulbright of Arkansas was an unrelenting critic of the war. I remember the dramatic moment in 1967 when Robert Kennedy, then a New York senator, publicly broke with Johnson over Vietnam, deepening the Democratic rift. And of course, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota humiliated Johnson by nearly upsetting Johnson in the 1968 New Hampshire primary.
Reagan’s Republican critics in 1985 were neither as brazen nor as hostile as Johnson’s Democratic dissenters. But even with a forty-nine-state landslide, Reagan floundered in forming a governing coalition. That was a paradox, because Reagan’s sweeping reelection victory in 1984 stirred expectations that his second term would start with legislative triumphs to match his first year in the White House. For three years he had actually been on the defensive, accepting tax increases in 1982, 1983, and 1984, seeing his budgets ignored, making compromises on Social Security, and suffering the cutoff of aid to Nicaraguan
contras
in 1984. A big reelection landslide was Reagan’s chance to recoup, but his governing coalition was gone.
Reagan’s experience tells a lot about second terms: They are notoriously hard, even on presidents who win landslide reelection. Woodrow Wilson, so triumphant in his first term, could not win Senate approval for his cherished League of Nations in his second term. Franklin Roosevelt, towering in his first term, was battered in his second term for his plan to pack the Supreme Court. He saw the New Deal slow down. Harry Truman, after reelection in 1948, became mired in Korea. Two decades later, the nation was so riven by the Vietnam War that Lyndon Johnson was politically crippled and dared not seek another term. Richard Nixon, who had made an opening to China and agreements with Moscow in his first term, was forced to resign in ignominy
because of the Watergate scandal and other abuses of power. Eisenhower alone seemed to escape the painful rhythm.