Authors: Hedrick Smith
Reagan inserted belated congratulations on O’Neill’s fortieth wedding anniversary, and the speaker closed by advising him, “Have your people talk to Jones and Boiling [the Democratic chairmen of the Budget and the Rules committees].”
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Despite this genial sign-off, the battle was on. In the forty-eight hours from Reagan’s press conference to his second prickly phone call, the two leaders had indulged in the mutual needling, the posturing, and the punching that characterized their rivalry. That rapid sequence captures their Irish tempers and their Irish blarney, their little digs and their substantive clashes, their compulsion to combat and their lust for the power game.
O’Neill now wanted to win. The Democratic-controlled Budget Committee crafted a package designed to lure back the Boll Weevils. It cut less from domestic social programs than Reagan’s package; it built up defense, but not as much; it cut taxes for one year, not three. It did not beat Reagan, but it lured home more than half of the Boll Weevil defectors. Reagan’s victory margin dropped from seventy-seven votes in May to just seven votes in the second budget battle in June.
The speaker was making some headway—playing “me too” on substance and slugging Reagan rhetorically. In the final test of 1981, on cutting taxes, Reagan beat O’Neill again by outbidding the Democrats in passing out tax cuts. O’Neill and Rostenkowski, his tax strategist, warned (correctly) that Reagan’s three-year tax cut risked big future deficits and refused to match Reagan. Also by then, the president was harvesting his image of invincibility from earlier victories. On July 29, O’Neill suffered his third major loss of the year, a 238–195 vote for Reagan’s tax package. This time, forty-eight Democrats defected.
“Certainly, it was my worst time,” Tip O’Neill confessed to me. “He
had the votes. He had me licked.… I was about as low as anybody could be.”
O’Neill would come home and share his pain with his wife.
“I’d come home, I’d be feeling so low. Millie used to say to me, ‘Well, d’you think you’re right?’
“I’d say, ‘Of course, I’m right. I know I’m right in conscience. I know I’m right in philosophy. I know I’m right in my mind. I know I’m right for America.’
“Well, she used to say, ‘Hey, put on a clean shirt and a new tie and press your suit, and go out and keep your chin up. Don’t let ’em know you’re down. That’s all.”
“And I did. I took that attitude and I kept fighting.”
Teaching the Old Dog New Tricks
After that early pummeling, O’Neill learned the new power game. Everyone knew Tip O’Neill as an old shoe—a friendly, clubby backroom man. He liked card games and shmoozing with cronies at the University Club. His wife, Millie, had no taste for Washington and had remained in North Cambridge. So, O’Neill shared a bachelor pad with Congressman Edward Boland, another Massachusetts liberal. They were an odd couple: Boland, trim, quiet-spoken, and immaculate; O’Neill, gregarious, rumpled, and endlessly dieting to get below 250 pounds. Weekends, he would commute to Boston to play golf near his Cape Cod home, his score hovering near 100. And he loved visiting barbershops and factories or swapping small talk with little old ladies down the street. His favorite aphorism—All politics is local—epitomized the parochialism of the House and marked him as a classic old-breed politician.
But Tip O’Neill was surprisingly adaptable; he became a modern politician who changed the ways of the House. He moved the House into the media age by bringing in cameras for live coverage of floor debate in 1979. He developed his own public relations tactics for jousting with Reagan. Despite touting localism, he thought in national terms. He hired pollsters to help plot a national strategy for congressional Democrats. He saw the rising strength of younger-generation moderates and neoliberals (more pragmatic than old-style liberals) and drew them into the leadership. His own thundering liberal rhetoric made him an anchor of consistency for a party adrift; yet, simultaneously he accommodated on both tactics and substance—all to protect his party’s precious bastion in the House.
Few people outside Washington are aware of how open O’Neill was in his final years to politicians half his age. That fit his record; he had been an agent of change a decade before. In the early 1970s, he had been a prime mover in changing the seniority system, in opening up House proceedings, and in setting House ethics standards. He had been among the first big-city Democrats to break with Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War and, later, to assert that Richard Nixon should be impeached.
As speaker, he readily tapped the talents of the new generation. After the 1980 election debacle, he gambled on Tony Coelho, a hard-driving Californian just starting his second term, to revitalize the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Coelho was so phenomenally successful at fund-raising and modernizing the party apparatus that in six years he jumped way up to the number three job, Democratic whip. On economic issues, O’Neill would set up special task forces to leaven old committee chairmen with younger neoliberals (Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Tim Wirth of Colorado, and Leon Panetta of California). Open to new ideas, O’Neill quickly endorsed the tax-reform plan proposed in 1982 by Gephardt and Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, which became the model for Reagan’s 1985 tax plan. O’Neill urged Walter Mondale to adopt it in 1984, but Mondale declined.
Institutionally, O’Neill copied the executive branch, building up the speaker’s office. He delegated much authority to a talented young staff: Ari Weiss, a slender, bearded, serious-minded Orthodox Jew, who mastered the substance of legislation and the politics of the House; Kirk O’Donnell, a tall, lanky, straight-talking, Boston Irish protégé of Mayor Kevin White, who was O’Neill’s sage and able national strategist; and Christopher Matthews, a witty, grinning, wisecracking phrasemaker with quick reflexes, canny media instincts, and a partisan lust for combat. O’Neill was in awe of Weiss, who finished college in three years and whom he treated like a son and a one-man brain trust. He leaned on O’Donnell for broad judgments and foreign policy advice, and he used Matthews to teach him the modern counterpunch. Together, all under forty, they moved O’Neill into the new era.
“In the old days, it was show horses versus workhorses in Congress,” commented Thomas Mann, executive director of the American Political Science Association. “If you wanted to get something done, you had to work inside the legislature. And the show horses were just posturing to the public. That’s changed. Now, it’s seen that playing the media is an important resource in passing legislation. Serious members understand
that they have to sell their story outside of the institution to have an impact inside it. They mobilize constituencies and communicate to each other through the media.
“The Democratic leadership thinks long and hard about how to mobilize public support. That is a change, and O’Neill as the point man ought to get credit. O’Neill in effect ushered the House into a much more public posture. The Republicans saw O’Neill as a perfect foil, a perfect stereotype to hit in the media. But in time they found out he could use it, too. He had a way of reaching outside the House, a certain sincerity and consistency in his beliefs that communicated to the public.”
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O’Neill’s most dramatic evolution came in the media game. He became the first media speaker. After his drubbings in 1981, he took on Tony Coelho’s media coach—Chris Matthews. “He rolled up his sleeves, those huge arms of his, just sat there, and looked at me like I was a stranger, a guy from a new era,” Matthews recalled. “He looked me in the eye and he said, ‘Tell me what I’m doing wrong and what I’m doing right. Let’s have a little conversation.’ And he basically listened. But he said, ‘You know, an old dog can learn new tricks.’ It was an amazing meeting.”
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The media game was hard because O’Neill had always been shy of cameras. “They used to say, you know O’Neill, you know he’s big and fat and overweight, and he’s got gray hair and a bulbous nose and cabbage ears—he’s afraid of television,” the speaker admitted. “I never was afraid of the television. I always figure—anytime that I’m on television—
I
set the agenda here [in Congress]. I know more about the Congress than anybody up here.” But his defensive tone betrayed that old shyness.
As speaker, O’Neill mostly ducked the Sunday talk shows, wary of a half hour’s steady exposure. Reporters liked him but knew he fractured grammar. In O’Neill argot, Reagan’s talk of a voluntary Social Security program came out as “Social Security volunteer”; the Nicaraguan rebels were not always
contras
but sometimes contadoras (nickname of the Central American group of mediators). O’Neill rarely gave the Democratic response to Reagan’s nationally televised addresses but tapped others.
But O’Neill’s daily press conferences became his platform for attacking Reagan and setting out Democratic priorities. With Matthews crafting darts for O’Neill to toss at Reagan, O’Neill drew a good crowd of reporters. Television crews would catch him in the morning arriving at the Capitol. His jabs at “Beverly Hills budgets” and at other “lemons
of Reaganomics” became political staples. By one count, he appeared on the nightly network news shows 120 times a year, three or four times as often his predecessors, Carl Albert and John McCormack.
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With greater visibility, O’Neill became a more formidable figure, influencing the House as much by his public line as by institutional powers. Tom Foley, from Spokane, Washington, then Democratic whip, was fond of saying, “Sam Rayburn could have walked down the streets of Spokane without anybody noticing him, but Tip O’Neill couldn’t do that.” In 1981, the number of Americans who recognized the speaker shot up from forty-five percent early in the year to eighty percent in the fall, according to opinion polls. That did not put him on a par with Reagan, but it gave him national clout to press the Democrats’ case.
O’Neill also learned from Reagan’s media game that a simple thematic message is vital. Normally, the opposition in Congress is a caterwauling babble. But by late 1981, O’Neill was framing a Democratic counterattack around the social and economic impact of Reagan’s program. He was setting up issues for the 1982 election, to protect the Democratic majority and blunt Republican realignment. “Fairness” was the theme that emerged from O’Neill’s skull sessions with staff and pollsters. The speaker pounced on Reagan as a foe of little people after Reagan’s bid to cut Social Security benefits—an issue which the Democrats milked hard in 1982. In the final 1981 budget vote, two or three dozen Republicans had voted to eliminate the minimum Social Security benefit, and Democrats used those votes against those Republicans in the 1982 campaign. On tax cuts, O’Neill and Rostenkowski had worked to make the Democratic bill better than Reagan’s bill for middle-income families with taxable incomes under $50,000. They called that the “$50,000 question,” arguing that Reagan’s tax bill tilted in favor of the rich. By fall 1982, the Democrats tied these issues together with national campaign ads declaring: “It’s unfair. It’s Republican.”
At the high tide of Reaganism in August 1981, O’Neill’s team was preparing to turn legislative losses into campaign advantages. That is a classic opposition-game tactic: Make the White House pay when its victories bring bad consequences. “A recession brought about by tight money is at hand,” Kirk O’Donnell predicted in a strategy memo to O’Neill on August 4. “The economy is
no longer our burden
[emphasis added],” O’Donnell advised. “It is a Republican Economy. The economic program is uniquely Reagan’s and his party’s. By not choosing to compromise with House Democrats, Reagan has assumed total responsibility
for economic recovery.”
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O’Donnell cited NBC polls indicating that American voters were already having second thoughts about Reagan’s moves. The polls had shown fifty-eight-percent support for the Reagan program in May, but only thirty-eight-percent support in July. O’Donnell urged that Democratic-led committees hold hearings around the country to generate news coverage about ill effects of Reagan’s budget cutbacks in housing and education. It was a new game: The media presidency had spawned a media-oriented opposition.
On the advice of pollsters such as Peter Hart, Pat Caddell, Bill Hamilton, and Dottie Lynch, the speaker began attacking Reagan as Herbert Hoover with a smile. That was an important tactical shift. O’Neill’s strategists had concluded that the middle class was far more worried about recession than budget cuts. Hoover carried echoes of Depression. By late 1981, O’Neill was charging Reagan with pursuing the “same old trickle-down tax policies” of Hoover and Coolidge and turning “an economic recovery into an economic disaster for millions of American workers.” O’Neill sharpened his class attack on Reagan’s tax cut as a windfall for the rich while the poor were getting socked by budget cuts. Reagan, he allowed, “is warm and congenial and a genuinely attractive personality. Unfortunately for Americans there is nothing warm and congenial about his policies. His policies hurt people.” With an economic downturn visible on the horizon, O’Neill accused Reagan of fighting inflation with a deliberate recession.
In the inside game, O’Neill sought to heal his party’s rifts. In midsummer, mainstream Democrats had been demanding punishment of the Boll Weevils who had defected to Reagan’s cause. By fall, fifty loyal Democrats petitioned the leadership to discipline fifty renegades. Instead, O’Neill and Majority Leader Jim Wright granted a political amnesty. Much later, Phil Gramm and Kent Hance, the two Texas Democrats who had connived with the Reagan White House, were deprived of their choice committee posts. But in general the defectors were invited back into the fold. Said Wright, “We welcome the sinners back.”
1982: The Confrontation Game
O’Neill was now pursuing a second goal in his opposition game. The first was to protect his party’s base; the second was to gain enough leverage to force Reagan to bargain with him or to retreat on policy—to dent Reagan’s image of invincibility. Gradually, shrewdly, O’Neill was regaining strength. Each step was crucial—allowing Reagan’s program
a fast legislative track, pushing Democratic alternatives, moving to unify House Democrats, taking the president head-on in the media. Finally, rising recession and Wall Street’s sinking confidence in what O’Neill derisively labeled “Reaganomics” had forced Reagan to recognize that he needed O’Neill politically and to try to bargain with the speaker. The politics of patience had paid off.