Power Game (10 page)

Television helped break up the policy monopolies of established committees and throw open the power game. Overshadowing the grinding “inside” spadework of bill drafting in committee, television offered shortcuts and a showcase. Kemp and Gramm are prime examples of those who learned how to influence Congress and market their ideas with their colleagues through the media. Over television, they sent messages to the voters and generated grass-roots interest that ricocheted back to Congress. Thus, television offered a marketplace for all 435 members of the House and one hundred Senators to become policy entrepreneurs. That is one major reason why Congress seems so unruly today.

“Congress has become atomistic,” remarked Charles Schumer, a rising young Brooklyn Democrat. “In the House we are 435 little atoms bouncing off each other, colliding and influencing each other but not in a very coherent way,” he remarked to me. “There used to be much more structure. But now there is no bonding that holds the atoms together.

“In a way, this reflects American society,” Schumer suggested. “Our society has become more atomistic. In fact, the thing that has struck me most about Congress is how the House of Representatives accurately reflects the country, both in terms of philosophy and structure. The other thing that has amazed me is not just how good the people are in Congress, but how the institution is screwed up. I think the pendulum has swung too far away from strong leadership.”
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Actually, the pendulum has begun swinging back the other way. Tip O’Neill was a strong House speaker, the strongest since the legendary Sam Rayburn died in 1961. Both Howard Baker and Bob Dole were effective Senate majority leaders. All three were able—with great difficulty and only on a few occasions—to assert leadership over the atomistic forces in Congress.

But Charlie Schumer’s observations are worth pondering by people who regularly scorn “the mess in Washington.” I think he is correct that the House of Representatives does mirror the country well. It is true that Congress has its scoundrels and dullards. But its periodic paralysis and its brawling stalemates do not prove the incompetence or laziness of its members. Often congressional immobility reflects the lack of clear public consensus on major issues. What’s more, as an institution, Congress suffers less from too many crooks and dodos, than from too many bright, hyperkinetic, ambitious politicians clamoring for attention and tripping over each other as they compete for airtime, trying to give voice to the competing impulses within the American electorate.

The more open power game provides strong incentives for politicians to play highly individualistic politics. Except for times of genuine crisis, or when some institutional deadline is imminent, both House and Senate often bog down in immobility or mere muddling through. But that is less the fault of poor politicians than it is of the sprawling dispersion of power, of the multitude of competing interests, and of the lack of cohesive forces powerful enough to pull members to work together.

One wintry afternoon, I asked Tom Eagleton, the veteran Missouri Democrat nearing the end of eighteen years in the Senate, what was the most important element of power in Washington, and he shot back without hesitation: “Being in the majority.”
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Of course, Eagleton was right, as far as he went. It matters greatly who is president, who is speaker, which party is in the majority in the House and Senate, and who are the principal committee chairmen. Eagleton, who had seen a Democratic Senate majority slip away to the Republicans, explained what being the majority meant: fixing the legislative schedule, having first crack at setting the agenda, picking the top committee staff, running hearings, arranging foreign trips, being called to the White House.

But formal titles of power confer less automatic authority than people imagine. That is an enduring lesson of American politics, but one that is especially true in the fluid arena of the new power game.
Across the country, all too often people equate position with power, and overlook the soft sides of power: the intangible ingredients that add up to influence and authority. The formal structures of government are only the scaffolding of power. They do not account for its human chemistry. High office offers leverage, but politicians can either squander or exploit that potential. No power is absolute or guaranteed, for at its heart, our politics is a contest of persuasion. In that contest, the intangibles have always been important, but never more so than in the era of television, which plays up the politics of personality and where impressions and appearances are so crucial to a politician’s power.

From recent experience, we know that one president (Ronald Reagan) appears strong and comfortable with power, while another president (Jimmy Carter) seems ill at ease with power and comes across as uncertain and strained. We have seen that a speaker of the House (Tip O’Neill) can be assertive and potent while another (his predecessor, Carl Albert) can seem almost invisible; that some committee chairmen can work their will while others flounder; that as budget director, David Stockman drove the policy process, while his successor, James Miller, was a secondary player whom congressmen kiddingly called “Miller Lite.”

In short, the most vital ingredients of power are often the intangibles. Information and knowledge are power. Visibility is power. A sense of timing is power. Trust and integrity are power. Personal energy is power; so is self-confidence. Showmanship is power. Likability is power. Access to the inner sanctum is power. Obstruction and delay are power. Winning is power. Sometimes, the illusion of power is power.

Take visibility: A president has many legally established powers—the power to purge the top echelons of government and put in his own allies; the power to appoint scores if not hundreds of federal judges; the power to issue executive orders and to make administrative decisions; the power to launch planes against Libyan terrorist camps or to make arms proposals to a Soviet leader; the power to reward political friends and punish enemies by approving programs, granting favors, or withholding benefits; and sometimes, the political power to affect the survival of other politicians by throwing his personal weight for or against them in campaigns.

Yet few presidential powers are more central to success than a president’s ability to command public attention, or in Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, to mount the “bully pulpit” and preach his cause. No such power is granted in the Constitution. Yet the president can request and
usually receive network television time—the coin of the realm in the new power game. As can no one else, the president can attract an audience in the tens of millions to put forward an agenda, to spell out priorities, to use the nation as his sounding board, to move the political system in the direction he wants; in short, to persuade.

Position makes the president preeminent, but it does not grant him a monopoly. We have seen others steal the stage and use it to change the agenda or to redefine reality and thus force the president’s hand. I believe it happens more readily in the new game of instant mass communication than it did in the old closed-circuit politics; television gives others a platform and a megaphone that magnifies their power.

One case in point is the change in American foreign policy, to support Corazon Aquino after the Philippine election on February 7, 1986. That change came in no small measure because Indiana Senator Richard Lugar shrewdly worked the leverage of his visibility. President Reagan’s sympathies clearly lay with President Ferdinand Marcos, whom he regarded as an old friend, an anti-Communist ally. Reagan tried to cling to Marcos. Before the Philippine election, Lugar had warned that the administration was tying itself too closely to strongman rulers such as Marcos. As the respected Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Lugar went to Manila heading a U.S. delegation to observe the fairness of the election.

At the first reports of fraud by the Marcos side, some American observers discounted it as no worse than a Chicago election. Lugar was more critical. After a very slow count and after computer operators walked out of the election commission charging they had been ordered to change vote counts, Lugar concluded that Aquino had surely won the election. He felt the time had come to change the Philippine government and American policy. Aides said he pressed that argument in a private session with President Reagan on February 11. Reagan suggested there had been fraud on both sides, but Lugar insisted that he had seen it only on the Marcos side.
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That night, Lugar was stunned to hear Reagan tell a press conference there was “the possibility of fraud … on both sides.” The next day, Lugar pointedly told reporters the president was “not well informed,” and the White House backed down. Reagan went incommunicado—to be unseen by reporters for several days. Lugar filled the vacuum, arguing in television interviews that Marcos “ought to step down.”

On Sunday, February 23, Lugar took center stage. He appeared on all three network television interview shows (
Meet the Press, Face the Nation
, and
This Week with David Brinkley
). Other politicians called
it the “hat trick,” the feat in hockey of scoring three goals in one game. From that television platform, Lugar called on Reagan to telephone Marcos to ask him to resign, and his television appearances had impact. The next day, Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada—Reagan’s close friend and intermediary with Marcos—talked with the Philippine leader by phone and told him to “cut, and cut cleanly.” Said Laxalt, “I think the time has come” to resign.

Reagan had been forced to shift. His position had been undermined both by televised scenes of massive fraud and by Lugar’s highly visible charges that the election was stolen and Marcos should go.

Similarly, when the tax bill backed by Reagan fell victim to a House Republican revolt in December 1985, Speaker Tip O’Neill put Reagan under the gun by declaring publicly that Reagan would be a “lame-duck” president if he could not muster fifty Republican votes to help a majority of Democrats pass the tax bill. Like Lugar, O’Neill used his visibility to define political reality and the terms of success, forcing the president to respond. On the tax bill, Reagan got the votes. But in the tactics of power, O’Neill, like Lugar, had forced the president’s hand. Both of them stole the bully pulpit from Reagan. Their leverage came from appealing to a wider audience.

Visibility sometimes gives junior members of Congress more power than people many years their senior. In 1980 and 1981, it was Buffalo Congressman Jack Kemp’s high profile advocacy of a thirty-percent reduction in personal income tax rates that provided the basic outline for Reagan’s bill. Kemp’s visibility had more impact than did the patiently acquired expertise of the ranking Republicans in Congress on tax matters, Senator Bob Dole and Representative Barber Conable. Indeed, the clashing styles and philosophies of Conable and Kemp offer examples of what Washingtonians now call “inside” and “outside” politics. In recent years, sharp jealousies have developed between the “inside” politicians, whose power derives from their ability to craft and broker legislation, and the “outside” politicians, who exert their influence on policy through publicity and sloganeering.

Conable, who has subsequently become president of the World Bank, was an old-school Republican congressman. By 1981, Conable had seniority in the House, but he had much more. He had earned a reputation as a serious, thoughtful politician who knew the tax code inside out and was a skilled legislative craftsman. Elected first in 1964, Conable had worked up the ladder to become the ranking Republican on the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. As an orthodox balance-the-budget conservative, Conable showed no enthusiasm for
Kemp-style tax cutting, although he went along when President Reagan adopted it.

Kemp’s power base was not seniority but visibility. As a telegenic celebrity politician and former pro football quarterback, he had popularized the supply-side economic theory that cutting tax rates would boost growth and, ultimately, government tax revenues. His star quality and theme politics had given him more clout than the more cautious Conable, especially with the new Reagan team. I was told privately that Conable had complained bitterly at being handed the Reagan tax bill at the last minute by Treasury Secretary Donald Regan and asked to cosponsor it, although it had been conceived and written by others. In subsequent maneuvering, Conable got some vindication: He helped inject into the bill some probusiness breaks that he favored: faster depreciation schedules and a provision to index tax rates to inflation. But Kemp still got the larger public glory.

Again, in Reagan’s dramatic 1981 blitzkrieg of Congress, it was David Stockman, as director of the Office of Management and Budget, who stole the limelight, not members of the cabinet who theoretically outranked him. Stockman came from practically nowhere, a mere two-term Michigan congressman, thirty-four years old. But he dazzled Washington. He had answers for the questions practically everyone was then asking.

Knowledge was Stockman’s power base. Reagan offered a vision of cutting government, Stockman had the blueprint for how to do it. He was the whiz kid with the razor-sharp mind, master of both the impenetrable arithmetic of the budget and the intricacies of congressional procedure.

In the first blush of what partisans called the Reagan Revolution, Stockman was at peak influence because, in one of Washington’s most telltale phrases, he was “ahead of the power curve.” Long after, Stockman confessed that neither he nor anyone else knew as much as he had pretended. But in the critical presidential transition of 1980, he knew better than anyone else where he was going, where Reagan wanted to head, and how to get there politically. The others were at sea. That was why people relied on Stockman. It was more than his understanding of the budget. It was his timing, his conviction, his road map. Stockman was bold and sure when others were hesitant, articulate when others stumbled. He sensed the moment to strike, and he showed others how to exploit the power vacuum.