Power Game (118 page)

But here, as in Europe, the national parties have been essential vehicles for formulating the nation’s agenda, presenting programs and candidates to the electorate, and then implementing those programs by marshaling majorities in Congress. Voters deride parties and many politicians try to walk away from them, but parties are indispensable for governing.

“The political party is the tie that binds, the glue that fastens, the bridge that unites the disparate institutions that make up the government,” observed James Sundquist, a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Without parties, democracy on a national scale simply couldn’t work.”
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Traditionally, parties have been the essential link between the voters
and government. Elections provide people with the opportunity to send a national message to their leaders. Voting for the “out” party has long been the vehicle for registering discontent with current policies and for producing new policies and new power arrangements. Changes in the balance of power between the major parties are signals of the electorate’s demand for a change in political direction.

For decades, it was primarily the role of political parties to nominate presidential candidates, raise the money and organize political campaigns, draw together the demands of diverse interest groups, and meld them into a general program, and help the public sort out its broad choices by encouraging identification with one of the two major parties.

But the primacy and the structure of our parties have been undermined by a host of changes. Presidential nomination is now determined in direct popular primaries. Party endorsement is an empty ritual. Candidates raise their own money and build personal organizations, bypassing party machinery. With the progressive reforms of the early twentieth century (referendum, initiative, and direct primaries), the public grabbed power from party bosses. In the nineteenth century, parties actually distributed ballots to voters—all straight tickets. But today, voting machines make split-ticket voting easy; only twenty-one states permit levers for straight-ticket voting.

Not only do parties no longer distribute ballots, but their historic role of dispensing patronage and social services has all but expired. The civil service has largely replaced patronage, and government programs have replaced the handouts of local party bosses and machines. Political clubs have withered as social centers, and party machines in big cities such as Boston and Chicago lack the steady infusion of new immigrants to swell the faithful party rank and file.

What is more, the parties have been shoved into the shadows by the modern technology and techniques of politics. Television, not the party network, is now the main channel of communication between candidates and the electorate. Political consultants and pollsters have replaced party bosses as the managers of candidates, the manipulators of political messages, the interpreters of the public mood. Government subsidies and PACs now compete with parties as the underwriters of campaigns. Even when parties raise hundreds of millions of dollars and support candidates with all kinds of help and advice, they act as service centers, not as hubs of power-giving direction and discipline. PACs are far more aggressive than parties are after elections, following up to see that victorious candidates attend to their pet issues.

Finally, parties have lost their strength as unifying forces across the
country. Brand-name loyalty simply does not work with voters as it used to. The most important phenomenon of American politics in the past quarter century has been the rise of independent voters who have at times outnumbered Republicans. Independent voters plus millions of ticket-splitting party members, hopscotch their ballots from office to office, foiling any party’s attempts to gain unified control of government for any length of time.

Political analysts such as William Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute make the point that under pressure from New Right and New Left activists, both major parties have narrowed philosophically, and this has lessened their political reach.
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In presidential primaries, ideological activists have occasionally pushed both parties to pick ideological presidential candidates: Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 for the Republicans, George McGovern for the Democrats in 1972.

As Schneider observed, the two biggest third-party presidential candidacies in the past two decades reflected mass disenchantment with the way mainstream parties were being pushed toward extremes. In 1968, George Wallace led a revolt of conservative southern whites disgusted with the liberal civil rights policies of the national Democratic party. His bolt helped elect Richard Nixon by a minority vote. In 1980, John Anderson’s independent presidential candidacy signaled the disaffection of northern Republican liberals and moderates, no longer at home in a party controlled by militant conservatives. Although Reagan won fifty-one percent of the popular vote in 1980, these two big splinter movements demonstrated the absence of an enduring majority party.

The Partisan Rhythm of History

The emergence of a new partisan majority would not only give greater coherence to American government, it would fit the patterns of the past two centuries. For our two-party system has been marked by rhythmic swings from one party to another. Every three decades or so has brought a political watershed.

The first great dynasty began in 1800 with the dominance of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican party. A major realignment took place in 1828 with the rise of Jacksonian Democrats battling the Whigs, the new opposition. Another major shift occurred in 1860 with the demise of the Whig party and the birth of the unionist Republican party of Abraham Lincoln. Then in 1896, after a muddy two decades
of often-divided government, the Democrats swung to the western, silver-standard populism of William Jennings Bryan, while the gold-standard, probusiness Republicans gained national hegemony with the election of William McKinley in 1896. Republican dominance lasted, allowing for the interlude of Woodrow Wilson, until Franklin Delano Roosevelt forged the New Deal Democratic coalition in 1932. Then, for two uninterrupted decades, the Democrats held the White House.

This historic rhythm, with swings every twenty-eight to thirty-six years, should have produced a new watershed between 1960 and 1968 with a Republican majority replacing the New Deal coalition.

The first trumpeting of the Republican coming sounded in 1952 when Dwight Eisenhower cracked Democratic control of the West and the Solid South. Republicans, winning House and Senate as well as the White House, sensed the hinge of history opening to a new era of GOP dominance. But the Republican surge proved ephemeral. Two years later, the Democrats regained control of Congress, and despite Eisenhower’s second triumph in 1956, congressional Republicans fell back. No realignment took place.

Again with Nixon, Republicans saw their dream rekindled, especially in 1972, when they made a net gain of two Senate seats and five House seats in the South. Republican strategists saw these modest but steady gains as a harbinger of a changing balance. But the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation in 1974 threw the Republicans off track. Kevin Phillips, a Nixon strategist who wrote
The Emerging Republican Majority
, told me years later that he believed that Watergate had blocked the normal swing of the pendulum and prevented full Republican realignment.
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In 1974, the Democrats won the Senate for six more years, firmed up an unbeatable majority in the House, and set the stage for Jimmy Carter’s unexpected victory in 1976.

But Watergate created an illusion of Democratic strength. For despite its hold on Congress, the Democratic party was losing its grip on the country and its long hegemony over national government. During the past two decades, the Democrats have suffered painful hemorrhages among traditional constituencies in both North and South.

At its core, Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition was an uneasy alliance of its northern and southern wings: white southerners, mainly Protestant, conservative, largely rural and mostly native-stock Americans; and white northerners, mainly Catholic, liberal, urban, and largely ethnic immigrants. If either faction pressed its agenda too hard, the other was sure to be disaffected.

Issues of race, war, and the economy finally tore apart FDR’s coalition.
In two great waves, millions of voters abandoned the Democratic party. The first major defection came among white southerners from the mid-1960s onward, mainly because of their anger at the civil rights policies of the northern liberal wing but also because of disenchantment with liberal Democratic opposition to Vietnam War. The defection was especially stunning among evangelical Christians. Overall, Democrats lost more than half their strength among southern whites. Republican strength doubled among this group and independent voters tripled. In 1952, for example, seventy-eight percent of white southerners called themselves Democrats; but after Reagan’s 1984 reelection, only thirty-seven percent were still self-proclaimed Democrats. In that interval Republicans shot up from eleven to twenty-four percent and independents from twelve to thirty-nine percent.
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The second great Democratic defection came in the North during the early 1980s among urban ethnic blue-collar voters. These were mainly the rank and file of organized labor who had long regarded the Democratic party as their bulwark against economic adversity. In the 1960s, many of these working class voters were upset with the Democratic party’s stand on racial issues and foreign policy. Some flirted with George Wallace in 1968. But the Democratic record of protecting them from inflation and unemployment held their allegiance—
until
Jimmy Carter soured Democratic credibility with blue-collar voters.

Ironically, Carter fashioned the political litmus test that sealed his own fate and wounded his party. To highlight Republican economic failures, Carter invented the “misery index,” which added the rates of inflation and unemployment. In 1976, Carter browbeat Gerald Ford mercilessly for a misery index of 15.3. But in October 1980, Carter’s own misery index shot up to 21.3. Reagan used that miserable record, and his later success in beating down inflation, to lure away big labor’s rank and file. Reagan got fifty-four percent of the blue-collar vote against organized labor’s candidate, Walter Mondale, in 1984.
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Weakened by these two large defections, the Democrats have competed poorly for the White House in the past two decades, except for Carter’s paper-thin, post-Watergate victory over Ford in 1976. The weakness of Democratic presidential candidates underscores the erosion of Democratic strength nationwide. Three times—in 1968, 1972, and 1984—the Democrats fielded variations of the same ticket: a northern liberal Protestant running for president with a northern liberal Catholic as a running mate (Humphrey and Muskie in 1968; McGovern and Shriver in 1972; Mondale and Ferraro in 1984). All three times, the Democratic ticket got only about forty percent of the
popular vote, a weak race for the presidency. In 1980, Carter, as incumbent president and a southerner, got only 41.7% of the vote.

That poor Democratic record highlights one hallmark of a major realignment: the Republican “lock” on the presidency. Lock is the graphic term of Horace Busby, a political commentator who rose to prominence as a Texas lieutenant of Lyndon Johnson. In the last five presidential elections, Busby points out, Republican nominees have won a staggering seventy-seven percent of the nation’s electoral college votes while Democrats have won just twenty-one percent. (Third parties won two percent.) Busby calls Republicans America’s “presidential party,” arguing that the Republican party appeals to that basic conservatism of Americans.
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In support his lock idea, Busby notes that in the nine presidential elections from 1952 through 1984, twenty-nine states voted Republican at least seven times—and those states cast 289 electoral votes, more than an Electoral College majority (270 votes). Twenty-three states have gone Republican the last five times in a row, while only the District of Columbia went Democratic five times. The strong pro-Republican group covers every state from the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast except Texas, Oklahoma, and Washington. In short, Republican ascendancy rides on people moving to the Sunbelt, both West and South.

Again, this fits historical patterns. Virtually every political realignment in American history has been a revolt of what then constituted the South and West against established power in the North and East—originally the Virginia dynasty against the New England and New York federalists, then the border states and Middle West against the Eastern seaboard, and so on. Nowadays, California and the Rocky Mountain West have anchored the new Republican power base, usually joined by Florida, symbol of the new Sunbelt, against established power centers in the industrial Rustbelt heartland and the old South.
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Reagan Tugs the Grass Roots

What the Republican drive for hegemony lacked was sufficient voter strength at the grass roots and growing echelons of Republican officeholders, from city hall and state legislatures up to Congress. No one worked harder at patient party building than former Republican National Chairman Bill Brock, a former senator from Tennessee and later Labor secretary under Reagan. Starting in 1977, Brock developed Republican fund-raising muscle and high-tech politics. With computers,
well-culled donor lists, and sophisticated direct mail, the Republican party shifted financially from the party of fat-cat donors to the party of small contributors. By 1980, Republican House and Senate campaign committees were raising from five to nine times as much money as their Democratic counterparts were—and the money gave a great boost to the 1980 crop of Republican congressional candidates.

The Reagan tide of 1980 quickened Republican expectations of a full-fledged political realignment, picking up where Nixon had been blunted by Watergate. With their 1980 gain of twelve seats in the Senate and thirty-three in the House, Republicans thought they had found legs to win in Congress as well as take the White House. Exuberantly, Republican leaders such as Congressman Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan boasted they would take over the House in 1982. They ballyhooed conversions of congressional Democrats, celebrating in the White House Rose Garden when Pennsylvania’s Eugene Atkinson joined Republican ranks, and jubilant at later crossovers by Phil Gramm of Texas, Andy Ireland of Florida, Bob Stump of Arizona.