Power Game (19 page)

“Going into the White House every day to work, seeing the iron gates open and then the iron gates shut, you’re in an almost-unreal world,” Carter White House aide Stuart Eizenstat commented. “There is something almost unnatural about the way in which people treat you. There’s a certain unnatural deference. You have microphones thrust in your face and cameras watching you when you make a speech. You begin to think, perhaps, you’re more important than you thought you were when you came into the job. All of these things have the potential, if you’re not careful, to make you again feel that you have the kind of unbridled influence to do that which you will, that somehow you’re a voice of wisdom. And I think that one has to fight against that feeling.”
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Washington is a city mercurial in its moods, short in its attention span, and given to fetishes. Events flash and disappear like episodes in a soap opera, intensely important for a brief period and then quickly forgotten. Like a teenager, the political community lurches from one passion to the next, seized for a season by the Gramm-Rudman budget-balancing act, later consumed by a battle with Japan over trade sanctions, or gossiping madly over the millionaire antics of White House officials turned lobbyists.

But whatever the twist and turns, the themes are invariably political. People visiting from New York or Los Angeles complain that Washington is a guild town with just one industry and one preoccupation. New York has the intensely self-preoccupied worlds of Wall Street, Broadway, publishing, and advertising, and Chicago with its corporate headquarters, grain trade, steel industry, and distribution centers. Each city has variety, while Washington, in spite of its growing world of art, theaters, opera and symphony, has only one passion.

“it’s a one-subject town,” lamented Austin Ranney, a political scientist from California who spent a decade at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “I don’t know how many dozens or hundreds of dinner parties I went to, largely as an outsider, an observer, and yet I almost never had a conversation about music, about novels, or very briefly about anything except the weather. It was always politics, politics, politics, of the insider variety.”
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Hugh Newell Jacobson, a prominent Washington architect, protested to Barbara Gamarekian, a
New York Times
colleague of mine, “This is the only city where you can go to a black-tie dinner [in a private
home], and there at the foot of the table is a television set up to catch a press conference!”
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In Washington, people take their own importance so much for granted that their first instinct with a new book is to turn immediately, not to the first page, but to the index to see whether they are mentioned. Yet very few politicians will admit in print how much they hunger for public recognition. Paradoxically, one who did was Paul Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat, who had impressed me during his ten years in the House and Senate as less driven by vanity than most. Tsongas had voluntarily retired for family and health reasons. But after retirement, he confessed to me what “heady stuff” it was to win the title of U.S. Senator. His mind flashed back to the moment on election night 1978 when over the radio in his car came the first word that he was the likely winner, and a campaign aide blurted out, “The goddamned senator!”

“It was so overwhelming to have that word next to my name,” Tsongas said, a bit of wonder in his quiet voice even years later. “It just seemed so unlikely to everybody in the car, and yet from that moment on, that title attaches. And the respect accorded to that title, irrespective of person, is enormous, and you begin to think of yourself in those terms. To a lot of senators that title is life. I’ve seen people who have been defeated and who basically never got over having lost the title.”
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In a very different vein, Newt Gingrich, a voluble, publicity-prone junior Republican from Georgia, admits to the exultation of making it to Washington. “There are very few games as fun as being a congressman,” he gushed one evening over a Chinese dinner. “Talk to guys who spent Christmas break traveling the world. Talk to people who landed on an aircraft carrier or went to see the space shuttle launched or had dinner at the White House or got to talk to people from
The New York Times
. There’s a sense of being at the center of things. This is the great game!”
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Congress: High School Networks

Great game or not, the individual congressman is often isolated and feeble. Without the echo and support of like-minded young Republican conservatives, Gingrich would be less exultant. In self-defense, politicians naturally band together in power networks, either within the executive branch, on Capitol Hill, or bridging the two. Obviously, the two main political parties are the basic networks of power. But the weak, loose structure of American political parties makes other networks
essential. In Congress, individual members are far less creatures of party than are their counterparts in European legislatures, whether the British Parliament, the French National Assembly, or the Canadian House of Commons, where parties provide strong organizational spine. Despite a bit of a comeback in Congress in this decade, American parties are more amorphous than they have been earlier in our history. And so, members make up their own alliance games.

“Almost everyone in government, whether he works on Capitol Hill or in the bureaucracy, is primarily concerned with his own survival,” observed Charles Peters in a knowledgeable little book,
How Washington
Really
Works
, which describes the webs that politicians spin for their own safety and advancement. “He wants to remain in Washington or in what the city symbolizes—some form of public power. Therefore from the day these people arrive in Washington they are busy building networks of people who will assure their survival in power.”
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The most natural networks are the product of generations, not the normal twenty-year generations but political generations based on when each new batch of politicians arrived in the city. California political scientist Nelson Polsby compares the Washington political community to a formation of geological strata, each new political generation layering on top of the preceding ones, each providing identity and a network of connections to its members.
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It is an apt image. The sediment of old generations hardens because so many politicians remain in Washington. Today, there are networks of older Democrats from the Kennedy and Johnson years, Republicans from the Nixon and Ford administrations, Carter Democrats and more recently the new generation of Reaganite and New Right Republicans with their conservative caucuses, think tanks and political action committees.

These generational clusters are neighborhoods in the political city. Lasting alliances get forged in the crucible of political campaigns or service in the battles between one administration and its Congress. “You have a special connection with people who are alumni of the various political wars you have fought in,” remarked Dennis Thomas, former legislative strategist in the Reagan White House. Ed Rollins, another Reagan political strategist, underscored the need for such networks for sheer survival, citing Anne Burford, Reagan’s first environmental director, as someone who lost her job because she had no network of allies.

“You just really need the network, which means, in essence, that you’ve got to give up a little bit of your independence, a little bit of
your turf and not make wars over every little issue,” Rollins explained. “Sooner or later, you’re going to need the support of some entity or another. Anne Burford is an example of people who have gotten wiped out by not having allies. She came here as a conservative, carried out Reagan’s agenda. When she got in trouble, there was no one to come to her rescue. She had not built coalitions with White House staffers. She had not built coalitions with people on the Hill. She had not built coalitions with the conservative movement. She didn’t build relations within her agency.”
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In the power fraternity, political alliances are vital not only for survival but to promote policies, to lobby former colleagues, or to play the more personal game of “careers,” advancement up the ladder for the in-and-outers who ride the ebb and flow of partisan politics upward with each generation.

Many of the most potent networks are factions of the two parties. Senator Jesse Helms and his right-wing Republican colleagues use the Steering Committee as their network to push issues or pet nominees for top administration positions, or to block the legislative initiatives of moderate Republicans or Democrats. The Steering Committee, and other networks like it, are called prayer groups, so nicknamed because they are not official arms of the Senate, just as prayer groups are usually not official arms of the church. In the House, Republicans have political fraternities, such as The Chowder and Marching Society and S.O.S. (the initials are secret). But the rough policy counterpart to the Steering Committee among House Republicans is the Conservative Opportunity Society, formed by partisans of supply-side, tax-cutting economics and less government. Moderate Republicans join the Wednesday Club, which lunches on Wednesday.

House Democrats have their own splinter groups. The liberal wing of the House Democratic Caucus gravitates to the Democratic Study Group and the Arms Control Caucus. Conservative southern Democrats (who call themselves boll weevils because, like the cotton weevil, they bore from within the boll) have formed the Conservative Democratic Forum. The list of networking groups goes on—many of them crossing party lines: the black caucus, women’s caucus, Hispanic caucus, automotive caucus, footwear caucus, space caucus, military-reform caucus, textile caucus, even the mushroom caucus.

But for most members of Congress, the most important initial networks are the freshmen classes—the legislators who arrive in Congress in the same year, especially if their first election came during a political high tide. Among Democrats, the biggest and most potent freshman
class in recent years was the class of ’74, the year when Watergate helped elect seventy-five new Democrats to the House. Among Republicans, the big years were the class of ’78, when the pendulum began to swing back toward the GOP, bringing thirty-six new Republicans into the House, and the class of ’80, when the Reagan sweep helped lift sixteen new Republicans into the Senate and fifty-two into the House.

Cutting across these freshmen-class layers are state and sectional ties. The big state delegations—California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois—marshall their troops for issues of local importance, whether military contracts or pet provisions in tax legislation. Significantly, whole state delegations, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, work together for parochial interests. The big states demand, and usually get, a set share of seats on the most powerful committees that deal with spending and taxes: Appropriations and Ways and Means in the House; Appropriations and Finance in the Senate. Then, there are broader regional coalitions, the Northeast-Midwest Caucus, or the looser clustering of western and Sunbelt politicians.

The kind of regional splits that now divide Snowbelt (Midwest and Northeast) and Sunbelt (South and West) date back in American history to Jeffersonian times. Historian James Sterling Young has written that back then, members of Congress lived together for months in boarding houses arranged along sectional lines. Those “boarding house fraternities,” as Young called them, enforced an iron social and political discipline that would be the envy of congressional leaders today. Sectional ties are still strong, but they lack the raw power of social ostracism used in the Jeffersonian era to whip members into line.
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For many decades, congressional committees have been important hubs of power, focusing the work of their members. Farm-state senators and congressmen gravitate to the agriculture committees; Rocky Mountain politicians want to be on the interior committees that affect land use and environment; those from big cities head for labor and education; and so on. Sitting side by side on those committees, parceling out funds from the federal pork barrel, committee members form alliances.

The committees become the members’ power bases for larger struggles with other power groups. Each committee forms the anchor of an “iron triangle”: the committee members and their staffs, the government agencies which the committee oversees, and the interest groups and lobbyists interested in issues which the committee handles (banking, labor, health, etc.). Sometimes the legs of the triangle clash, but
more often all three legs work things out to forge policy in their area and then combine forces to battle other special interest communities and their committees over slicing up the budget and setting priorities. The committees are the hubs of the political action.

The congressional networks evoke those in high school, as Barney Frank suggested. “Everybody’s got the same networks—your class, the people you were elected with. That’s like your high school class,” Frank observed. “Then the people from your region, they’re like the people whose neighborhood you live in. And then, the people whose committee you’re on, they’re like the other students you used to go to class with. Those are the three networks that everybody has. And you may be able to pick up some over and above that.”
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One of the most important informal networks that has developed is among younger House members who play sports or work out together in the House gym. Located in the subbasement of the Rayburn Office Building, the gym is a hideaway for members; they alone can use it. It is barred to their staffs, reporters, constituents, and most lobbyists (former members turned lobbyists can enter, but can do no serious lobbying on the premises). Senators have their own “baths.” The House gym is not large; it has a sixty-foot pool, $28,000 in Nautilus equipment, a half-length basketball court which doubles for paddleball, as well as steam, massage, and locker rooms. Some members do little more than take a steam bath, shave, shower, and go back to work refreshed; others work out daily.