Power Game (90 page)

A Genuine Bipartisan Core

The real genius in forging a more genuine bipartisan coalition for tax reform turned out to be Bob Packwood, the maverick moderate Republican who became Finance Committee chairman in late 1984. More than any committee member except for Democrat Bill Bradley, Packwood mastered the substance of the tax bill. But for several weeks, he lost control of the bill in his committee, and neither President Reagan
nor Jim Baker could rescue him. Various special business interests had gotten senators to add one provision after another to protect them; the bill had lost its reform flavor and its appeal. Don Regan told me that by mid-April 1986, the White House regarded the tax-reform bill as dead in the Finance Committee because special interests had overwhelmed Packwood.

Alarmed by his predicament, Packwood suddenly reversed field. Although business interests kept pretty much of what they had already gained, Packwood outflanked his committee by reaching for a more daring reform on individual tax rates than either Reagan or Rostenkowski had attempted. He chose one central concept to overcome special interests, excite popular support, and revive the notion of reform; it was precisely the kind of bold maneuver needed to pull together a coalition, for any successful coalition requires a single, fairly simple driving idea to attract support from a variety of factions: In 1981, Reagan’s budget bill rode on the idea of cutting government; his 1981 tax bill rode on the idea of cutting taxes; Dole’s 1985 budget bill rode on cutting the deficit; Reagan’s tax bill, on cutting top individual tax rates and making business pay; and Rostenkowski’s tax bill, on cutting middle-class tax rates and making the rich pay.

Packwood electrified Congress by going Reagan and Rostenkowski one better. He proposed to cut the top individual tax rate from fifty percent—not just to thirty-five percent as Reagan had proposed, but to twenty-five percent. He would finance that rate by raising $50 billion over five years through shutting down tax dodges for the rich and by raising another $150 billion over five years by ending the special capital gains tax rate, another boon to well-heeled investors. This was the stuff for a very broad coalition, for it appealed to both political extremes. The basic concept was so stunning that it attracted right-wing conservatives as well as liberals and moderates. The liberals had long wanted tax loopholes closed and conservatives liked driving the tax rates way down to twenty-five percent. After some initial press scoffing, Packwood’s plan—borrowing heavily from the earlier Democratic bill of Bill Bradley and Dick Gephardt—had a magnetic effect on Congress.

In putting together his coalition, Packwood was ingenious enough to form a bipartisan core group with Democrats such as Bill Bradley, Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, and George Mitchell of Maine; moderate Republicans such as himself, John Chafee of Rhode Island, and Jack Danforth of Missouri; and a right-wing conservative such as Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming. As Moynihan told me, it was the millionaires—Chafee, Danforth, and Bradley—who were most fed up
with the old tax loopholes. With a bipartisan core at the outset, Packwood avoided the kind of partisan revolt that took place in the House.

As it turned out, the tax books would not balance unless the top individual tax rate was taken up eventually to twenty-eight percent (with a hidden thirty-three-percent rate added later). Each rise caused some hesitation. But the sudden promise of bringing the top rate below thirty percent captured the popular imagination and generated unbeatable momentum in the Senate—the same coalition ingredients that had worked for Reagan in 1981. Packwood deftly worked the “soup kitchen” to dole out favors to gain more votes, one by one, and suddenly there was a bandwagon effect. His bill got unanimous approval from the Finance Committee; it sailed through the Senate. And after some long bargaining with Rostenkowski, a modified Packwood plan got passed by Congress.

In this final legislative round in 1986, President Reagan was not a central player—certainly not the coalition leader. He was mostly at the sidelines, encouraging Packwood and working near the end to make sure the House Republicans did not upset things. Actually, it is not surprising that a moderate Republican such as Packwood, rather than Reagan, had taken the lead. Grand coalition politics come more naturally to a moderate, centrist Republican such as Packwood than to Dole, a more partisan Republican, or to Reagan, an ideological conservative. A centrist such as Packwood lives by compromise, throwing his weight first to one flank and then the other. In this case, Packwood pulled the two flanks to the center. Reagan was very lucky, for his own strategists did not know how to rescue the tax bill. Packwood not only brought it back to life but redeemed Reagan’s promises to the House Republicans.

What Packwood demonstrated, as Reagan himself had done in 1981 with his budget and tax cutting, was that the vision of a simple idea—in this case a dramatic cut in personal tax rates—was enough to overcome the opposition of special interests. To make the tax coalition work, it took that vision, some masterful committee bargaining by Rostenkowski as well as by Packwood, plus the tenacity and flexibility of Jim Baker and Dick Darman in improvising the politics of the bipartisan coalition, and Reagan’s tenacity. Whatever the issue, any future president will need these same basic ingredients to pull together a governing coalition across party lines—as our system so often requires.

In the pantheon of twentieth-century Democratic politicians, Sam Rayburn stands for many as the model speaker of the House. Rayburn helped Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 extend the prewar draft and enact many wartime measures. Rayburn helped Dwight Eisenhower in 1955 pass the Formosa Resolution, formally throwing American protection over the Chinese National Government on Formosa. Rayburn gave young jack Kennedy a vital hand in 1961 in curbing the power of the House Rules Committee, the obstructionist bastion of conservatives. During forty-nine years in the House starting in 1913, Rayburn came to symbolize authority and cohesion. Rayburn, son of a Confederate cavalryman from Flag Springs, Texas, was physically intimidating: stocky and bull-like, with a strong, bald skull, penetrating eyes, and a barrel chest. He was known for a bristling temper, scolding younger members or punishing them like a schoolmaster. To his troops, he seemed stern, remote, imposing, powerful.

But the Rayburn legend is a bit misleading, for with presidents and other major power brokers, Rayburn was more accommodating than his
wary scowl suggested. When Rayburn became speaker in 1938, Franklin Roosevelt was worried that Rayburn was too cautious by nature and delivered him a patronizing pep talk, lecturing Rayburn that “it is better to go down fighting than it is to accept defeat without fighting.”
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Over the years, senior committee chairmen sometimes defied Rayburn; he repeatedly shied away from dramatic confrontations with the Rules Committee, often acquiescing when it killed bills that he or the president wanted. And Rayburn worked at collaboration with the White House, no matter which party was in charge.

During the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, Speaker Rayburn and his fellow Texan, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, became renowned for cooperation with the Republican administration. They profited by the appearance of collaboration with the popular Eisenhower, who was a national hero and mostly a nonideological, nonpartisan president. As my colleague John Finney of
The New York Times
recalled, Johnson was fond of pulling from his pocket a card with a list of legislative achievements and bragging, “Look what I’ve gotten done for Ike.”
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As leaders of the opposition, Rayburn and Johnson practiced bipartisanship—with a definite partisan twist. Unlike the Opposition leader in the British Parliament, who leads a minority, Rayburn and Johnson had real power; they led majorities in both houses. They knew Eisenhower needed them. They would go to the president’s living quarters in the White House every few weeks and, in Johnson’s homey image, “sip bourbon and branch water with Ike.” The president told them what he wanted, and they would tell him the most he could expect from Congress. Basic deals were struck. Back on Capitol Hill, Rayburn and Johnson would shunt aside Democratic alternatives to Ike’s pet legislation. Their tactic was to take White House bills (a massive highway act, a civil rights bill), leave the Republican label on them, and then remodel the contents to give them Democratic flavor. That was their way of playing the opposition game: cooperating and remodeling. Seen from the partisan 1980s, that was a halcyon period of bipartisanship.

Whenever a party loses the White House but controls one or both houses of Congress, its congressional leaders have a choice of opposition game. They can go for Rayburn-Johnson-style collaboration with the White House, or they can take on the president in head-on confrontation. After Richard Nixon’s election in 1968, for example, House Democrats under Speaker John McCormack fought Nixon tooth and nail on domestic spending. Nixon’s defiant stand that he did not have to spend all the funds that Congress voted for social programs left
McCormack and company little choice but to fight to protect the institutional powers of Congress. The showdowns over federal spending grew so heated that Congress finally passed the Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974 to force future presidents to abide by congressional appropriations.

Changing the Role of Speaker

When Ronald Reagan took over the presidency in 1981, Speaker Tip O’Neill had a choice of strategy, and his decision assumed even greater importance for the Democratic party than Rayburn’s role under Eisenhower. For in Eisenhower’s day, there had been Democratic leaders in both houses to share national party leadership. But in 1981, with the Republicans controlling the Senate, O’Neill stood alone as the nation’s top-ranking Democrat, second in line of succession after the vice president.

O’Neill was suddenly thrust into performing as the voice of opposition, as spokesman as well as strategist for the Democratic party for six years—except during four months in 1984 when Walter Mondale was Reagan’s official Democratic challenger. This high-profile role was not a function for which O’Neill, an old-fashioned, behind-the-scenes legislative tactician, had been trained. But circumstance demanded that O’Neill change, and he did; in the process, he altered the office of speaker, modernizing it for the media era. This Irish pol, long shy of cameras, became a far more visible national figure, better known to ordinary people than Rayburn and earlier speakers had been. His increased visibility and popularity gave him more leverage in the opposition game. At first, O’Neill was far outclassed by Reagan, but before he retired in 1987, O’Neill had fared surprisingly well.

In 1981, O’Neill had ambivalent feelings about how to play the opposition game; his strong partisan instincts were tempered by reverence for the presidency and the weakness of his political position. “I am the Opposition,” O’Neill liked to thunder. But O’Neill had been tutored by Rayburn, who revered the nation’s highest office; O’Neill picked up that reverence. Many times, I have heard O’Neill refer not merely to “The President” but more elaborately to “The President of the United States.”

Nor is this mere verbal genuflection. For as speaker, Tip O’Neill believed it was his responsibility to make the process of government work. Despite the carping of liberal Democrats, he was determined to give Reagan’s program a fair chance to stand or fall in 1981 and not to sabotage it by parliamentary obstruction. Early on, he gave Reagan
his word that Reagan’s main economic program would be voted on by the August recess in 1981. “I’ll give you your right,” he told Reagan—then adding with partisan exasperation, “but, Jesus, don’t push me.”
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That commitment, kept by O’Neill, was a great boon to Reagan’s presidency. Had the Democratic Congress given Jimmy Carter as firm a legislative schedule in 1977, Carter’s record and reputation would have been far different. The Senate stalled Carter fatally.

Reagan’s popularity and the national mood of economic crisis made it risky for O’Neill to obstruct the Reagan program; the 1982 recession could have been blamed on Democrats had they blocked the new president’s first move. As a New Deal Democrat, O’Neill opposed many specifics of Reagan’s program; but as speaker, he felt a parliamentary duty to give Reagan a fair shot.
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For example, O’Neill was wary when Reagan phoned him in June 1981 to ask for a second try to toughen up the budget resolution (his first had passed but had been watered down). Nonetheless, O’Neill arranged the second chance. “Hey, I allowed the president of the United States to put it on the table,” he declared to me one day. “My power is to stop things. I had all my ultraliberal friends saying, ‘Jesus, you shouldn’t let the son of a bitch get it on the floor.’ But he’d just had an election that he’d won, and that isn’t the way democracy works. You give him his opportunity to get his stuff on [for a vote].”
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Over the years, O’Neill occasionally joined forces with Reagan, especially when Reagan was in retreat and ready for genuine compromise. They pushed through a tax increase in 1982, agreed on modest changes in the Social Security program in 1983, and worked to pass the tax-reform bill of 1986. On another major issue, O’Neill also went far out on a limb to endorse Reagan’s use of Marines in Lebanon in 1983—only to feel betrayed when Reagan pulled them out in 1984, one week after implying that O’Neill was cowardly for suggesting a pullout. In the second Reagan term, O’Neill’s tactics became more canny. He let Senate Republicans battle Reagan on the budget and then rammed home Democratic victories on trade and South Africa.

In general, O’Neill’s strategy, his way of playing the opposition game, was far different from Rayburn’s. O’Neill’s hallmark was the politics of confrontation. He fought Reagan on the war in Nicaragua, the budget, military spending, taxes, South Africa, trade. O’Neill is a partisan scrapper by nature and training. His political school had been the highly partisan Massachusetts legislature. In Congress, he stacked committee ratios heavily for Democrats, and he believed that the opposition’s main function was to oppose on substance.