Takeover (17 page)

The talk-savvy new president had plans to continue exploiting talk radio once he became president. He did eighty-two radio interviews during his first two years as president, while Hillary did eighty.

One of the Clinton’s major radio initiatives centered on Hillarycare, and it was the first really big thrust of the Clinton agenda. To help sell the proposal, the president invited more than two hundred talk radio hosts from all over the country to Washington.

They received a briefing on September 21, 1993, followed by a
lawn party two days later where they could broadcast their shows “direct from the White House.”

Top administration officials, including Hillary Clinton, HHS secretary Donna Shalala, presidential advisor David Gergen, Tipper Gore, and health care czar Ira Magaziner, were made available to the talk radio hosts to help sell Hillarycare.

The problem was that America was not responding well to the sell. As
Talkers Magazine
’s Harrison put it, “the initial infatuation with the health care plan is fading as a majority of those who choose to express themselves don’t trust Clinton, don’t trust government and don’t trust anything that smacks of socialism.”

Rush Limbaugh’s program had only been on the air nationally for about five years, but Limbaugh jumped into the fray against Hillarycare with both feet.

While Rush was leading the on-air charge against Hillarycare, in Washington Bill Kristol (formerly Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff and now editor of the
Weekly Standard
) channeled the brewing popular revolt into legislative opposition. Part of that campaign was very public—but the most important part may have been behind the scenes.

Three or four times a week, Kristol sent a barrage of faxes to thousands of conservative leaders, providing talking points against Hillarycare as well as practical advice on defeating the measure in Congress and the court of public opinion. Each new fax would be on opinion-molders’ desks the very first thing in the morning.

Talk radio first showed its potential as a political force when a few talk radio hosts began to push the idea of voters mailing tea bags to Congress to protest a proposed congressional pay raise. The idea quickly gained currency and was promoted vigorously on air. Thousands of tea bags were mailed to Washington, and the fax machine, first used between a mere dozen talk hosts in the “tea bag” campaign, became a full-fledged member of the alternative media.

The establishment media was not absent from the battle, and the
Wall Street Journal
, one of the last conservative-leaning daily newspapers
in America, waged a relentless campaign against Hillarycare, backed up by its stable of accomplished economic conservative opinion writers and commentators.

Direct mail also played a key role in the fight against Hillarycare. Dozens of conservative organizations—such as the American Conservative Union (ACU), under the leadership of David Keene and Don Devine, and the United Seniors Association, led by Sandra Butler and Kathleen Patten—mailed between twenty and twenty-five million letters.

As just one example of the breadth and depth of the campaign against Hillarycare, the Viguerie Company had the American Conservative Union as a client—in a period of one hundred days we mailed thirteen million letters, others were mailing as well, but we led the direct-mail charge in rallying grassroots conservatives to oppose Hillarycare and turn it into a nightmare for the Clinton administration.

The Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill was frozen by the outpouring of public opposition, and it stalled Clinton’s legislative agenda just as the scandals began multiplying to further bog him down. More importantly, through talk radio, millions of outside-the-Beltway Americans were empowered to express their opinions, understand that they were not alone, and rally like-minded people to their cause.

The Democrats didn’t really understand what they were up against.

At the height of the Hillarycare battle, I attended a policy forum, and one of the largest events was a panel presentation on Hillarycare, with ten panelists from the Clinton administration and an eleventh panelist from the insurance industry—a guy about 60 percent in favor of Hillarycare.

Mrs. Clinton was there watching, and they all talked as though (and apparently assumed that) Hillarycare was a fait accompli. I remember thinking,
Do you have any idea what we’re doing?

Apparently they didn’t, because the new and alternative media
of direct mail, faxes, talk radio, etc., were all under the establishment’s radar.

They sure understood afterward.

Hillary Clinton sat down to a series of interviews with sympathetic liberal reporter Adam Clymer of the
New York Times
. Clymer’s October 3, 1994, article, titled “Hillary Clinton Says Administration Was Misunderstood on Health Care,” put the blame—or credit—right where it belonged: “This battle was lost on paid media and paid direct mail,” the First Lady complained.

The new Republican majority that was elected to the House in 1994 believed that talk radio played such an important part in their victory that the Class of 1994 made Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their caucus.

While Limbaugh, Kristol, and other conservative activists made opposition to Hillarycare the rallying point for opposition to Clinton and the Democrats, that effort by itself wasn’t enough to rebuild the Republican brand after the damage George H. W. Bush had done to it.

What was needed was a new platform and new faces for the GOP, and going into the 1994 midterm election, Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, and the new conservative leaders of the Republicans in the House had a plan to rebrand the Republican Party, and in the process repair much of the damage Bush had done.

It was called “The Contract with America.” You can find the Contract with America in
appendix 4
of this book.

While many members of the Gingrich leadership team have claimed a hand in the Contract with America, it was pure Ronald Reagan, and according to Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, it took much of its substance from Reagan’s Second Inaugural Address.

While Newt Gingrich later wrote (with typical hyperbole) that “there is no comparable congressional document in our two-hundred-year history,” he was right in the sense that never before had the technique of nationalizing an election been applied with such discipline to congressional campaigns.

And, I might add, never before had an effort been made to so completely expunge the legacy of a president only two years after his defeat, since practically everything in the Contract with America was intended to scream at voters, “We’re not George Bush!” and at least one of the provisions of the Contract, that on compensation of property owners, was intended to mitigate the harm caused by Bush’s wetlands policy.

As Jeffrey B. Gayner, writing for the Heritage Foundation, noted in 1995:

The revolutionary character of the change represented by the Contract went beyond the US House of Representatives. Not only did the 367 Republican candidates for the House of Representatives who signed the document run election campaigns based on its provisions, but many of the campaigns for the US Senate, as well as state and local government races, also pivoted around the fundamental questions concerning the role of government in society as reflected in the Contract. In short, the Contract may come to symbolize the most profound change in the American political landscape in the last half century and, in many respects, determine the character of American government well into the 21st century.
¹

Gingrich, Armey, and the rest of the new House Republican leadership were helped in this effort by the retirement of long time minority leader Bob Michel—the old establishment Republicans who had accepted minority status as their lot in life (and learned to like it) and who had opposed the policies of Ronald Reagan were now mostly gone.

In their place were young, principled conservatives who were prepared to not just talk a good game, but (unlike George H. W. Bush) actually act on those promises.

The Contract with America was introduced at a big Capitol Hill rally, September 13, 1994, about six weeks out from Election Day 1994. The Contract with America allowed House Republicans to shift the debate in the last six weeks of the campaign to the size, scope, and
intrusiveness of government, and almost as important, to the elitist character of Washington and its permanent liberal majority.

Democrats and the establishment media jeered, but the voters embraced the Contract with America, and the result was a fifty-four-seat swing from Democrats to Republicans.

Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley was defeated for reelection in his district, becoming the first Speaker of the House to fail to win reelection since the Civil War. Scandal-tainted Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois was defeated, as was House Judiciary Committee chairman Jack Brooks of Texas. In all, thirty-four incumbent Democrats were defeated.

Republicans gained a majority of seats in the United States House of Representatives for the first time since 1954, and Newt Gingrich was set to be elected Speaker.

The Contract with America showed once again that conservative principles, clearly articulated, win elections.

And as Speaker, Gingrich made good on the Contract—within the first 102 days of the new Congress, all of the provisions of the Contract with America got a vote … at least in the House.

In the Senate, it was a different story, with the Republican establishment’s 1994 senate candidates, such as Mitt Romney, opposing the Contract with America before the election, and establishment Republican senators, such as Oregon’s Mark Hatfield, opposing it on the floor of the Senate; as House Republicans sent bills over to implement it, many of the most popular provisions of the Contract (such as the Balanced Budget Amendment) failed by narrow margins in the Senate.

Next to congressional term limits, the Balanced Budget Amendment was probably the most popular element of the Contract with America, and all but one of the Senate’s fifty-three Republicans voted for the amendment, along with fourteen of forty-seven Democrats. But that was still one vote shy of the two-thirds majority required for passage of any proposed constitutional amendment. The House had passed the measure by a vote of 300 to 132, well over the margin.

Thanks in large measure to opposition from establishment Republican senators, most of the Contract got the promised House vote, but never became law, causing CATO Institute chairman Ed Crane to observe in 2000 that the budget for those programs the Contract had proposed to abolish had growth of about 13 percent since the Contract with America was announced and Republicans took control of the House.
²

Clearly, something was amiss in the re-branded Republican Party.

W
hen Democratic president Bill Clinton said in his January 23, 1996, State of the Union Address that “the era of Big Government is over,” and “We know Big Government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem. We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means,” it sounded as though conservatives had won; we could fold our tents and go home.

Of course, 1996 was an election year, and politicians, particularly Democrats like Bill Clinton, are prone to say anything they think will get them elected or reelected, and in this case Clinton was simply facing reality. With Newt Gingrich holding the Speaker’s gavel and the House leadership by and large in the hands of conservatives, the era of Big Government seemed to be on the ropes.

The question was, would Big Government go down for the count, or come back to go another round?

The Republican presidential primary elections and the budget impasse between Clinton and Gingrich, which resulted in two government shut downs lasting a total of twenty-eight days, dominated
the political environment when Clinton gave his 1996 State of the Union Address.

Establishment Republican Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader, was running for president in 1996, and the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries were looming. Dole wanted to put the budget crisis behind him and get out on the road to campaign, despite the willingness of other Republicans to continue the fight unless their demands were met.

Gingrich for once failed to effectively make the case for conservative policy on the budget and came away looking as though the budget fight with Clinton was personal.

Democrats and their allies in the media attacked Gingrich’s motives for the budget standoff. The polls began to suggest that the standoff and Gingrich’s comments were damaging the Speaker politically, and he later referred to his comments as his “single most avoidable mistake” as Speaker.

Clinton’s approval rating fell significantly during the shutdown, indicating that the public also blamed the president for the government shutdown, but once the fight was over, Clinton’s approval ratings shot back up to the highest level seen since his election.

Gingrich later argued that the government shutdown led to the balanced-budget deal of 1997 and the first four consecutive balanced budgets since the 1920s. He also argued that the 1996 election brought about the first reelection of a Republican majority since 1928, and that was due in some measure to the Republicans’ willingness to go to the mat on the budget.

Gingrich was right; while the 1996 Republican candidate for president, Bob Dole, went down in defeat and Republicans suffered a net loss of eight seats in the House, they managed to retain a 228–207 seat majority in the House, and in the Senate Republicans actually gained two seats.

The problem for Republicans was that the budget standoff with Clinton revealed the continuing fault line in the Republican Party and reenergized the Republican establishment to undercut
conservatives on the budget and fiscal policy.

Once again, the toughest battle for conservatives was not with Democrats and liberals; it was with the establishment Republicans, like Bob Dole, who were only too happy to spend more and let government grow if it would just keep the budget battle off the front page.