It's My Party

Also by Peter Robinson

Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA

IT’S MY PARTY
. Copyright © 2000 by Peter Robinson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher,
except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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Contents

Also by Peter Robinson

Copyright

Prologue: Still Republican After All These Years

Chapter One: Mount Reagan

Chapter Two: Along the Rippling Susquehanna

Chapter Three: To Live and Die in Dixie

Chapter Four: Cool and Uncool, or Medialand

Chapter Five: Converts

Chapter Six: A Tale of Two Cities

Chapter Seven: The Prickly Ladies of the Cactus State, or Women

Chapter Eight: On the Border of the Finkelstein Box

Chapter Nine: George And Rudy’s Excellent Adventure

Epilogue: Love?

Acknowledgments

For my mother and father

Alice May Booth Robinson

Theodore Herbert Robinson

and my brother

Donald Joseph Robinson

Omnia cooperantur in bonum

I
grew up Republican. There were extenuating circumstances. I was born to Republican parents and raised in a Republican neighborhood.
(A big family named Federowicz lived a couple of streets away from us, and I see now that as Polish Catholics they may have
been Democrats all along. It is a measure of just how Republican our neighborhood was that all these years later I find the
thought of Democrats in our midst unsettling.) Thus I took the Republican imprint before I was old enough to understand what
was happening.

Yet it is difficult for me to escape all responsibility here. After attaining the age of reason—or at least the age at which
I could legally drive, drink, and vote—I remained a Republican. In college I even became something of a campus politician,
editing the opinion page of the college newspaper, writing a political column, and contributing to an upstart conservative
newspaper, the now notorious
Dartmouth Review
. Studying at Oxford for a couple of years after graduating, I infuriated my dons by revealing an enthusiasm for Margaret
Thatcher—cheering for Tories is what Republicans do when they find themselves in England—and when I returned home I became
in effect a professional Republican, taking a job in the Reagan White House.

I was a speechwriter. I name the position because it carried a particular requirement. Broadly speaking, the Reagan administration
was divided between pragmatists and true believers. Speechwriters were true believers. Nobody was ever likely to ask a deputy
assistant secretary of commerce or labor whether he believed Reagan was right to call the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” But
the speechwriters? We had to believe Reagan was right. We were the ones who had come up with the line. I believed in nearly
every word Ronald Reagan uttered. I mean it. When I did disagree with Reagan it was because I thought he was being too soft,
not too hard. (The chief of staff, Donald Regan, once told the speechwriters to go easier on Gorbachev. We refused. Regan
had to troop us into the Oval Office to hear it from the president himself.)

Even after leaving the White House I continued to take steps that look Republican. First, I went to business school. Now,
students at business schools are less Republican than you might think—in a poll of my classmates, Michael Dukakis led George
Bush for president—but when they graduate, often walking into the highest tax bracket the same day they walk into their new
jobs, they begin migrating to the GOP.
^*
At my class’s tenth reunion this past spring, you couldn’t have spilled a beer without splashing a Republican. After business
school I spent a year working for Rupert Murdoch, then a year working for the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
A media mogul and a capitalist tool—fitting items on a Republican rÉsumÉ. Finally I joined the think tank where I now work.
Although it avoids partisan ties, the think tank espouses free market principles, endearing itself, not surprisingly, to members
of the GOP. The name of the think tank, I had better admit, is the Hoover Institution. That would be “Hoover” as in “Herbert.”
Herbert Hoover founded the institution in 1919. Nine years later he was elected to the White House. One year after that the
Great Depression struck, transforming Hoover’s reputation from that of a business genius and humanitarian into that of a glassy-eyed,
hard-hearted … Republican.

I recognize that the evidence against me is enough to get me hanged. I can picture my body twisting, with a placard,
STAUNCH REPUBLICAN
or
GOP ZEALOT
, pinned to my shirtfront. The odd thing is, the lynching party would be wrong. I’m not a zealot. I’m not even staunch. I’ve
always kept a strict distance between myself and the Republican Party. The distance has existed only in my mind, I grant you.
But it has been no less real for that.

I learned early in life to place this distance between myself and the GOP. When I was a boy, each day when my father arrived
home from work he would open the
Binghamton Evening Press
. I can’t tell you the number of times I saw him shake his head in disapproval as he read about yet another lavish spending
project enacted by our governor and fellow Republican, Nelson Rockefeller. In those days the Republican Party so dominated
New York that the big political divide ran not between Republicans and Democrats but between Republicans upstate, where we
lived, and Republicans in New York City, where Nelson Rockefeller lived, and where we couldn’t even imagine living. Republicans
upstate were decent and frugal. Republicans in New York City were extravagant, with their own money and that of the taxpayers
alike. You might have to share a political party with such people, the look on my father’s face suggested, but you didn’t
have to feel pleased about it.

As I’ve said, this distance between myself and my fellow Republicans stayed with me. During my high school and college years
the leading Republicans ran from the shifty-eyed and criminal (Richard Nixon) to the bland and hapless (Gerald Ford). If the
GOP was the minority party, it was easy enough to see why, and I viewed the Republican Party with the same faint disgust that
I imagine must characterize sports fans who follow the Chicago Cubs, the Boston Red Sox, and other perennial losers. Later,
during the Republican resurgence of the 1980s, I gave my heart to Ronald Reagan, for reasons I will discuss in due course,
but never, even then, to the GOP itself. It may seem a small matter, but I feel sure one of the reasons was that I had to
tag along with the president or vice president to so many Republican fund-raisers. Fund-raisers were events that rich people
put on for the benefit of other rich people. Or so it certainly seemed. At a fundraiser you could spend as long as you wanted
studying the crowd, which would be milling around the ballroom of a hotel or the living room of a huge private home, but the
only people of modest means you’d ever spot would be the ones in uniform, tending the bar or circulating with trays of drinks
and canapés. I knew the Republican Party championed economic opportunity for the little guy as much as for the plutocrat—I
was writing speeches that said so. But at a fund-raiser you could see that for a lot of people belonging to the Republican
Party was like belonging to a club. A very good club, judging from the size of the shrimp.

The years since Ronald Reagan left the White House have done nothing to make me feel more at home in the GOP. George Bush?
A likeable man—I came to know him well when I wrote speeches for him. But in some ways he was like those well-heeled Republicans
at whom my father used to shake his head. I once heard a member of his staff chastise Bush, then vice president, for wearing
striped cloth watchbands. “It looks too preppie,” the staffer said. Bush replied, “I like it and I’m keeping it. That’s the
way I am.” Bush was right. If he’d gotten rid of his striped watchbands he’d have been engaging in pure artifice, pretending
to be something he wasn’t. But the staffer had a point, too. A lot of Americans found it difficult to feel comfortable with
a politician from such a patrician background. There were times when I was one of them. Bob Dole? I flipped channels to avoid
watching the 1996 GOP convention nominate Dole for president. All those good people, attempting to whip themselves into a
state of enthusiasm for a candidate who had no idea why he was running.

Spendthrifts such as Nelson Rockefeller, suspicious characters such as Richard Nixon, bumblers such as Gerald Ford, self-satisfied
rich people such as the ones I encountered at fund-raisers, patricians such as George Bush, time-servers such as Bob Dole.
There was always so much in the Republican Party of which I disapproved.

“Of course there was always a lot of stuff in the GOP of which you disapproved,” my friend David Brady recently told me. A
professor of political science at Stanford, David is a big man who speaks bluntly. He and I talked over the Republican Party
repeatedly while I was writing this book. “The GOP is a political party, for Pete’s sake,” David said. “It tries to put together
the views of tens of millions of Americans. Most people don’t even approve of all the people in their own family. How is anybody
ever going to approve of all the people in an organization that includes something like 30 percent of all Americans? A distance
between yourself and the Republican Party, my backside. You’re just looking down on political activists the way everybody
does. Let me ask you this. How many times have you ever voted for a Democrat?”

I swallowed hard. The answer was none.

David laughed. “That’s good, Peter,” he said. “That’s a real distance you’re keeping there.”

My views were Republican, I voted Republican, I had worked in a White House that was Republican. Whatever the distance from
the GOP that I may have cultivated in my own mind over the years, it was nothing anybody else would ever have been able to
detect. I had to admit it. I was as Republican as they come. That may have been obvious to you as soon as you began reading
this introduction, but it came as

a rude awakening to me.

* * *

The country may be in for a rude awakening of its own.

In the 2000 elections, all three branches of the federal government will be in play as they are only a couple of times in
each century. In Congress, both chambers are at stake. In the House, the Republican majority is tenuous. Either party could
capture the chamber outright. In the Senate, the GOP appears likely to retain its majority. Yet if the Democrats win enough
seats, they could persuade northeastern Republicans to join them in a liberal coalition, effectively bringing the chamber
under Democratic control. The White House will have no incumbent running for reelection for the first time since 1988. Either
party could win it. The Supreme Court and the federal bench, both almost evenly divided between liberal and conservative judges,
could each see its balance tipped by the new president’s appointments—and the new president, again, could be a member of either
party.

Of course, the GOP could lose all three branches. Losing comes naturally to Republicans. Look at Congress. From 1954 to 1994
the Republican Party failed to achieve a single majority in the House of Representatives while eking out majorities in the
Senate in only eight years out of forty. Or look at the White House. After Republicans had held the White House for twenty-eight
of the forty years from 1952 to 1992, political scientists had come to refer to the GOP as the “presidential party.” Then
George Bush found a way to lose to Bill Clinton. Bush’s margin of defeat was six percentage points, which in presidential
politics isn’t even close. Four years later the Republican Party turned down a number of attractive candidates for president
to nominate Bob Dole instead. Dole’s margin of defeat was eight percentage points. If the GOP loses in 2000, count on a lot
of gracious concession speeches. Republicans have had practice.

Yet the scenario for a GOP victory isn’t all that implausible. It goes like this. The Republican Party nominates an appealing
presidential candidate, perhaps, to name the leading contender as I write, George W. Bush, the governor of Texas.
^*
In winning the White House, Bush pulls fifteen or twenty new Republicans into the House of Representatives, securing a small
but solid Republican majority. In the Senate, most of the nineteen Republicans up for reelection are returned to office, while
seats the GOP loses are offset by seats, possibly in Virginia and Nevada, that the GOP picks up. With Republicans in control
of the Senate, which of course will have to confirm his appointments, President George W. Bush will proceed to fill the vacancies
that arise on the Supreme Court and the federal bench just as he pleases.