Power Game (6 page)

Case in point: Ronald Reagan built a reputation as a strong president, and at times he clearly took charge: ordering the invasion of Grenada and air strikes against Libya, pressing budget and tax cuts through Congress in 1981, naming justices to the Supreme Court, or suddenly announcing plans for a space-based defense that few others thought wise or realistic. At these times, especially when dealing with foreign policy, Reagan clearly combined the functions of chief of state and prime minister, both of which are inherent in our presidency. His early legislative victories restored the vigor of the presidency and
revived public confidence in the nation’s highest office. Unquestionably, he rekindled the ceremonial majesty of the presidency.

But for other long stretches of time—not just as a late-second-term, lame-duck president, but even in his first term—the power of political initiative floated away from Reagan, despite popularity ratings on a par with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. During Reagan’s passive periods, policy has been driven not by the president but by others.

This is not unique to Reagan. Eisenhower had to bargain with Democrats Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. Nixon, Ford, and Carter all found it impossible to grasp and exercise continuous control and deliver on their pet programs. Each wound up on the defensive, with declining popularity. What is so striking and instructive about the Reagan presidency is the peculiar combination of his overwhelming personal popularity and his frequent lack of matching political leverage. It is as if we had unknowingly slipped into operating like a European parliamentary system, with its revolving coalition governments, while our president reigned above it all, a regal symbol of nationhood.

“What you have right now is a constitutional monarchy,” asserted Representative Newt Gingrich, a bright Reaganite Republican from Georgia. “What we’ve done is we’ve reinvented Hanoverian kingship without reinventing the parliamentary prime ministership. We have this tremendously nice, likable King Victoria. Everybody likes him but where the hell’s Disraeli? or Gladstone? What I’m saying is that in the age of television, we now have the television-series equivalent of [rotating] prime ministerships.”
¹²

Michael Barone, writing in
The Washington Post
, once compared the kaleidoscopic shuffle of political coalitions in the Reagan period to the Italian government, where a relatively small group of politicians shuffle and reshuffle the top government ministries. “Italian politics is often held up to ridicule as comically unstable, with constantly changing ministries, divided responsibility, and splinter parties,” he observed. “But how much different, in practice, is ours?… Functional responsibility—not necessarily the title, but the real decision-making power—gets passed around here as well, to those strong enough to grab it.”
¹³

Barone’s analogy fits, not only the Reagan years but the modern presidency in general. The president is always part of the power mix but not necessarily the central part. In 1981, when Reagan pressed his budget and tax cuts through Congress, he was at the peak of his power—the prime minister of his own coalition; his leading ministers were his budget director, David Stockman, and his White House chief
of staff, James A. Baker III. But by that same fall and into the following year, 1982, the critical role of driving economic policy had passed to Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Volcker’s tight money policies were wringing inflation out of the economy and bringing on a painful recession that the president could not prevent; Reagan deficits compounded the problem.

In the spring of 1982, a new political coalition emerged to take over policy leadership, a surprising partnership between Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker and House Speaker Tip O’Neill. They forced the president to backtrack and accept a $98 billion, three-year tax increase in August 1982. They eventually pushed through two jobs bills, and they worked out a Social Security compromise with the president. In the spring of 1983, the MX issue was resolved by a new coalition spearheaded by two congressmen, Les Aspin of Wisconsin and Albert Gore of Tennessee, and Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. These three Democrats stepped into a foreign-policy vacuum left by Reagan’s inability to move Congress. In the election year of 1984, little happened and the nation was left with a caretaker government.

Surprisingly, after his landslide reelection in 1984, Reagan did not reclaim the prime ministership in 1985. His one big policy push was tax reform, but that was slow in coming. The start of Reagan’s second term marked a rapid turnover in national political leadership. First came Robert Dole, the new Senate majority leader, who drove the budget process for six months, insisting on austerity for both the Pentagon and Social Security. When the White House pulled the rug out from Dole and toppled his coalition, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, took the limelight by rewriting the president’s tax-reform bill. Reagan’s role was rescuing it from defeat by angered House Republicans.

The public was still giving Reagan high marks for strong leadership, but in fact, leadership was largely coming from below. By fall 1985, two freshman Republican senators, Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, became the driving forces, the new prime ministers, for a five-year plan to balance the budget. In early 1986, the stunning turnaround of Bob Packwood, Senate Finance Committee chairman—and not anything done by President Reagan—revived the dying tax reform bill. On the Philippines, Reagan was pushed into a new policy primarily by Richard Lugar of Indiana, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. With public accusations of vote fraud, Lugar made it virtually impossible for Reagan not to break with the Philippine government of Ferdinand Marcos and
recognize the election victory of Corazon Aquino. Reagan simply got dragged along, as he did on South African sanctions and trade policy.

When the Iran crisis broke in November 1986, Reagan behaved like a monarch, acting as if he were above the controversy that consumed his aides, ousting chief of staff Donald Regan and others—as if he were a king dismissing a discredited prime minister to spare the crown. By his direction, the national security staff had secretly continued aid to the Nicaraguan
contras
—but at times the staff ran him, not vice versa. In late 1987, yet another prime minister emerged, House Speaker Jim Wright, taking the policy lead and forcing Reagan to go along with a Central American peace plan. To be sure, through it all, Reagan clung to his Star Wars defense, held summit meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and signed the medium-range-missile agreement. But what is striking in many other cases is how often the policy initiative came not from the president, but from someone else.

Reflecting on the record, some of Reagan’s own domestic policy advisers privately admit how frequently power floats out of the White House.

“Part of it is that Reagan’s programmatic agenda is simply not the majority agenda,” Richard Darman, a senior first-term Reagan White House aide and later deputy Treasury secretary candidly conceded in 1986. “And the American political system is telling him, ‘Look, we like you. You’re an icon. You represent almost everything we ever loved about America. You’re from the Midwest. You went West. You made money but you’re still a small-town boy. You love the girl; the girl loves you. You’ve been a hero of all these different kinds. You survived an assassination. You sure seem to love our country. You make everybody feel good.’ That’s Walter Bagehot’s nineteenth-century English notion of the monarchy, consistent with the living symbol of the nation’s whole history and values and all of that. That’s all a plus.

“But the curious thing about Reagan,” Darman went on, “is that even though all of this is much loved, his constitutional amendment to ban abortion is opposed seventy to thirty. His constitutional amendment to balance the budget can’t get through Congress. His constitutional amendment for prayer in schools runs against the majority feeling. His desire to privatize big hunks of government is not the majority view. All Reagan budgets have been dead on arrival with the exception of the ’81 budget. The House of Representatives is particularly in touch with the people. And with power fragmented and information floating widely in the system, anybody anywhere who tries for
too long to run against the majority simply will not hold power. To govern, a president has to move toward the middle.”
¹⁴

Those observations were true enough, although they pin too much on Ronald Reagan’s shortcomings. He has been a president given to delegating great authority to others, undisturbed at allowing chunks of power to slip away, as demonstrated by the bold adventures of Rear Admiral John Poindexter and Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North on the covert Iranian arms deals.

But the root causes of the modern power float lie well beyond Ronald Reagan—in the political transformations of the past fifteen years that have altered the power game and the way our nation is governed. They await the presidents who take their oaths of office through the rest of this century.

The political fault line from the Old Washington power game to the New Washington power game was 1974.

To most Americans, 1974 was the memorable year in which Richard Nixon was driven from the White House by the Watergate scandal. But Watergate is now behind us and what is far less well remembered—even though it is more enduring—is that 1974 was also the year that climaxed a political earthquake. It was an earthquake that shook the established power structure of the American political system.

Forces which had been pulling at the threads of power for several years finally ripped apart the tighter weave of the old power structure. The old political game was shoved aside, and a new game took over. The political context for governing changed. That transformation dramatically altered how power works in Washington. And the impact is still with us today.

After decades highlighted by periods of presidential dominance from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt, Congress finally revolted, and not just for the moment: Changes were made that would affect how we are governed for a long time to come.
Angered by Lyndon Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon’s intentional confrontations over government spending, and Nixon’s abuses of power such as illegal wiretapping and using the Internal Revenue Service to go after political enemies, an assertive Congress rose up to challenge not just Nixon but the presidency as an institution. As
The Wall Street Journal
observed in 1973, Nixon “aroused a snoozing Congress and made it mad.”
¹

Congress seized for itself the legal authority and the expertise to insure that its challenge to the chief executive would be permanent. As if that were not upheaval enough, the House of Representatives also assaulted the citadel of the old congressional power system—seniority—and then balkanized its own power: It created scores of “subcommittee governments,” each taking charge of a slice of federal policy.

That same fateful year of 1974 also gave rise to a big class of new House Democrats, who shook the foundations further by throwing out several established power barons.

As these three upheavals were happening in Congress, a fourth change was occurring in the basic power system in Washington: The power of political parties, which had provided a critical glue, a vital force for cohesion in American government, was being dissolved by a highly mobile, independent-minded, ticket-splitting electorate.

The weakening of the parties and the trend toward a more wide-open power system was hastened by the mushrooming importance of television—and of its political offspring, a new generation of video politicians whose medium was the tube rather than the political clubhouse.

Finally, the increased fragmentation of governmental power set off a political gold rush among thousands of special interest groups, all of whom were bent on panning the new streams of power for nuggets, and were well enough heeled to buy their way into the New Washington power game.

To be sure, the fundamental structure of the old political system was still standing and many old habits remained. No one had torn up the Constitution. But within the basic framework, the rules of the power game had been rewritten, and the old power relationships had been dramatically shaken up. What emerged was a more fluid system of power, one which made the American political system harder to lead than just a couple of decades ago.

For one thing, the sheer volume and velocity of political activity became staggering. The profusion of activity took a quantum leap since the 1960s and especially in the phenomenal growth decade from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. Everyone flocked to Washington:
trade associations, health and welfare groups, labor unions, businesses, environmentalists, lobbyists for cities, counties, states, right-to-lifers and freedom of choice advocates, consumer groups, political consultants, pollsters, public relations firms. They all moved in. Politics became a full-time industry for tens of thousands of people. In addition, millions of grass-roots voters poured into Washington when their pet issues came up. Voters inundated Congress with oceans of mail, and Congressmen sent back their own unbelievable volumes of mail. The growth of activity in every area was exponential—and it swamped the political system.

Watergate was the epicenter of that political earthquake, but the tremors of reform had been rumbling through the political parties and through Congress in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For a decade, a climate of congressional bitterness and mistrust had developed toward the executive branch. It was fed by the Vietnam War; it was confirmed by the confrontations with President Nixon over money—Congress had legally voted to spend money on domestic programs, but Nixon impounded the money and defiantly refused to spend it. This atmosphere of distrust was climaxed by the investigation of the Nixon campaign’s criminal break-in at the Democratic headquarters located in the Watergate complex, and by disclosures of the multimillion-dollar Nixon campaign slush funds, financed by wealthy corporations.