Power Game (26 page)

“The new-breed guys were born in the TV studio, and the old breed were born in the political clubhouse” was how Chris Matthews, Tip O’Neill’s spokesman, put it. Matthews, at forty-one, is a curious blend of new-breed glibness and old-Irish roots in North Philadelphia. “It’s the difference between Atari Democrats, high-tech Democrats, and street-corner Democrats,” he went on. “The old guys worked their way up through the chairs, as Tip puts it. They’re very hierarchical. They keep their friendships. They keep their alliances. They dance with the girl they came with. They stick together. The new-breed guys play one-night stands. They’re always forming new coalitions. They’re always worrying about their image and how to position themselves. They decide what image they want to project, and they position themselves to project that image.”
¹⁵

Roots explain a lot: Old-breed politicians such as O’Neill and Rostenkowski grew up in strong Catholic, ethnic enclaves that shaped their outlook and their dialect, while many of the new breed hail from WASP, suburbanite districts.

“The new-breed guys have no imprint of their districts,” Matthews suggested. “Wirth or Les Aspin [of Wisconsin] could come from a hundred different districts around the country. The new-breed guys went away to college. They became unrooted. They were very mobile, and they are very national in their perspective. They don’t represent a neighborhood. The old-breed guys stayed home. Tip went to Boston College, and Danny went to Loyola. Tip O’Neill could only come from Cambridge. He fits the district. Danny Rostenkowski is a telephone-book candidate. You could open the phone book in his district, point to a name, and come up with someone like Danny. Not as smart, but with his attitudes and style. And I think that’s one reason why the older members have a greater instinct for the neighborhood.”

In a witty and intriguing book,
Tribes on the Hill
, anthropologist J. McIver Weatherford compares the two types of politicians and their quite separate power games to tribal figures—shamans and warlords. By
his account, tribal shamans are medicine men, witch doctors who win followers by seeming to dispense magic to protect warriors, end droughts, arrange love matches. “Unlike the chiefs and war leaders in a tribe, the shaman’s power derives not from the authority of his position or from the practical results which he produces, as much as from the confidence he displays and the emotions he can extract from his followers,” Weatherford wrote. “They publicize, play upon, and eventually help to allay the worst fears of the common people. They make real the threat of unseen demons, which they then exorcise. In the political world of Washington, shamans do not invoke the dread of evil spirits as much as the dreaded forces of world communism, the Mafia, monopoly cabals, the moral majority, or immoral minority.”
¹⁶

By contrast, the tribal warlords of Capitol Hill play a different power game entirely. “They carefully choose one piece of organizational terrain, slowly dominate it, strengthen it, and gradually extend it outward, increasing the scope of that special area,” said Weatherford, who watched the process as an aide to Ohio’s Senator John Glenn. “Theirs is a patient game of slowly adding staff in one certain area year after year.… Theirs is also the game of the career legislator willing to spend the remainder of his life in Congress and to eschew the glitter and fame of the White House. Even though the Warlords may be the least-known Congressional powers to outsiders, they ultimately have the clans that stretch furthest from Congress and into the bowels of government, exercising an influence that far outweighs the more media-oriented politicians.”
¹⁷

The differences are not purely generational, but they do generally match the generational lines. For television is a natural medium for modern political shamans whose most potent magic is mood, image, and symbolism—whether they be John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, or the political new breed in Congress. Jealously, the old-warlord breed deride them as mere “show horses.” Rather disdainfully, Christopher Matthews quipped that “the new-breed guys will go to a seminar and talk issues, but the old-breed guys like Danny Rostenkowski would never go to a seminar—they want to know when you’re going to pass a bill.”

That’s a bit overdrawn; some older politicians have learned the tricks of the new-breed game, and some younger politicians have proven their skills at old-breed inside politics. For example, House Democratic leaders, such as Tip O’Neill, Jim Wright, and Tom Foley, have learned to master the media, and Rostenkowski ran economic seminars to get his committee to pass the 1986 tax-reform bill. And the best of the new
breed have been extremely able legislators, politicians such as Dick Gephardt of Missouri, Leon Panetta of California, and Bill Gray of Pennsylvania on the House Budget Committee.

But unquestionably, television has helped the new breed get ahead much faster than newcomers used to. Some of the best and the brightest of that class of ’74—Tom Downey and Stephen Solarz of New York, Henry Waxman of California, Tim Wirth of Colorado, Chris Dodd of Connecticut—ignored Sam Rayburn’s old rule that in Congress “to get along, you go along.” The Rayburn rule dictated silent apprenticeship for junior members and a slow climb up the ladder, but the new-breed leaders were quick to carve out important issues and become spokesmen—Downey on arms control, Solarz on South Africa and the Philippines, Waxman on health, Wirth on the breakup of American Telephone and Telegraph, Dodd on Central America. Indeed, the dispersal of power in Congress meant fast advancement, because old congressmen were retiring, and the two shock elections of 1974 and 1980, with their unusual numbers of upsets, pushed out many others. By Reagan’s inauguration, a majority of House members had served no more than four years, and fifty-five senators were still in their first terms. The new breed were taking over.

More broadly, video politics of the constant campaign invaded the very operations of Congress. In 1979, the House started televising its floor proceedings; in 1986, the Senate followed suit. In both bodies, tele-wise junior members have taken to making brief topical morning speeches, hoping for a pickup by the networks. During debates, some members show up with huge graphic blowups, mounted on easels, for good video viewing.

Along with changing political styles came a fleet of consultants who sailed into the inner councils of politicians—not just during campaigns but during governing sessions as well. They, too, altered the Washington power game. These are the real political shamans: the media advisers, political strategists, pollsters, direct mail operatives. And they have replaced the old political bosses.

It’s no longer news that Carter and Reagan in the White House rarely gave a major speech without consulting their pollsters (Patrick Caddell for Carter and Richard Wirthlin for Reagan), sometimes down to the most minute detail. But few people know that old-breed House Speaker Tip O’Neill formed an inner sanctum of half a dozen political consultants to give him advice on overall Democratic legislative strategy, to help figure out how to oppose Ronald Reagan without offending the voter.

Also, I remember sitting in the office of Peter Hart, one of the best Democratic pollster-strategists, shortly after the 1981 elections in which his candidate, Charles Robb, had been elected governor of Virginia. The phone rang, and Peter talked for about ten minutes. It was Robb asking Hart for detailed advice on how to set out his agenda as governor and how to craft his inaugural address.

“Today, you don’t use your brain or your gut, all you use is your pollster and your filmmaker,” groused Senator Thomas Eagleton near the end of his third term. “They’ve replaced the party boss. In the campaign, they have taught you something and the play continues afterward. If you’ve had a good pollster and a good filmmaker, they have told you how to craft issues and then how to get them into the public media in thirty-second clips. You’ve learned what will get on the nightly news in St. Louis or Kansas City. You’ve learned what press release, properly captioned, will play on page three of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. So they’ve taught you. So once you’re here, you say, ‘Well, I’ve got to continue to play the game.’ ”
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Indeed, when the Senate decided to televise its proceedings, the staff worried that the mustard color of the walls was too drab a background for video and proposed blue or some earth tone. Some senators, including Robert Dole, complained that the angle of the four cameras in the gallery was too steep and unflattering. Roger Ailes, a well-known Republican media consultant, was summoned; at least a third of the Republican senators met Ailes secretly to get his advice. Here was a media consultant telling senators, not how to craft a campaign commercial, but how to behave as senators, on the Senate floor!

I was told that Ailes lectured the senators like a parent talking to children. He minced no words, warning senators that they would have to change their habits. He chided them for their tendency to rush onto the floor from very busy schedules, often appearing ill-prepared and then doing their business hastily, with an air of boredom.

“Listen, you’ve got to be at your best on the Senate floor from now on,” Ailes told them. “Treat a floor appearance the way you would a major speech. There are four cardinal rules: The public won’t forgive you if you’re not prepared, if you’re not committed, if you’re not comfortable, and if you’re not interesting. If you want to be liked, you yourself are the message, not just your words—your message, your energy, your eyes, your clothes, your everything. If you want to project likability, project commitment. In general, the public likes commitment. That is a very winning trait.”

The implication was that the lure of the live camera would draw senators away from dusty committee deliberations and put new zip into
floor debates. This presented yet another set of pressures on career patterns of the Old Senate Club, accustomed to doing its main business in back rooms or in committee. Televised floor debates opened the door for good performers and independent operators to gain a leg-up with the voters and thus perhaps with their own colleagues. Even before the coming of TV, the Republican majority had picked Bob Dole as their leader in 1985; one clear reason was Dole’s agility on camera. Dole combined old-breed skills as a legislator with new-breed skills as a communicator. Robert Byrd, the Democratic leader, faced a revolt in 1985 because he was too much of an inside player with well-honed parliamentary skills but a reputation as weak on TV. To protect himself, Byrd spruced up his camera style enough to survive.

Playing the Press and TV Gallery

Clearly the media politics of the constant campaign have become a staple, not only for the politics of survival, but for ambitions of higher leadership. Six of the class of ’74 Democrats have been sharp enough to move to the Senate: Timothy Wirth, Christopher Dodd, Paul Simon, Tom Harkin, Paul Tsongas, and Max Baucus. The presidential field for 1988 is thick with new-breed candidates from several recent congressional classes: Dick Gephardt, Jack Kemp, Paul Simon, and Albert Gore, each of whom has fashioned a TV image.

Even those who have stayed in the House work the media game for career advancement; they play not only to the folks back home but to the galleries in Washington—the press and TV galleries.

One of the sharpest headline hunters is Stephen Solarz, a bright, articulate Brooklyn Democrat from the class of ’74, who has specialized in foreign policy, especially on the Middle East. Solarz worked the press assiduously during the Philippine political crisis. In August, 1983, Solarz flew hastily to the Philippines after Benigno Aquino, the opposition leader, was assassinated and managed to get himself photographed looking into Aquino’s open coffin. That made the cover of
Newsweek
’s international edition.
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When Corazon Aquino was elected president of the Philippines, House Speaker Tip O’Neill wrote her a letter saying that
if
she were ever in Washington, he would be pleased to have her address a joint session of Congress; O’Neill gave Solarz, as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Pacific and East Asian Affairs, his letter to forward. Within hours, Solarz called a press conference and, stretching the point, said that O’Neill had invited Aquino to Washington and had dispatched Solarz to Manila to deliver the invitation. Off he went.

During the controversy over corruption in the 1986 Philippine election and over the hidden wealth of the family of Ferdinand Marcos, Solarz was ubiquitous. By his staff’s count, he appeared on thirty-four radio and television shows and was quoted in eighty articles in
The New York Times, The Washington Post
, and
The Wall Street Journal
in a five-month period. Solarz has been accused by some colleagues of media hogging, but he does not fit the caricature of a handsome, blow-dried, airhead TV politician. He is a brainy legislator, quick to master important issues and to make a policy point. By now, he has gained some seniority; but for years smart P.R. has made him better known than most of his elders.

A different maestro of the media among House Democrats is Les Aspin, who in 1985 parlayed a largely media-built reputation into an uprising that made him chairman of the House Armed Services Committee over six senior Democrats. Aspin had worked in the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara before winning a House seat from Wisconsin in 1970. Like Solarz, he is genuinely knowledgeable. Moreover, with a constant stream of shrewdly timed press releases, Aspin has gotten enormous press attention over the years, becoming known as an informed, influential power on defense issues. Among many other things, he has exposed the army for conducting poison gas tests on beagle puppies, disclosed that the navy’s Phalanx missile had locked on a friendly American ship during a simulated firing test, blasted the Pentagon for a bloated pension system, and challenged the claims of the Reagan military buildup.

Aspin’s techniques tell a great deal about how to play the press game. The fundamental rule, he asserts, is to provide genuinely fresh information. What that involves, Aspin says, is “staying ahead of the curve,” or anticipating where the news is heading and getting a step ahead of the story rather than chasing old news.
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A second fundamental rule is to time your news release for a slack news day. A typical Aspin operation includes some juicy Pentagon revelation, embargoed for release in Monday morning newspapers when there is little breaking news. The release is sent out to newspaper offices by two
P.M
. Thursday so that reporters can write it up on Friday and have their weekends free, but the Monday embargo insures that it does not get swamped by the heavy Sunday news flow. Aspin’s press agents send his material to reporters specializing in defense or arms control issues. I have known them to circulate copies of one release to five different
New York Times
reporters and editors, playing on competitive instincts to insure that
someone
gets their story into print. The tactic works.