The president and players in the power game are like surfers riding the waves of power. Sometimes they are careening at top speed before some giant wave; sometimes they are coasting slowly, looking for a crest. Their success depends on avoiding the thundering surf around them. From time to time, they may have to make those agile sideward shifts that enable the most skilled surfers to escape being crashed beneath the waves. Sometimes they will fall and quickly mount their boards to ride a new crest triumphantly. From the distance on shore, the best surfers appear to have uncanny balance, ever gliding and in control.
“It’s a stylistic thing,” Dutton said. “Both Kennedy and Reagan have ridden the thing with grace. To look at the presidency purely in terms of congressional wins and losses is a mistake. There’s much more to it that that. It’s a matter of grace, of looking like you’re handling it. I used to think that being an actor was the worst possible background for a president, but it turns out that it’s a good background. A president has to keep up appearances to protect his power.”
4. Porcupine Power: The Politics of Being Prickly
The key is to be a porcupine—have a reputation for being difficult
—Christopher Matthews, speaker’s spokesman
On the political stump, North Carolina’s Senator Jesse Helms projects the folksy style of the antebellum South; he’s full of stories about ninety-two-year-old Miss Ellie blessing him for fighting for school prayer or grandfathers surprised by how tall he is. With an owlish glance through his horn-rimmed glasses, he can mix homespun anecdotes with righteous tirades against world Communism and he can paint himself as the innocent defender of freedom victimized by a biased, malicious big media.
In the Senate, his manners are courtly. But his parliamentary techniques are telling and crafty. Helms plays the politics of confrontation. stalling, filibustering with marathon speeches, tying the Senate up in knots, frustrating others to achieve his own ends. His aides have proudly nicknamed him Senator No. Helms represents another basic kind of power in Washington: the power of obstruction, a negative power, the power to block and deny, the power of being difficult and prickly. Some call it porcupine power.
Partisan Democrats such as Joseph Biden of Delaware rail against Helms, but they acknowledge his power and his skill at the tactics of legislative guerrilla warfare. “Helms is the master,” was Biden’s frank appraisal. “He’s the toughest. He’s the smartest. He is the three hundred-pound gorilla of the right wing, the godfather of the right-wing network. He’s the architect of this notion that if you plant enough cells out there, the revolution will go on.”1
It was typical of Helms, in October 1983, to protest stormily when most other Republicans and practically all Democrats favored a bill declaring a federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Howard Baker, then the Senate majority leader, and even strong conservatives such as Idaho’s Jim McClure, urged Helms not to provoke a painful and futile battle. Their vote counts showed the measure would pass easily, and they argued that a losing donnybrook on such a racially sensitive issue would only hurt the Republican party nationwide. They asked Helms to play his opposition low key; he ignored them.
On October 4, Helms launched a filibuster to shelve the Martin Luther King bill. Hoping to scotch the embarrassment to Republicans, Howard Baker moved to kill Helms’s filibuster, and President Reagan announced he was ready to sign the bill. The next day, Helms dropped the filibuster. But two weeks later, he tried to derail the legislation with four amendments and sharp accusations that secret FBI files would show King’s “association with far-left elements and elements in the Communist Party, U.S.A.” New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan threw a bound copy of Helms’s charges on the floor, denouncing its contents as “filth” and “obscenities.” Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts accused Helms of a reckless “smear campaign” to revive “vestiges of old hatreds.” The House had already passed the bill; broad bipartisan support swept it through the Senate, 78–22, leaving other Republicans grumbling about Helms.
But the champion of the New Right knew what he was doing. He had gotten big press play, especially back in North Carolina where polls showed him trailing Democratic Governor Jim Hunt who was out to take away Helms’s Senate seat in the 1984 election. Democrat Bill Bradley of New Jersey accused Helms of “playing up to ‘old Jim Crow’ ” back home. Helms and his staff denied the charge. “That had nothing to do with black versus white,” one Helms aide insisted to me. “Senator Helms’s point was that if you want a black holiday, why pick a black with a background that includes some possible Communist connections.” But the reaction back home indicated Bradley was on the mark. When Helms went home after his anti-King maneuver, lily-white crowds cheered him at truck stops and his poll standings turned upward.
“It was a substantial turning point in the campaign,” commented Farrell Guillory of the Raleigh News & Observer. “The racial cue had great resonance in the state among voters who had not made up their minds.”2
This was Jesse Helms juicing up his power and appeal with the politics of confrontation. His political base in North Carolina and around the country is his passionate right-wing following and his organizational network. What galvanizes that movement and gives him power leverage in Washington is his calculated practice of the politics of obstruction. Helms has a variety of maneuvers: filibusters, delaying amendments, putting his personal “hold” on legislation so that it cannot be brought up for a vote, or stalling appointments for months on end.
On the Martin Luther King holiday, it did not matter to Helms’s strategy that he was doomed to lose the Senate vote. He was playing to the grandstand—trying to fire up his reelection effort. At other times, he has tried to instill fear and caution in the State Department, kill the nominations of ideological foes, bargain for something he wants by taking other senators’ bills hostage, or pressuring the Reagan administration to follow the “true conservative faith.” Blocking, stalling, and rejecting are the tactics and tools of this brand of power.
Certainly, Helms has no monopoly on porcupine power. There are many subcommittees and fiefdoms all over Capitol Hill—narrow legislative gates through which bills must pass, little sluiceways where the politician in charge of that power station determines just how much money will flow over his part of the federal dam. This is power based on controlling turf, and the favorite chokepoints of turf politicians are the appropriations subcommittees in both houses, which get first crack at deciding how much money gets spent on everything.
For nearly four years, for example, the most powerful figure in Congress on aid to El Salvador was an obscure, eccentric old curmudgeon, a Maryland Democrat named Clarence Long. After “Doc” Long’s son served in Vietnam, the congressman became a dove on foreign policy and a strong advocate of human rights. As chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, often able to cast the deciding vote, Long regularly extracted pledges from the Reagan administration to take some action against Salvadoran rights abuses, especially the death squads. That was the price for his support. Long would stall legislation and bargain. To get on Long’s good side, the administration tried to placate him, once going so far as to persuade the Salvadoran government to name a local Salvadoran school for Long. Year after year, Long practiced the power of obstruction, until he lost his seat in 1984.
According to Christopher Matthews, an experienced legislative aide, the key to the game of negative blocking power is a willingness to offend your colleagues. It requires a purposeful crankiness, especially in the closing days of a legislative session, when time is short. The ideal settings for legislative orneriness are the House and Senate conference committees formed to reconcile the differences in legislation passed by the two houses. Conference committees must produce a single version accepted by a majority of the conferees or else the legislation dies. The bargaining can be tough.
“The key is to be a porcupine—have a reputation for being difficult,” Matthews told me. “Don’t have a rep
utation for being a nice guy—that won’t do you any good. Everybody knows that the most effective conferees are porcupines. I worked for [former Senate Budget Committee Chairman] Ed Muskie for three years. He was the best of them all, the absolute best, because nobody wanted to tangle with him. You know, why tangle with the guy? Why ruin your day? Most people are generally utilitarian; they try to achieve the greater happiness. So why spend your day being miserable? And Muskie will make you miserable, because hell outwit you. He’ll be gross. He’ll smoke a god-awful cigar. He’ll just be difficult, cantankerous. That’s one of the tricks of being a successful conferee.”
“That is why Muskie wrote more legislation than most guys will ever write,” Matthews went on. “You know, clean air, countercyclical assistance to communities, public-works-style stuff, and budget resolutions. It’s all because he was an extremely difficult guy to deal with, and people would just sort of walk around him, ignore him, try to avoid fights with him. In other words, at the margin, you tend to give the guy slack.… I think a bad temper is a very powerful political tool because most people don’t like confrontation.”3
In the late 1950s, Oklahoma’s Bob Kerr had a reputation as a senator who got his way by effective bullying, even more than Lyndon Johnson did as majority leader. Nowadays, John Dingell, the pile-driving chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Dan Rostenkowski, the relentless chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, are known for facing down or wearing down more tender souls. Porcupine power also pays a premium for patience when others are in a hurry.
“Muskie’s great strength was that he never left the [conference] room,” Matthews recalled. “I mean he never went to the bathroom. He’d go in at nine o’clock and stay until one. Everybody else was getting hungry. If there was a photo opportunity, congressmen and senators would come in and out, get their pictures taken, say a few things and leave. Muskie would stay—right? That’s a great strength. You’ve got to decide whether you’re there to get your picture taken or you’re there to get the bill passed. He’s there to get the bill passed—his way! And if you’re hungry and he’s not, all the better. He’ll wait until one o’clock and if you want to go eat at twelve, fine, leave a proxy. He’ll take your proxy, and he’ll finish at one-thirty, and he’ll have his resolution then.”
On the Senate floor, the prime tactic of negative power players is using filibusters or controversial amendments to bog down legislation. Practically every senator occasionally uses such dodges to stop bills he considers anathema. The practice dates back to such legendary masters of legislative blockades as Louisiana’s Huey Long, Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo, and Alabama’s Jim Allen. It has become much more common in the new power game with its independent-minded players. The Senate is vulnerable to such paralyzing tactics because its rules and procedures are so much looser than those of the House, guaranteeing unlimited debate unless cloture, or a cutoff, is voted by three fifths of the Senate.
When reform-minded senators have tried to change the rules to limit debate and make the Senate more efficient, Helms has led the fight to preserve the old rules granting individual senators maximum leeway against the majority. Helms also used old-fashioned seniority to protect his power. After voluntarily relinquishing his position as ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee in 1985, in order to serve as Agriculture Committee chairman, Helms demanded his ranking post on Foreign Relations back in 1987. In the interim, Dick Lugar of Indiana had been a popular and effective Foreign Relations Committee chairman, and the committee Republicans wanted him to stay on. But Helms appealed to the Senate Republican Conference, all forty-six Republican senators, and won back his position on seniority alone. Enough other Republican senators were fearful of being ousted by abler, younger senators unless they banded together—another example of Helms’s politics of obstructing change.
As a Republican gadfly, Jesse Helms has a match on the Democratic side—Howard Metzenbaum, the silver-haired millionaire liberal Ohio businessman whose pet peeve is special breaks for special business interests.
Metzenbaum’s most celebrated campaign was his prolonged but vain effort to block President Reagan’s nomination of Ed Meese as attorney general. In 1981, Metzenbaum’s most stunning filibuster cut in half the multibillion-dollar tax break being granted to independent oil producers. But what has made him a target of his colleagues’ scorn—Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska once publicly called him “a pain in the ass”—are Metzenbaum’s “watchdog filibusters” in the closing crush of a session. By that time, floor action is like a rugby scrum, everyone pumping through special bills for favored constituents when no one else has time to study the contents. Metzenbaum, a seventy-year-old self-appointed watchdog for taxpayers, maintains a vigil on the floor to block the most egregious favoritism. If Metzenbaum’s filibuster is overruled, he switches to strangling bills by amendment. Tenacity is a key to his power, as it is with Helms.
In the lame-duck session of 1982, Metzenbaum later boasted, he blocked twenty-six separate “giveaways to special interests” that would have cost the U.S. Treasury more than $10 billion.4 Stevens was enraged by Metzenbaum’s blocking the sale of a federal railroad to Alaska. Other senators were rankled because Metzenbaum halted lucrative bills that, among other things, would have granted antitrust immunity to the beer and shipping industries and the National Football League, permitted large timber companies to cancel more than $2 billion of government contracts they wanted to escape, made major changes in bankruptcy law; leased oil shale lands, and removed physicians and other professionals from oversight by the Federal Trade Commission. Metzenbaum says he would like to give up his obstructionist game but the unruliness of the Senate leaves him no choice.
Metzenbaum got indirect confirmation from Timothy Wirth, a Colorado Democrat who won a Senate seat in 1986 after serving six terms in the House. In just one month, Wirth told me, he concluded that Senate procedures encourage the negative power game. “In the House, you learn how to get something done by putting together a coalition, counting votes and getting legislation passed,” Wirth said. “But in the Senate, people’s power arises from their ability to say no, their power to block anything. The people who are really good at legislating are good at knowing how to threaten the use of negative power.”5
Helms and Jackson: Mirror Images
In the broader political arena, the confrontational politics of Jesse Helms were paralleled in some ways by those of Jesse Jackson in the 1984 presidential campaign. For Helms and Jackson have worked as highly symbolic politicians who gain power and leverage by mobilizing a minority within their own party, and keeping it stirred up, often to the exasperation of their party leaders. Their philosophies are radically different, but their tactics have been similar in leading mass movements: Jackson, the blacks; and Helms, the hard right. Just as Helms angered other Senate Republicans with his attack on the Martin Luther King holiday, Jackson gave heartburn to Democratic party leaders in 1984 by pitching his campaign at black voters and black pride, causing a backlash among white voters that later hurt Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, especially in the South. In the 1988 campaign, Jackson played a more traditional style of politics, trying to broaden his appeal. But in 1984, Jackson, like Helms, played an antimainstream strategy.
When party leaders have tried to placate or negotiate with Helms or Jackson, it has rarely worked. For the porcupine power game depends on being the odd man out, not on building coalitions. In that game, the battle is usually more important than the victory because the battle keeps the movement alive and aroused. Helms and Jackson typically battle for their share of the spoils, using their popular leverage against their own party leaders. In that game, power stems from dramatizing the Cause, forcing new showdowns, stirring again and again the emotional dynamic of their movement, and in Helms’s case, in touching those predictably sensitive nerves that trigger a new flow of financial contributions. In confrontational politics, there is little incentive to compromise. Fo
r compromising with the power structure dilutes the force of the symbolic leader’s appeal to his most ardent partisans.
In another sense, Jesse Helms has become the 1980’s political cult figure of the right, to replace Senator Edward Kennedy, the 1970’s cult figure of the left. Kennedy had great influence with other congressional Democrats. His legislative staff network reached into many committees, touching many issues. With the Kennedy family cachet, he could help other Democrats, and they clustered around him. When Kennedy moved on an issue, others moved with him, especially as he challenged Jimmy Carter in 1979 and 1980. The failure of Kennedy’s bid for the presidential nomination, and the defeat of several liberal Democratic senators in 1980, caused the Kennedy movement to ebb.
In almost mirror image, Helms has been to Reagan as Kennedy was to Carter, except that Helms was smart enough not to tackle Reagan directly. But Helms has been the keeper of the ideological flame, riding partisan shotgun as the “genuine conservative,” just as Kennedy had cast himself as the “genuine Democrat” against Carter’s watered-down version. Each tried to hold his president’s feet to the fire, to bring the president back to the true gospel. The role is well-known in American politics; other presidents have had purists on their flanks: Dwight Eisenhower had Senator Robert A. Taft; Franklin Roosevelt had Henry Wallace. If Ted Kennedy thought Carter was too tightfisted to be a true Democrat, then Helms and company clamored that Rasputins in the White House were poisoning Reagan’s pure conservatism. “Let Reagan be Reagan!” they chanted.
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