It's My Party (16 page)
In 1986 David received an appointment at Stanford. “One of the first things I do when I move to a new place is try to figure
out the local politics,” David said. He attended a Democratic meeting to hear Barbara Boxer, then a member of Congress from
Marin County, north of San Francisco, and now one of California’s two senators. “I sat in the front row. The stuff she said
was so wacko, so far to the left, I had to bury my face in my hands. I was embarrassed for her.” David felt certain everyone
in the audience felt just as he did, but since he was in the front row he couldn’t tell. “You have to remember, I’d just spent
years in Texas. Democrats there aren’t like Democrats in the rest of the country. They would never have put up with that kind
of left-wing stuff.” Yet instead of hearing the audience behind him razz Boxer when she finished, David heard the sounds of
a standing ovation. “I couldn’t believe it. I hung around for half an hour afterward talking to people to find out what they
believed. Sure enough, they were all just as far to the left as Boxer.”
The next day, David registered as a Republican. One more white Catholic had decided that the Democratic Party was too liberal.
* * *
The GOP once thought Catholics like David Brady would come to it en masse. In 1980 Ronald Reagan became the first Republican
presidential candidate since Ike to win a majority of the Catholic vote, polling 51 percent. Four years later Reagan polled
57 percent of the Catholic vote. By the time George Bush won 56 percent of the Catholic vote in 1988, the GOP believed that
Reagan Democrats—the millions of Democrats who crossed party lines to vote for Reagan in 1980 and 1984, many of whom were
white Catholics—were becoming Bush Republicans. Instead, the Reagan Democrats became Clinton Democrats. Running against Clinton
in 1992, Bush saw his share of the Catholic vote plummet to 37 percent. Four years later, Dole polled only 40 percent. Yet
by contrast with Jews, who, since Clinton has headed the Democratic Party, have once again become faithful Democrats, Catholics
have returned to the Democratic Party only provisionally. In 1994 Catholics gave a majority of their vote, 53 percent, to
Republican congressional candidates, enabling the GOP to recapture the House of Representatives for the first time in forty
years. Just two years after helping Clinton win the White House, in other words, Catholics helped Republicans humiliate him.
Catholics have thus become swing voters. They take stands on the issues that cut across both parties. Catholics—especially,
polls show, those who attend church regularly—oppose abortion. That inclines them toward the GOP. Yet they support health
care and welfare while opposing the death penalty. That inclines them toward the Democratic Party. (Plenty of Democrats, including
President Clinton, support the death penalty, but eliminating the death penalty still has more support among Democrats than
among Republicans.) Catholics might as well be playing peekaboo with Republicans and Democrats alike. Now you see us, now
you don’t.
How can the GOP appeal to Catholics?
“Study Reagan,” David Brady replied.
Catholics voted for Reagan for many reasons that were peculiar to Reagan himself. Reagan was Irish. He grew up in the Midwest,
where many Catholics live, and he kept the simple manners of the Midwest all his life. “He may not have been Catholic,” David
Brady said, “but he seemed like us. He was a guy you knew you’d like to go out with for a couple of beers.” But those weren’t
the only reasons Catholics supported him.
“Reagan had a good heart,” David continued. “That was a lot more important than you might think.” Although Catholics have
moved up in the world, they still feel a particular sympathy for the little man. They’re just a couple of generations away
from the immigrant experience. And their church teaches a “preferential option for the poor,” arguing that society should
be judged at least in part on the way it treats its most unfortunate members. It made a difference to Catholics that Reagan
was able to cut taxes and retard the growth of government spending without conveying ill will toward the poor and disadvantaged.
“People could claim that Reagan was mean-spirited, but it just wouldn’t stick,” David said. “I mean, you could see just to
look at him that he wasn’t. Now compare Reagan with some of the Republicans who came after him. Newt Gingrich? Give me a break.”
Now that Reagan was gone, David said, the GOP needed to get rid of the spokesmen who were giving it an ugly face. Dumping
Gingrich was a good start. (Strictly speaking, Gingrich wasn’t dumped from the speakership of the House of Representatives,
he resigned. But Republican members of the House were so dissatisfied with him that they probably
would
have dumped him.) “Then I think that the GOP has to keep talking,” David continued. “Republicans have to say, ‘Maybe welfare
isn’t such a great idea, but because it hurts the people who are on it, not because the Republican Party is a bunch of sixty-year-old
WASPs who have got it made and stopped caring about anybody else. Maybe it’s better for people’s self-respect if they develop
skills, get a job, and learn how to show up for work every day instead of taking government handouts.’
“The GOP’s ideas are right,” David continued. “The free market
is
better than big government. But the GOP has to say it believes in the free market for the right reasons—because the market
is better for everybody, even the poor, not just for fat cats.
“Can Republicans learn to talk like that?” David asked. “Beats me. But if they want the Catholic vote, they’d better.”
Journal entry:
I still can’t imagine doing what each of them has done. Michael Medved and David Brady have friends who suggest only half-jokingly
that they must have been out of their minds to become Republicans. For Justin Adams, it has been even worse
.
“To most black people,” Justin says, “I’m a sellout. It’s not as if every time I meet a black person I say, ‘Hey, did I happen
to tell you what political party I belong to?’ But people find out. And I know what they think of me when they do.”
It’s astonishing. It really is. There are people to whom being a Republican is so important that they’re willing to pay a
price
.
A T
ALE OF
T
WO
C
ITIES
Journal entry:
As the plane banked to land in Washington, D.C., this afternoon, I found myself peering out the window to admire the Capitol
far below. The building has always struck me as a kind of architectural miracle. Virtually none of Benjamin Latrobe’s original
structure remains visible—the north and south wings, in which the Senate and House now sit, were added in the mid-nineteenth
century, while much of the construction of the dome took place later, during the Civil War—yet somehow each successive architect
got everything right, making certain that his own changes enhanced rather than distorted the design. If only, I found myself
wishing, the country had been as fortunate in the changes that have been made to Congress itself
.
The Constitution originally mandated one member of the House of Representatives for every thirty thousand inhabitants of the
country. For several decades that formula gave the House a relatively small membership—the first time the body met it was
comprised of just fifty-nine representatives. But as the country grew, so did the House. By the second half of the nineteenth
century, when the membership of the House had grown to more than three hundred, observers began to argue that the institution
was becoming unwieldy. By the early years of the twentieth century, when the membership of the House had grown to more than
four hundred, even congressmen themselves could see that the institution would soon be teetering on the brink of chaos. Congress
acted in 1929. Yet instead of shrinking the House to make the institution collegial once again, Congress simply froze the
membership at 435. And there the House has remained, teetering on the brink of chaos ever since
.
As the plane floated toward the runway, it struck me that the size of the House in itself puts the Republicans who serve there
at a disadvantage. Republicans like order. Chaos is for Democrats
.
T
he two cities to which the title of this chapter refers are Washington, D.C., and Jersey City, New Jersey, both of which I
visited to investigate a question that had been puzzling me for months. Why do Republicans in the House of Representatives
so often look hangdog or bewildered, while Republican governors and mayors—including the Republican mayor of Jersey City—so
often appear to be enjoying themselves?
In Washington, I talked with three prominent Republicans, one a former member of the House, ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich, and
two who are current members of the House, Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois and Congressman Christopher Cox of California.
If you do not remember the excitement that Republicans felt back in 1994 when the GOP captured the House of Representatives
for the first time in forty years, take my word for it. We whooped and hollered. At the election night party that I attended,
Republicans embraced, tears in their eyes, then drank round after round to celebrate, then embraced again, even tearier. President
Clinton had been repudiated. The Democrats were down and we were up. Since the powers of the Senate majority leader are for
the most part administrative, the most powerful Republican in America—the leader of us all—was the man who would soon be sworn
in as speaker of the house, Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia. All hail, Newt!
Six years later the Republican majority in the House has shrunk from twenty-six seats to just 11, giving the GOP the slimmest
majority held by either party in the House in forty-seven years. Republicans in the House now lack even the semblance of a
coherent agenda, much less a ten-point program such as the Contract with America on which they swept to victory in 1994. And
Newt Gingrich himself is out of a job, having resigned from the House after the GOP’s feeble showing in the 1998 election,
during which, polls showed, voters regarded him as one of the most unpopular politicians in the nation.
What went wrong? When I posed the question to Gingrich himself, he answered, in effect, nothing.
“Go back and look at the assumptions of Washington in the summer of 1994,” Gingrich said. Everyone in Washington—the administration,
Congress, the press—believed the federal government would run $200 billion a year deficits indefinitely, that taxes would
continue to go up, that welfare would remain an unreformed mess, and that federal spending would continue to grow. “Now look
at the accomplishments of the last five years,” Gingrich said. The federal budget is in surplus, taxes have been trimmed,
welfare has been reformed, and although federal spending has indeed continued to grow, the economy has grown even faster,
so that relative to the private sector the government outlays have actually shrunk.
“It’s like a movement in plate tectonics,” Gingrich said. His hair looked grayer than I remembered it from television, but
other than that Newt was Newt—intense, voluble, self-assured. “We shifted the basic nature of American government about ten
points to the right.”
If Republicans had scored such a success, then why had the GOP seen its majority in the House reduced in the election of 1996,
then reduced again in 1998? Why had Gingrich found himself forced to step down as speaker?
“I was representing a proactive agenda executed through the legislative branch in opposition to the executive branch,” Gingrich
replied. In other words, Gingrich was behaving as though he, and not Bill Clinton, was the president. “We pulled that off
for three years, from 1994 through some of 1997. That’s probably as long as anybody in American history has ever been able
to do it.”
While Speaker Gingrich was spending those three years attempting to force President Clinton to cut programs and balance the
budget, House Republicans saw their popularity plummet. The low moment took place during the government shutdown of 1995.
Intent on balancing the budget, Gingrich gave Clinton a choice: either accept a Republican budget or close the government.
Clinton closed the government. Functions considered “essential” continued—the Pentagon stayed open, Social Security checks
continued to be put in the mail, and so on. But a great many “inessential” functions did indeed cease. The Smithsonian shut
down. The National Parks closed. Gingrich was certain the public would blame the president. The public blamed the House Republicans
instead. Although they had been hoping to increase their majority in the elections of 1996, the House Republicans lost eight
seats instead. Their morale has never recovered. But what Gingrich sees when he looks at this record is success. “Now, for
one wave of change,” he said, “what we accomplished is a hell of a deal.”
Almost the moment my interview with him came to an end, it struck me that Gingrich was America’s answer to Napoleon Bonaparte.
I do not mean to poke fun at Gingrich when I say this. I mean that the parallels between the two men are truly striking. Napoleon
rose to power during a period of uncertainty and indecision in France, unifying the nation by demonstrating tactical brilliance
and an indomitable will. As emperor, he remade the politics of Europe. But Napoleon overreached, embarking upon a project—crossing
the entire continent of Europe to conquer the vast landmass of Russia—that one look at the map demonstrates to have been mad.
Likewise Gingrich. He rose to power in the GOP when the party was still reeling from the defeat of George Bush, demonstrating
Napoleon-like tactical brilliance and an indomitable will as he unified Republicans, then led them to victory. As speaker,
he remade American politics, not as dramatically, to be sure, as Napoleon remade the politics of France, but nevertheless
shifting American politics considerably to the right, just as he claimed when he spoke to me. But Gingrich overreached, embarking
upon a project—turning the speakership into a “counterpresidency,” as George Will puts it—that a glance at American history
shows the founders never intended and no speaker has ever been able to sustain.