It's My Party (18 page)

“At least it must have given you a sense of satisfaction,” I suggested. “‘The Cox Report.’ Not many people get that kind of
billing.”

Chris smiled sadly, as if he were dealing with an idiot child. After all that the press had done to the Cox Report, he explained,
he almost wished that his name had never been associated with it.

Chris stood from the sofa to walk to his desk. He picked up a newspaper clipping. “This is an editorial from the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune,”
Chris said. He skimmed the clipping, searching for a particular sentence. “Here it is,” he said. “Listen to this. ‘The report
is subtly but palpably partisan.’

“Partisan?” Chris said, exasperated. He tossed the clipping back onto his desk. “ ‘Partisan’ is exactly what the report is
not
. It’s
completely
bipartisan. But since they didn’t like what the report said, they ignored the facts and called it ‘partisan’ anyway.”

The newspaper that galled Chris the most was the
Los Angeles Times
, partly because it was the dominant newspaper in his region of the country, Southern California, partly because he had gone
to the trouble of driving to Los Angeles to meet the newspaper’s editorial board not long before the Cox Report was published.
The editors of the
Los Angeles Times
knew, because Chris had told them so himself, that the Cox Report was completely bipartisan, based on meticulous research,
and intended only to report on the theft of American nuclear secrets, not to demean any ethnic group. The
Los Angeles Times
had nevertheless run one story after another suggesting that the Cox Report was racist. “These people have
so
screwed me,” Chris said. “I mean, you’re taping this, and I don’t want to sound paranoid. But if we can’t go after a few
spies without being accused of being anti-Chinese, I mean, I just don’t know how all of this is supposed to work.”

* * *

Listening to Chris, I thought back to a conversation I had had with David Brady. In David’s view Republicans seldom felt as
much at home in the House of Representatives as did Democrats. He named two reasons for the Republicans’ discomfort. The first
was the nature of the work itself.

“Democrats like the process for its own sake,” David argued. “What Republicans like is getting things done. To them, the process
just gets in the way.

“Turn on C-Span and watch a hearing sometime,” David said. When the camera pans to the Democratic side, you’ll see congressmen
who were enjoying themselves. They’d be passing notes back and forth to their staffs. They’d be exchanging whispered asides
and chuckling. But when the camera pans to the Republican side, you’ll see a different picture.

“You watch them,” David said. “The Republicans will all have their chins in their hands and a glassy look in their eyes. They’ll
be wondering why they ran for Congress in the first place.” Calling witnesses, raising points of order, posturing for television
cameras, holding votes—Democrats tend to thrive on it, Republicans to see it as claptrap.

Christopher Cox bore David out, disliking congressional claptrap so much that, as we have seen, he had avoided holding any
public hearings at all.

The second reason Republicans seldom felt as much at home in the House as did Democrats, David believed, was that it cost
Republicans so much to be there. David told me about the Lincoln Club of Northern California. Made up mostly of businesspeople,
the Lincoln Club recruits Republicans to run for office, giving them financial backing. “Do you have any idea how hard it
is for the Lincoln Club to find people to run for Congress?” David asked. “They have to beg—literally beg.”

When the Lincoln Club found an executive who was Republican, well-spoken, and interested in public policy, it would send several
of its members to his office. Attempting to persuade this capable, intelligent individual to abandon his career in business,
they would explain that if he won his race for Congress he would earn a congressional salary of $136,700 a year. The reaction
of the executive was nearly always the same. For a moment he would look at them. Then he would burst out laughing. The Lincoln
Club had acquired a considerable reputation as a local source of merriment.

The Lincoln Club’s Democratic counterpart, a group of businesspeople who, like the members of the Lincoln Club, provide candidates
with financial backing, found itself facing the opposite problem, not too few candidates for Congress but too many. “We’re
talking social workers, schoolteachers, public defenders, associate pastors of Unitarian churches—professional do-gooders,”
David said. “Every election cycle there are dozens of them, all desperate to run for Congress as Democrats. For people like
that, getting into Congress would be a big step up.” Democrats in Silicon Valley had to interview one prospect after another
before they could even begin to winnow the list.

Of course Silicon Valley represents an extreme. “You haven’t got middle-level talent pulling down the big bucks in Kansas
that middle-level talent pulls down out there,” David said. But the GOP faces the same problem throughout the country even
so. The owner of a car dealership in Topeka, the surgeon in Moline, the McDonald’s franchisee in Mason City—to serve in Congress,
each would have to accept a pay cut.

“At least on the Senate side you get a little prestige out of the job,” David said. “But Republicans in the House? It’s only
one voter in five who can even
name
his member of Congress.”

Here, too, Christopher Cox bore David out. After all, he had been elected to Congress as a man in his middle thirties, just
entering his prime. He had now spent a dozen of the most dazzling years in the history of the American economy on a government
paycheck. If instead of going home to Southern California to run for Congress he had gone home to join a law firm (when we
worked at the White House, I always pictured Chris as the managing partner of a major firm), his income would have been—well,
you get the idea. Chris certainly did. His face sank as I asked him about it.

“I have to say that I’ve asked myself that many times,” Chris replied. It wasn’t as if he derived no satisfaction from serving
in the House, Chris explained. He was proud of the legislation he had authored. He was certain the Cox Report had made the
nation more secure. But make the House his entire career? Forgo the private sector entirely? The income? The ability to get
things done, unencumbered by politics? “If I died tomorrow and it were my epitaph that I had been a member of Congress, I’d
feel horrible about it. I’d be dead, of course, so I’m not sure what I’d feel. But you see what I mean.”

Indeed I did. Any Republican would.

* * *

Not long after I left Washington, D.C., Republicans in the House of Representatives managed to pass a ten-year, $800 billion
tax cut. Speaker Denny Hastert trumpeted the tax cut as a historic achievement, and for a while I thought I was going to have
to take back everything I had written in my notes about the dazed mien of the House Republicans. I needn’t have worried.

When the Republican tax cut reached the president he vetoed it, claiming the cut was so big that it would have returned us
to the days of massive federal deficits. By then Republican budget experts outside Congress had had time to study the measure.
They learned that over the first several years it would have cut taxes scarcely at all. When the measure finally did begin
cutting taxes, the tax cuts would have been modest—and contingent on the ability of the economy to provide the federal government
with revenues at certain prescribed rates. While the president was denouncing the House Republicans for their rashness, knowledgeable
Republicans were thus denouncing the House Republicans for their timidity. The tax cuts, intended to demonstrate that the
House Republicans still had an agenda, demonstrated only their fecklessness instead.

Now, you would think that if Republicans in the House have become feckless, Republican governors and mayors would have done
the same. They haven’t. While over the past several years Republicans in the House have accomplished little but the impeachment
of the president, Republican governors and mayors have produced a remarkable string of accomplishments. Governor Tommy Thompson
of Wisconsin has instituted sweeping welfare reforms. Governors George Pataki of New York, Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, John
Engler of Michigan, and others have cut taxes. Mayor Richard Riordan of Los Angeles has overseen improvements in his city’s
schools. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York has presided over a drop in the crime rate that has helped to make New York, still
a dangerous metropolis when Giuliani took office, into the safest large city in the country. Republican governors and mayors
seem to have a knack for getting things done. To find out why, I visited Bret Schundler, the mayor of Jersey City, who has
compiled one of the most impressive records of any Republican in the nation.

To prepare for my interview with Mayor Schundler, I looked over Jersey City’s Web site. One item in particular arrested my
attention: Mayor Schundler’s second inaugural address. It was unlike the remarks of any politician I had ever seen. The address
wasn’t folksy. It made no attempt to establish a rapport between the speaker and his audience. It offered no particular call
to action. Instead it laid out the mayor’s governing philosophy, delving into the history of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance,
and the Enlightenment, and quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Running to several thousand
words, the address read like a lecture at a divinity school, and the fourth time I found the mayor quoting Nietzsche I began
to wonder whether someone in his audience might have considered circulating a recall petition just to get him to stop speaking.
Yet in a city that is more than half black and Hispanic, with a total Republican registration a minuscule 9 percent, Bret
Schundler, a white man from the suburbs who likes to give long, earnest speeches, has been elected mayor three times.

Walking around Jersey City before meeting Bret Schundler, I found one block on Grove Street that shows how the city looked
before Schundler became mayor. A decade ago a developer made a bid for the properties on the west side of the block (the east
side is occupied by city hall). Then the developer ran into financial trouble, tying the properties up in legal proceedings
ever since. The properties are dilapidated buildings of brownstone and brick. At ground level several of the buildings contain
small businesses—Grove Liquor and Deli, Olympic Cleaners, Tangles Hair Studio, Carlascio Orthopedic (“Prosthetics, Orthotics,
and Footwear Prescriptions Filled”). Above ground level, however, most of the buildings are unoccupied, their windows smashed
or boarded over. A scant decade ago all of Jersey City was just like this—derelict and half deserted.

Jersey City still isn’t a garden spot, but it is visibly a city that works. On the blocks surrounding the dilapidated buildings,
I found well-maintained grocery stores, drugstores, and restaurants lining every street. The upper stories of buildings were
occupied, curtains fluttering in the windows. The sidewalks were crowded with African-Americans, Hispanics, Indians, and Pakistanis,
all of whom seemed at ease in each other’s company and all of whom walked purposefully, like people with jobs. The long economic
boom of the 1990s of course played a role in Jersey City’s revival. But if the economy were entirely responsible, then nearby
towns should have changed for the better just as dramatically. They haven’t. The difference is Mayor Schundler.

Schundler, 41, works in a small office on the second floor of city hall. His office has a vault built into the wall. “The
mayor’s office used to be on the other side of the building,” Schundler explained with a smile. “Then one of my predecessors
realized it would make his life simpler if he just worked next to the money.” In 1991, Mayor Gerald McCann, who controlled
Jersey City’s Democratic machine, was convicted of defrauding a Florida savings and loan. Three months later, in 1992, a New
Jersey Supreme Court ruling forced McCann from office. Schundler won the special election that followed. He immediately embarked
on half a dozen initiatives, first using skills he had learned on Wall Street to monetize the city’s tax receipts, bringing
in desperately needed cash. His most dramatic initiative involved city hall itself. A large, handsome granite building dedicated
in 1896, city hall had been one of the proudest structures in Jersey City until 1979, when a fire burned out the roof. The
government of Jersey City then did just what residents of burned-out homes throughout Jersey City had gotten into the habit
of doing—it had learned to live in a decaying hulk. Schundler renovated city hall, rebuilding the roof and cleaning the place
up. It was his way of letting people know that Jersey City was going to become a self-respecting municipality again.

Schundler grew up in Westfield, a middle-class, suburban New Jersey town, one of nine children whose father made an impression
on all of them. “My father would say, ‘Of him to whom much has been given, much is expected,’ ” Schundler told me. “He would
ask us questions at the dinner table. ‘The middle class has moved out of New York City. Is that good or bad?’ ‘There’s litter
on the streets. What can be done about it?’ He was always pushing us for ways to make the world a little bit better.”

For all his high-mindedness, Schundler is relaxed and engaging. He has bright eyes set in a face that, even though his sandy
hair is already flecked with gray, is round enough to make him look younger than he is. He smiles easily. He laughs a lot.
Even when he is talking about his aspirations for making the world better, which he does constantly, it is a pleasure listening
to him.

Schundler obtained his first exposure to politics after graduating from Harvard. Convinced that he wanted to become an urban
minister, he moved to Washington, D.C., to write a thesis about an inner-city church. A Democrat—he believed that Democrats
cared more about the poor than did Republicans—Schundler found that he had enough free time to take a job in the office of
a Democratic congressman. On Capitol Hill he met people close to Senator Gary Hart, and soon Schundler moved to Iowa as a
volunteer on Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign.