Power Game (2 page)

We Americans are a nation of game players. From Friday night poker and Sunday bingo to corporate rivalry and the nuclear arms race, Americans are preoccupied with winning and losing. Competition is our creed; it is knit into the fabric of our national life. Sports and game shows are national pastimes. Either we play games ourselves or we take part vicariously. We swim, cycle, jog or play tennis—making it a game by matching ourselves against a rival, against par in golf, or against the stopwatch when we hike or run. Five out of six Americans spend several hours a week viewing football, baseball, boxing, bowling, or some other sport on television. One hundred million people tune into television game shows weekly—forty-three million to
Wheel of Fortune
, appropriately named for a nation almost addicted to games. All over the world, people are playing at commerce on one hundred million sets of Monopoly.

Some people treat life itself as a game, to be won or lost, instead of seeing it in terms of a religious ethic or of some overarching system of values.

In Washington, senators and congressmen talk of politics as a game, and of themselves as “players.” To be a player is to have power or influence on some issue. Not to be a player is to be out of the power loop and without influence. The ultimate game metaphors in government
are the “war games”—not just the military exercises for fleets of ships or regiments of troops, but those ghostly, computer-run scenarios that our policymakers and nuclear experts use to test their reflexes and our defenses in a crisis: human survival reduced to a game.

So it seems only natural to look at how we are governed—the way Washington
really
works today—as a power game, not in some belittling sense, but as a way of understanding how government actually works and why it does not work better. For the game is sometimes glorious and uplifting, at other times aggravating or disenchanting. It obviously is a serious game with high stakes, one in which the winners and losers affect many lives—yours, mine, those of the people down the street, and of people all over the world.

When I came to Washington in 1962, to work at the Washington bureau of
The New York Times
, I thought I understood how Washington worked. I knew the usual textbook precepts: that the president and his cabinet were in charge of the government; that Congress declared war and passed budgets; that the secretary of State directed foreign policy; that seniority determined who wrote legislation in Congress; and that the power of southern committee chairmen—gained by seniority—was beyond the challenge of junior members; that voters elected one party or the other to govern; and the parties set how the members of Congress would vote—except for the southern Democrats, who often teamed up with Republicans.

These old truisims have been changed dramatically. My years as a reporter have spanned the administrations of six presidents, and over the course of that time, I have watched a stunning transformation in the way the American system of government operates. The Washington power game has been altered by many factors: new Congressional assertiveness against the presidency, the revolt within Congress against the seniority system, television, the merchandising of candidates, the explosion of special interest politics, the demands of political fund-raising, the massive growth of staff power—and by changes in voters as well.

The political transformations of the past fifteen years have rewritten the old rules of the game. Presidents now have much greater difficulty marshaling governing coalitions. Power, instead of residing with the president, often floats away from him, and a skillful leader must learn how to ride the political waves like a surfer or be toppled. The old power oligarchy in Congress has been broken up. The new breed of senators and House members, unlike the old breed, play video politics, a different game from the old inside, backroom politics of Congress.
Party labels mean much less now to voters and to many candidates, too.

Altogether, it’s a new ball game, with new sets of rules, new ways of getting power leverage, new types of players, new game plans, and new tactics that affect winning and losing. It is a much looser power game now, more wide open, harder to manage and manipulate than it was a quarter of a century ago when I came to town.

My purpose in this book is to take you inside each part of the political process in Washington and to show you how it works. And then, to show you how the whole game of governing fits together—and also to show where it doesn’t fit together. My premise is that the games politicians play today—that is, how the power games are played and therefore how Washington
really
works—have unwritten rules, rituals, and patterns that explain why things so often happen the way they do. These political customs, conventions, and predictable patterns of behavior lie behind what Max Lerner once called “the ultimate propulsion of events”:
¹

In using the metaphor of games, I do not mean to imply that politics is child’s play. Governing the United States of America is a serious enterprise. Washington is a world where substance matters. Issues matter. Ideas matter. One political party, for example, can gain the
intellectual
initiative over the other party, and that is vitally important in the power game. The Democrats seized the “idea advantage” at the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal; the Reagan Republicans seized it in the early 1980s with their idea of cutting government and taxes.

But Washington is a city engaged simultaneously in substance and in strategems. Principles become intertwined with power plays. For Washington is as much moved by who’s up and who’s down, who’s in and who’s out, as it is by setting policy. Politicians are serious when they debate about Star Wars, arms control, a fair tax system, protectionism, and welfare reform. But they are no less serious when they devise gambits to throw the other team on the defensive, when they grandstand to milk a hot issue for public relations points and applause. They pursue the interests of their home team—their constituents. But in the special world of Washington, they also hotly pursue their highly personal interests in the inside power games—turf games, access games, career games, money games, blame games—each of which has an inner logic of its own that often diverts officeholders away from the singleminded pursuit of the best policy.
²

Politics in Washington is a continuous contest, a constant scramble for points, for power, and influence. Congress is the principal policy arena of battle, round by round, vote by vote. People there compete, take sides, form teams, and when one action is finished, the teams dissolve, and, members form new sides for the next issues. Of course, team competition is our national way of life, but rarely does the contest take place at such close quarters, among people who rub elbows with each other, professionally and socially, day in and day out.

The lingo of games rings naturally on the playing fields of political combat. For analogies, our politicians often turn to the argot of the sports arena, the track, the boxing ring, the playing field, or the casino. Richard Nixon, as president, would not dream of operating without “a game plan.” Jack Kennedy, comparing politics to football, told his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, “if you see daylight, go through the hole.” When Gerald Ford was the House Republican leader, he could not resist using football clichés; hardly a major vote could take place without Ford’s warning that the ball was on the ten-yard line and the clock was running out. More recently, Ronald Reagan’s campaign strategists, like ring handlers coaching a prizefighter, tapped a “sparring partner” to warm up Reagan for the 1980 presidential campaign debates. They chose David Stockman as the person to prep Reagan for debates with John Anderson and Jimmy Carter. Later, Secretary of State Alexander Haig was dropped from the Reagan cabinet because the White House
felt that he was not “a team player.” Both admirers and critics saw how Henry Kissinger approached our national rivalry with Moscow as a global chess match, with other nations serving as his pawns.

The power game echoes Las Vegas and the daily double. Howard Baker, as Senate majority leader, fashioned the image that Reagan tax-cut economics was a “riverboat gamble.” Politicians are forever citing the long odds against them, talking about front-runners and dark horses. Political reporters are kin to sportswriters, indulging in political locker-room talk: We compile “the book” on leading contenders and often devote more attention to the advance handicapping, the pace of the favorite, and the skill of his campaign trainers than to the issues and the national agenda.

But the purpose of this book goes beyond locker-room jargon and game analogies for American politics. The game metaphor helps to explain the patterns and precepts that skilled politicians live by, regardless of party or administration, as well as the consequences in all of this game playing, for all of us. Actually the Washington power game is not one game, but an olympiad of games, going on simultaneously, all over town. My aim is to take that olympiad apart, play by play, game by game, player by player, so that the overall game of governing is revealed.

Seeing the inner workings of Washington as a power game is a way of following the action amidst the babel. It’s a metaphor for understanding what makes famous people—and faceless people, unknown but powerful—do what they do. Sometimes it explains why some good people don’t play the game better, why they don’t win. It helps in spotting the tricks of the political trade used by the winners, for seeing why some politicians succeed and others fail.

Knowing the rules of the game, the right moves and countermoves, is crucial to success. Some politicians like to say that the power game is an unpredictable casino of chance and improvisation—“lightning hitting the outhouse” is the way Senator Alan Simpson puts it. But most of the time politics is about as casual and offhand as the well-practiced triple flips of an Olympic high diver. The appearance of a casual, impromptu performance may add to its political appeal out in the country, as Reagan’s TelePrompTer speeches and rehearsed press conferences do. But the real pros, like chess masters, rarely trust true amateurism in politics. They usually have a pretty good feel for how certain policy lines and maneuvers will play out, before they start.

Politicians themselves know that there are advantages for those who understand the rules and the moves, the power realities and the winning
gambits, and for those who are savvy about the traps and escape routes of modern politics. The rules of the game apply from one administration to the next. To pick just a few examples, a modern handbook of political tactics would say: