Power Game (3 page)

Some of the most sophisticated people around the country often fail to understand the rules of the Washington power game, people who
become cabinet members and even presidents and high corporate executives who frequently call at the White House. For instance, in late 1983, Thomas Wyman, former CBS board chairman, came to make a policy pitch to Edwin Meese III, who was then counselor to President Reagan. At the time, the television networks were fighting the Hollywood studios over control of the lucrative syndication rights for movies made for TV. It meant big money. Both sides went to Washington to get their way, and Wyman took his case to Meese, according to someone close to the Reagan inner circle.

As it happened, Meese was unable to keep the appointment because he was caught up in a sudden foreign policy crisis with the president. As a courtesy, Meese had Wyman sent to the office of Craig Fuller, then secretary of the Reagan cabinet and a top White House adviser to Meese. Fuller offered to help Wyman.

“I know something about this issue,” Fuller suggested. “Perhaps you’d like to discuss it with me.”

But Wyman waved him off, unaware of Fuller’s actual role and evidently regarding him as a mere staff man.

“No, I’d rather wait and talk to Meese,” Wyman said.

For nearly an hour, Wyman sat leafing through magazines in Fuller’s office, making no effort to talk with Fuller, who kept working at his desk just a few feet away.

Finally, Meese burst into Fuller’s office, full of apologies that he simply would not have time for a substantive talk.

“Did you talk to Fuller?” he asked.

Wyman shook his head.

“You should have talked to Fuller,” Meese said. “He’s very important on this issue. He knows it better than any of the rest of us. He’s writing a memo for the president on the pros and cons. You could have given him your side of the argument.”

Washington insiders know that the staff is often the key on any substantive issue. In this case, they would have known that Fuller, as brain truster for Meese and hence for the president, was the key figure. Fuller had already been thoroughly lobbied for the Hollywood studios by Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan White House aide and a well-known lobbyist. Not that Fuller would neglect to give Meese both sides of the argument, but Wyman had lost a golden opportunity. Time with Fuller was actually worth more on that issue than time with Meese was, because Fuller was drafting the administration’s position.

Wyman’s mistake was not unusual. Many people, not understanding how the game is played, are dazzled by political celebrities and feel they
have to go to the top: to the president or his right-hand man, to the Treasury secretary, the senator, the committee chairmen. Washington insiders pay far more attention to the power and expertise of staff than outsiders do. The insiders pay their respects to the person with the title and then work the serious issues with less-celebrated staff people who actually draft policy. The wise game player always paves the way to the higher-ups through the staff person.

Wyman’s experience was a small incident, but change the names and the issues and it happens hundreds of times every year, from the Carter administration to the Reagan administration to the next administration, not only in the White House but in Congress, at the Pentagon, at the Agriculture Department, all over town. It is not just a matter of understanding staff power; it’s also a matter of knowing whose economic figures to trust, which House leaders can pull together coalitions, which senators personally provoke opposition when they sponsor legislation, when to press the attack, and when to lay back and let the normal rhythms of politics pass by.

Washington has its special political culture, its tribal customs, and its idiosyncrasies. These folkways can trip up not only an untutored network boss, but also a new president such as Jimmy Carter, a business titan such as Donald Regan, and sometimes even a government careerist such as former Secretary of State Alexander Haig. All because these people really didn’t know how to play the power game—or, in Haig’s case, because he hadn’t really absorbed the lessons of his own experience. These three men and others failed to understand the maxim that in political Washington, unlike in the military or industry, power is not hierarchical. Persuasion works better than unilateral policy pronouncements. Command is less effective than consensus.

Even as skillful a politician as Ronald Reagan can run into pitfalls when he forgets the basic rules of the game. Reagan was masterful as a political leader in 1981 and as president. During the brilliant launching of his first administration, he understood the game, or he relied on others who did. He followed a near-perfect script for presidential leadership, especially in his critical first year, which fixed the country’s approving impression of his presidency for six years. So often, early on, Reagan made the right move, whereas Jimmy Carter, in the opening days of his presidency, made the wrong move, which lost his presidency ground that it never regained.

But strangely, after Reagan’s reelection to a second term in 1984, he failed to follow his own successful game plan, and in 1985 he began to fare badly. His 1984 landslide with the voters did not, ultimately,
have the dramatic consequences that were expected. But the way Reagan played the game did.

Let me emphasize that the outcome in American government does not always depend on game playing. Obviously, the political environment affects the success or failure of presidents. For example, Jimmy Carter was handicapped by skyrocketing world oil prices beyond his control, prices that shot up the rate of inflation in America; whereas Ronald Reagan was helped immensely by the tumbling of those same oil prices, bolstering his campaign against inflation.

Nonetheless, over the past half dozen presidencies, there is ample evidence to suggest that regardless of philosophy or motives, some politicians have played the power game well and largely gotten their way, and others have played it badly and seen their policies falter. Beyond that, there are some political games that are vital to the effective functioning of our system, others that delude us for a time, and still others that tie our government in knots and stall the whole process. There are trivial games and weighty ones—the turf games of a bureaucrat protecting his piece of policy, the image games of the video politician, the “perk” games of access and proximity to the team captain. There is the blame game—dumping responsibility on the other side. There are the “porcupine politics” played by mavericks who derive their power from being prickly, from harassing the majority. And there’s the political game that we, as citizens, most need for the players to play—the game of building coalitions.

The examples in this book draw heavily on the past decade, especially on the Reagan period; this period amply illustrates what works well in the power game and what works poorly. It is full of both smart moves and foolish gambits. What is more, this period reflects the larger dynamics of the power game that have driven our system in recent years and are likely to drive it in the coming administrations. I’ve also drawn on experiences from the presidencies of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter. But the Reagan period was particularly fruitful, not only because it is so fresh and it reflects the most up-to-date power techniques, but also because Reagan himself demonstrated some of the most skillful and triumphant game playing in recent American politics—and some of its most glaring failures. So did members of his cabinet, his staff, and the Congressional leaders during his presidency. Their patterns, their ways of winning, and the pitfalls of losing—the dos and don’ts—are likely to persist well into the next administration and beyond.

In all of this, power is the mysterious quotient. Power is the ability
to make something happen or to keep it from happening. It can spring from tactical ingenuity and jugular timing, or simply from knowing more than anyone else at the critical moment of decision. At its most clear-cut, power is President Reagan’s ordering the bombing of Libya in 1986 or, six months later, tabling a spur-of-the-moment arms-control proposal in Reykjavík. It is House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., and Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker striking a deal to push a tax increase through in 1982 and then putting that bill on the agenda for both houses of Congress. It is the stuff of headline news.

But there are many other less orthodox kinds of power, for power operates in many indirect, invisible ways. Before presidential decisions are made or the final congressional votes are taken, their content is shaped by hidden hands. In Washington, as elsewhere, power does not always follow organizational charts; a person’s title does not necessarily reflect the power that he or she has.

In Part One, my approach is to look, first of all, at the nature of power: how different it is from what it appears to be and how the levers of power have changed dramatically in the past fifteen years. Next, in Part Two, we look at the playing field on which the power game takes place. This is the terrain that the players take for granted: the folkways of Washington, the power networks, the odd couples, the rise of women in the power game. Then we will follow the various strands of the power game: the world of the constant campaign in Congress, the pork-barrel and turf-cartel politics of the Pentagon, the modern techniques of lobbies and the channels of political money, and the hidden but immense power of staff. All of these together form the backdrop for the big games of Part Three: presidential agenda setting, the building of coalitions, the strategies of opposition, the making of foreign policy. And finally, in Part Four, we will look at the basic dilemmas of our political system and why it doesn’t work better: the deadlocks of divided government, the steep costs of the absence of a majority party, and the disconnect between our political campaigns and the very process of governing. My purpose, through it all, is to show how the Washington power game really works, and how it could work better.

PART I
The Nature of Power

Let us begin in Huntsville, Tennessee.

It would take years to find a more unlikely command post for an American president than Huntsville. Normally, Huntsville is a sleepy, peaceable mountain town (population 519), a classic slice of rural Americana set in the Appalachian forests of the Cumberland Plateau, nearly three thousand feet above the sea, and a sixty-mile drive northeast from Knoxville on sweeping, curving highways. It is the kind of tight-knit, little country community where, as one frequent visitor noted, “everyone knows when you come into town; and when you leave, they all know what your business was.”

For well over a century, this upland neck of eastern Tennessee has been so staunchly Republican and so loyal to the Union that when Tennessee seceded during the Civil War, Scott County seceded from Tennessee. For much of this century, the staples of the local economy were strip-mining, lumbering, and prospecting for oil and natural gas. But the local folks say that environmental regulations have squeezed
the life out of these industries and that the best jobs these days are making hardwood parquet floors at Tibbals Flooring, or working for B. F. Goodrich in Oneida, about seven miles up the road.

Huntsville is home to the Scott County government seat but boasts little else. The center of town, “the mall,” is not much more than a grassy area surrounded by a two-story brick courthouse, a municipal building, one school, a grocery store, a drug store, one self-service laundry, a filling station, a community center, a motorcycle dealership, and a gazebo. No stoplight; only a blinker when school is in session. And the locals lament with envy that the nearest McDonald’s is over in Oneida.

In short, Huntsville has little to distinguish itself from thousands of tranquil towns dotted across this nation—except that it is located just off Howard H. Baker Highway, named for an extremely skilled and amiable hometown lawyer who rose to become majority leader of the United States Senate in 1981, just as Ronald Reagan moved into the White House. The Baker family had crossed the mountains into Tennessee back in the 1790s and achieved some local prominence. Senator Baker’s grandfather was elected sheriff of a neighboring county. The Bakers erected the town gazebo in Huntsville. But no one in the Tennessee family tree foreshadowed Senator Baker’s eminence as a close confidant and political ally of a president. Nor did anyone dream what their relationship would mean to Huntsville.