Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (25 page)

My own attitude was to fight.
“I think we should not compromise,” I wrote in my journal. “We should push the President hard and get what we can. Why should we give in on anything if Reagan doesn’t want to give in on Kemp-Roth?” This shorthand referred to Reagan’s signature 1981 tax cuts bill that had been jointly sponsored by New York congressman Jack Kemp and Delaware senator William Roth. That victory had defined the country’s direction, as dictated by Reagan’s agenda since the summer before, and its reality constituted the Democrats’ defeated position now.

To push for even a partial repeal was asking Reagan to repudiate Reaganism. I could never see it happening. Quite frankly, I wasn’t even rooting for such a deal. My view was that, if Reagan, against all odds, could have been talked into concessions on the timing of his tax cuts, the Democrats would still be wrong to accept it. It was an unequal trade. Reagan would only be adjusting details of his tax cuts by a year or so. The Democrats would be betraying their fifty-year commitment to Social Security. For me, any Democratic deal that compromised that bond would never be as good as no deal at all.

The Speaker realized it wasn’t that simple. There were moderate Democrats, he knew, ready to agree to an arrangement with the White House. They were letting it be known they were open to accepting a swipe at the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment in return for a partial delay in Reagan’s proposed three-stage cut in income taxes. I compared them, if somewhat indiscreetly, to the British prisoners of war in
The Bridge on the River Kwai
. Meaning, those guys were getting so involved in the intricacies of deal-making with the enemy that they forgot they were doing it primarily to save Reagan’s skin. After all, it was
his
administration, and
he
was the one faced with a greatly flawed budget he’d shoved into being and now needed badly to fix.

One political case for buckling to the Republicans on the budget
was that it would change the subject. The pollsters working for our side had issued a warning to the effect that whenever “the budget” became the headline in partisan debate, it benefited the Republicans. What the opposition party needed to focus on was “the economy.” Budget, as a concept, played up the Democrats’ reputation as big spenders. To speak of the economy, on the other hand, put the accent on the rising jobless rate. This argued for giving up legislatively on the
budget,
while keeping up the media drumbeat on what Reagan had done to the
economy
.

When it came to how the public was viewing the protracted efforts over the budget, Reagan knew what we knew. As an actor he’d naturally never liked bad reviews, and as president he must have hated them all the more. Fed up with media talk about the worsening recession—“Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash someplace has just been laid off, that he should be interviewed nationwide?” he asked sarcastically after watching a Bill Moyers documentary on its impact around the country. He badly wanted the national conversation off the “economy” and back to the “budget” fight.
“I called Tip O’Neill,” he jotted in his diary. “I’m not sure he’s ready to give. Tip is truly a New Deal liberal. He honestly believes that we’re promoting welfare for the rich.”

In early April, a day after the shock of lousy poll numbers—
“I’m slipping badly,” he wrote in his journal—
Reagan began making weekly Saturday radio addresses. These five-minute live broadcasts were designed to be a media magnet for the weekend. The Sunday newspapers habitually provide end-of-the-week analysis of the political scene. Reagan’s carefully scripted commentary often trumped the op-ed pages with the public. It was a masterful use of traditional media by an old pro. Radio was where Ronald Reagan had started, after all.

It became my task—one I shared with my Senate counterpart; we alternated weeks—to enlist House members to sit in front of a
radio mic and present the formal Democratic response to air after the president’s Saturday talk. I would discover to my dismay how many Democrats didn’t want to go head to head with Reagan, how only a few would agree to respond to him in real time. Overwhelmingly, those who stepped forward wanted to have their five-minute “responses” an hour after Reagan’s address written and ready the day before. Here’s a note in my journal for Saturday, April 17, 1982. It concerned the congressman Toby Moffett, who was willing to take the plunge despite extraordinary family circumstances.
“Toby Moffett, his wife in labor from 8 AM this morning, is about to respond to Reagan’s radio address.” Looking back, I give the Moffetts—both of them—credit. Even under normal family circumstances, heading into a studio to talk back to a president with the whole country listening had to be stressful.

As those spring days passed, the White House set up a situation that amounted to an ambush waiting for Tip to walk into it. If he didn’t participate directly in a budget deal that briskly trimmed Social Security payments, he’d be tagged an “obstructionist,” the very label he’d sacrificed so much to dodge the previous year. To heighten the melodrama quotient, President Reagan would now motorcade to the Capitol, symbolizing the heroic “extra mile” he was willing to go in order to strike a compromise with the Democratic Speaker. After this bit of political theater, and depending on how Tip responded, the president would either applaud him for at last agreeing that Social Security needed cutting, or else lay into Tip if the Speaker held firm.

So the two of them were about to go head-to-head, purportedly on Tip’s home turf. It would be a battle of wits, deciding who would come out the grand compromiser, who the roadblock. It would play to Reagan’s strengths as a showman but also to the Speaker’s proven ability once the pair of them were in the room together.

O’Neill was a master of the backroom negotiation. He worked them all the same way. Each time there was a dispute within the caucus to be settled, he would summon all parties to his working office. There he would sit behind his giant desk, the one used by President Grover Cleveland, light up his cigar, and hear the arguments.

He would never move from behind that desk while the arguments rose and fell. He was the judge, after all, and never in a rush to offer his verdict. My guess is that he liked it when the room grew hotter, stickier, closer. It wore down the contestants for his judgment, made them hunger for the fresh cold air of the Capitol they knew awaited them just outside those doors.

He had this other technique, which is so absurd as to not be believed: He would bellow loudest at the congressman he had decided well beforehand to support. This way, the loser would leave his office feeling that the Speaker saw his argument even if he did not end up siding with it. His prestige was that great, his cunning that sharp. After all, he
knew
these guys.

The Reagan people also liked to leave nothing to chance. Always a smooth operation that preferred no surprises, in this case they were careful to preemptively spin for the media the “real story” of the meeting about to take place. Reagan’s spokesman, Larry Speakes, authoritatively put out the word that ongoing negotiations between the two sides—the White House congressional liaison team and the House Democrats—had progressed to the point where it was now all over except for the cherry on top. Meaning, the presence of the two top guys, Reagan and O’Neill, was being required merely to sign off on the final deal. The “chief stumbling point,” Speakes explained, remained taxes, nothing else. His clear implication: whatever you may have believed up until now, Tip O’Neill is ready to swallow a cut in Social Security.

• • •

David Broder, the much-respected
Washington Post
columnist, saw the Reagan-O’Neill encounter that April as an historic matchup of men with differing philosophies but equal conviction.

After 45 years in public office, O’Neill is easily caricatured as a bumbling relic of the political past, a ward heeler who threatens harm to the Queen’s English every time he puts down his cigar and opens his mouth. Reagan, the movie actor and television host who took up a second career in politics as he was approaching retirement age, is just as easily caricatured as a lightweight charmer with a gift of gab but no talent for sustained leadership.

Each man has come to know the other’s caricature is a lie. O’Neill learned last year that Reagan is as tough as he is charming; and Reagan is learning this year that O’Neill can be as stubborn about his convictions as the president is himself. . . . But Reagan and O’Neill are not just stubborn Irishmen; they have convictions, and those convictions were forged a long time ago. Reagan is certain he did not become President of the United States in order to raise taxes. And O’Neill is equally convinced he did not become Speaker of the House in order to reduce anyone’s Social Security. . . .

For O’Neill, a rollback in promised Social Security payments is the first retreat from the promise of decent, dignified retirement that the sainted FDR made the cornerstone of the New Deal. . . . For Reagan, an increase in the tax rate contradicts the first principle of the philosophy he has preached since he left the Democratic fold, the belief that the only way to curb big government is to slow the torrent of taxes on which it feeds.

Despite what amounted to a journalistic benediction from Broder, the “Budget Summit” clearly seemed a setup. For one thing,
the Speaker’s office was presented with the White House’s rules for the engagement, which, most significant, dictated that only
principals
were to attend the Capitol meeting, meaning
no staff.
Such an attempt at control made an absurdity of what was scheduled to happen, since staff experts, laden with their facts and figures, are standard operating procedure during such sessions when legislation is being finalized. In short, the Reagan people were practically telegraphing the fact that this face-to-face would have a great deal in common with David Stockman’s “woodshed.”

When I called Jim Baker to say that the Speaker wanted to bring Ari Weiss with him, he stood firm. “No staff,” he reiterated. At this point, I pointed out the obvious. “You’re staff!” It was a point Baker, with his mandarin sensibility, seemingly hadn’t taken in. He then attempted simply to brush aside the Speaker’s reasonable request while proposing we “be gentlemen about this.” In any case, when I told the Speaker of the rebuff, he was unimpressed. “I’m bringing Ari.”

President Reagan, one could deduce already, certainly wouldn’t be coming alone. When he arrived in the Capitol at the agreed-upon day and time, so did a full White House entourage. You’d think he was traveling to China. It was definitely
not
to be a quiet, out-of-the-way meeting to reconcile a budgetary stalemate. As I turned the corner to the Senate lobby that afternoon—the meeting was to be held in the President’s Room, just outside the Senate chamber itself—I saw a mass of reporters, held back by the stanchions. It was clear the White House media-meisters had something big in mind. To be fair, Reagan, too, had suspicions about what
he
might be walking into.
“The D’s are playing games,” he’d written in his diary two days earlier. “They want me to rescind the 3rd yr. of the tax cut—Not in a million years!”

As I would learn later, the meeting began with Tip demanding a change in the seating arrangements. The place cards had him next to President Reagan, an unusual placement for two men about to
begin tough bargaining. O’Neill’s first order of business was to take a chair directly across from the president.

Reagan tried breaking the ice with an Irish story:

Mary, suffering from morning sickness, is asked by a doctor for a “specimen.” Not knowing what he means, she goes to ask her neighbor Deirdre. When she gets back to the house, she’s got a black eye and bloody face. Her husband Michael wants to know what happened. “I stopped to ask Deirdre what a specimen was,” she replies. “So she told me to piss in a bottle. I told her to shit in a hat, and the fight was on.”

Tip was not to be charmed. “Mr. President, the nation is in a fiscal mess,” he began sternly. “Last year you were going to win on everything you put up. Now the economy is going bad. If we don’t have agreement there will be massive deficits. I know you people don’t like to hear it, but you’re just advocating trickle-down economics. Your program has failed, and you should take the lead in admitting it.”

“I’ve read that crap about my program,” Reagan shot back. Reaching into his cinematic memory, he tossed out a scene that seemed to fit. “We haven’t thrown anybody out in the snow to die. . . . It has not failed at all. It hasn’t even started yet.”

Meanwhile, out in the corridor, where I was positioned, I saw Lesley Stahl of CBS, whom I knew from my Carter days. She pulled me aside to say that the White House staff was putting out the word that the Democrats were the ones proposing to cut Social Security benefits. I went ballistic, furious that anyone would buy such a fiction and only too aware of its potential for real damage. When I delivered this news to the Speaker during a break in the “summit,” it confirmed his worst suspicions. What the White House foot soldiers were peddling in the hallway, I learned from him, was exactly what Reagan’s lieutenants were conniving to accomplish inside.

When he and the other Democratic leaders had walked into the room they’d found on the table a working paper, placed by the White House. It was labeled the “Bolling Proposal.” It was only then, when the Speaker and I compared notes, that we realized what the game was.

Also, who was winning. Dick Bolling, with Tip backing him, had apparently come around to giving Reagan’s people what they’d been looking for from the start. For his own reasons, Tip had allowed Bolling to counter the Republicans’ aggressive move on Social Security benefits with a smaller one, a slight (1 percent) cut in that year’s adjustment for inflation. The problem was, the Speaker had strayed perilously close to the abyss. By taking this step he’d left himself exposed to the charge that he, Tip O’Neill, was the one initiating it.

It was the White House overreach that saved him. The instant I told him what story they were pushing outside the meeting—that he, not Reagan, wanted to cut Social Security—his limited interest in cutting a deal was gone.