Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (29 page)

President Reagan, meanwhile, was energetically working an old angle, trying ploys that would help position him as the outsider in Washington, not the guy in charge but the one
taking on
“the Government.” To launch this charade, in late August he resolutely vetoed a large appropriations bill, making him the tightfisted keeper of the purse, despite the fact that its total cost fell within the Republican-endorsed budget lines. It was a fight he’d been spoiling for, giving him an opportunity to take on the capital’s powers that be.

The Speaker recognized what the White House was up to and labeled the veto a
“political tactic” intended to draw attention away from the failure of the administration’s economic program.
“The president would rather have people talking about his fight with the Congress than his losing battle with unemployment.” A letter signed by the Democratic leadership—this included the Speaker, Majority Leader Jim Wright, and Majority Whip Tom Foley of Washington State—made the same point.
“The politics of the veto are all too obvious: it distracts attention from Reaganomics.” It was the now familiar contest: the Republicans wanted the headlines on “the budget,” the Democrats on “the economy.”

Watching all this, I didn’t like the way Reagan, with his grandstanding veto, was drawing attention to the appropriations fight.
It made it appear that we on the opposing side were doing exactly what the public feared Democrats invariably do—that is, spend any money they can get their hands on.

It turned out I was wrong, at least tactically. Yes, a “spending bill” was the wrong place for Democrats to pick a pre-election fight. But it’s not such a bad idea, at any time, to be seen
fighting,
especially when you might just win.

Jim Wright, for one, welcomed the conflict. He had no problem calling himself a tax-and-spend Democrat. With the veto override vote just minutes away, the Speaker asked Ari Weiss and me if we thought he should go on the floor to speak. We were both for it. This was turning into a big Democratic moment and he belonged squarely out front. I left the room to find out if the Speaker had been accorded his usual privilege to close debate on a major issue. He had. When I gave him the word, he decided to take the opportunity.

Wright, speaking first, performed brilliantly. The veteran congressman from Fort Worth said that Reagan was pulling the Republican members around with a ring in their noses like a
“prize bull.” His fellow Democrats in the chamber loved it. When it came his turn, the Speaker took the high road. He’d only been accorded three minutes.

What
made
his performance was the way he handled an interruption, an unusual occurrence when he had the floor. Millicent Fenwick, the old-money, rather crusty, pipe-smoking Republican from New Jersey, took her place at the GOP microphone, declaring more than once her wish for the Speaker to “yield.” After putting her off until he finished his remarks, O’Neill finally gave way to the older, distinguished woman. “I would be glad to yield to the young lady,” which won huge laughter and applause.

He closed by urging Republican members to “do a good deed” and vote to honor the integrity of the Congress’s budget. Tip O’Neill’s decision to get out in front of the appropriations vote, affirming his leadership, had been the correct one. Upsetting predictions, the House voted to override Reagan’s veto. The lopsided tally was 301 to 117. Eighty-one Republicans joined the Democrats across the aisles in giving the president his first licking since coming to office.

Here’s what my journal entry says: “Monday—September 13. The vote on the supplemental appropriations override was Thursday. I was upset over the past 2 weeks, that we were making such a big deal over this. We were allowing Reagan to simply draw our fire and make ‘spending’ the issue rather than let people’s attention revert to their home and pocketbook issues.” Once again, I was trying to steer the national debate away from a Washington budget fight to the national unemployment rate.

I was desperate for a way to shift attention to one simple, smart question. “Why have we got the highest jobless rate in 40 years?” I asked rhetorically in my journal. “Need a major event/instrument to focus attention on unemployment and Democratic Party’s commitment to creating new jobs.”

A few days later, the Democrats, with Tip spearheading the endeavor, introduced a “jobs” bill. However, it was no surprise when the Republicans bashed this legislation as a
“billion-dollar ballot box bailout bill.” The implication was that the government would fund only phony, “make-work” jobs. Republican House leader Bob Michel was out on the House floor trashing the Democratic proposal with this very argument.

Rather than let him get away with it, I decided to do a bit of digging. I recalled research I’d done a decade earlier for Senator
Moss, during which I’d spent days pulling together a list of public works projects in Utah, ones approved but not funded. Operating on a hunch now, I called the chief engineer of Peoria, the heart of Bob Michel’s congressional district, and asked how many bridges were below safety code. The man on the phone came up with a list, complete with names and addresses where necessary repairs in the structures had been identified but not funded. I gave what he’d sent me, along with the jobless number for Peoria, to the Speaker.

I never realized how tough the Speaker would get with his old pal Bob Michel. Tip tore into him on the floor, listing with unusual specificity the precise location of each dangerous Peoria bridge, throwing in for good measure the charge that the Republican leader should have been on the ball and used his clout with the U.S. Department of Transportation and other agencies to get those bridges fixed. In short, he was calling him out for failing to serve the constituents who voted for him and trustingly depended upon him to serve their interests. Obviously upset at Tip’s invasion of his back-home politics, Bob Michel headed to the back of the chamber. His press secretary, Mike Johnson, was waiting there for him, but there was little consolation he could offer. “In Peoria, Reaganomics is going to play a lot better than Tiponomics,” the red-faced Republican leader shot back before heading to the back of the chamber. I just have to add here, looking back, what wonderful people Bob Michel and Mike Johnson were and are.

• • •

As September gave way to October, the election grew more intense. Time works that way, no matter what party you belong to. Even though he’d come aboard for the bipartisan tax-raising bill just
weeks before, Reagan still was bent on portraying himself as a man apart, as a citizen-politician at the gates of Washington.

Remember that big July rally on the West Front of the Capitol? Well, Ronald Reagan had gotten such a kick out of it he now was coming back for an encore. Unfortunately for him, his previous crowd-pleasing act—his call for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution—was beginning to wear thin. What he hoped to do was trap Democratic members of Congress who could be accused of being against a balanced budget. The problem was, even true believers were now more driven by the country’s real economic predicament than the ideological appeal of constitutional change.

To his chagrin, the president saw the balanced-budget amendment now fail to win the two-thirds vote needed before it could be submitted to the fifty states for ratification. Twenty independent-minded Republicans had joined the Democrats to kill its chances.

As anticipated, Reagan tried turning the legislative lemon he’d just been handed into lemonade—what else could he do? He played the aggrieved crusader.
“Voters across America should count heads and take names. In November we must elect Representatives who will support the amendment when we propose it again in the spring. Today I share the deep burning anger, I think, of millions of Americans.” He attacked what he called the
“stonewalling” by O’Neill and other Democrats who’d kept the House from having scheduled the vote earlier.

Since the
Washington Post
pronounced that the vote denying Reagan the balanced-budget amendment
“boosted the stock” of O’Neill, I was happy with the result. Yet at the same time, I remained uncertain how this upset actually was going to play in the coming
election. Here’s how I framed it in my journal: “The problem is that the Democrats never really made a public case against the constitutional amendment. We needed some hook, some easily understood and accepted reason why the amendment was not the answer. I don’t think there
is
one.” In the voters’ minds, why shouldn’t there be a mechanism forcing politicians to do what they themselves have to do at home, balance the checkbook?

I further worried that Reagan could make the election about the refusal of the Congress—“Washington!”—to let him make the big changes he’d called for. Again, it was about not being the roadblock to voter intentions. Basically, I was fretting that the vote on November 2 wouldn’t hinge on the worsening economy—the jobless rate was now above 10 percent—but on Reagan’s righteous presidential anger at an unbending Congress.

But if morale was any guidepost, matters were suddenly looking up for the Democrats. Here’s the Speaker describing how he saw his success story in fighting Reagan: “I was the only voice that was really criticizing them. I kept hammering away and hammering away and hammering away. A lot of my people were running away, frightened of ’em, scared stiff of ’em.”

But for Reagan’s speechwriters, the Speaker still remained a target. Here’s the president at a campaign rally in Irving, Texas, unkindly equating Tip O’Neill with Pac-Man:
“Somebody told me it was a round thing that gobbled up money. I thought that was Tip O’Neill.”

During his swing through the Southwest, a script had called for Reagan to be much rougher. A copy of a speech released earlier to the press had him saying,
“In Washington, the nine heavenly bodies are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, Neptune and Tip O’Neill.” Reagan was either too nice or too prudish
to imply that his sometime buddy—after 6 p.m.—was known as “Uranus.” He’d not been willing to go
that
far.

Tip, too, preferred to tease rather than insult. During a White House briefing on foreign policy, for example, Reagan had to excuse himself. He told the Speaker and the other congressional leaders present that he was going to get his picture taken with a group of handicapped children.
“Your heart would die for them,” he said as he left the room. O’Neill saw his opening. “Mr. President, don’t forget to
tell them that Tip O’Neill is fighting for their budgets!” he called after the departing Reagan.

In mid-October, during his regular Saturday radio address, Reagan spoke of his early presidential hero,
Franklin Roosevelt. He explained that
“fear” was now again the country’s real problem, just as it had been in the 1930s. However, he wanted to be sure his listeners knew that, this time around, the Democrats weren’t the solution but rather the problem itself.

But the president wasn’t to go unchallenged. Until this moment Tip had delegated other House Democrats to broadcast the official opposition reply. Now, finally, he was going to do it himself. It was a great moment for us corner men. I planned to have the Speaker tape his five-minute address on Friday in Boston, then send the transcript to the wires and major newspapers that afternoon with an embargo. That meant they couldn’t publish or broadcast the Speaker’s remarks until the next morning.

From my journal: “By letting the wires go with the story at 9 AM—and also letting the radio stations begin running it then, we created a story that TPO was on offense and Reagan on defense. I called Peter Milius, an editor at the
Washington Post,
on Saturday and asked if they could put TPO in the lead and Reagan in the jump. He said, ‘You can kiss my ass.’ ”

But he was just kidding. In the end, the strategy worked and
we got the story we wanted: Tip and the Gipper fighting on even terms.

Here’s how it played in the
Post:

Democrats took the offensive yesterday for the first time in their weekly radio battle with President Reagan, bringing in House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) to elevate and sharpen the dispute over who should be blamed for the condition of the economy.

In a taped message released three hours before the president’s live broadcast, O’Neill charged that the administration’s program “is not working because the program is not fair—and just as important, because the people themselves know it is not fair.”

It was the first time a Democrat of O’Neill’s stature had taken part in the Saturday broadcasts and the first time the party launched a political assault rather than responding to Reagan’s remarks.

Steven Weisman’s coverage for the
Times,
topping the front page, was even better in setting up the match.

REAGAN AND O’NEILL EXCHANGE CHARGES OVER THE ECONOMY

President Reagan and the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., exchanged accusations on the economy today as the off-year election campaign went into its final 10 days.

Sounding their principal themes in a campaign that is viewed by both sides as a referendum on the Reagan Administration’s economic policies, Mr. Reagan charged the Democrats
with proffering “fairy tales” and Mr. O’Neill said the Administration had deliberately thrown people out of work. . . .

Just as Mr. Reagan appealed for patience, Mr. O’Neill sounded the principal theme of the Democrats this fall: that the Administration’s policies were unfair.

The Speaker’s rare appearance on the airwaves did what we’d hoped: put him out in front where, suddenly, he sounded as impressive as I was convinced he deserved to be.

An election eve account by the Associated Press’s Tom Raum recognized both the strategy and its effectiveness:

Not long ago, some members of his own party dismissed O’Neill as ineffective and politically over the hill, as he lost one budget battle after another to Reagan. Today, the speaker seems to have reclaimed his status as the Democratic Party’s chief spokesman.

He is making more radio and television appearances, and his enlarged press staff is cranking out almost daily O’Neill attacks on Reaganomics. One was a poster that carried this message: “Voodoo Economics: Stay the Curse.”