Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (36 page)

Knowing from experience the justified ambition of a man elected majority leader, his words to us that same morning were less flowery. “I intend to be Speaker right up to the last day. If Jim Wright tries anything, I’ll cut his balls off.” He knew better than anyone how a majority leader can promote himself to de facto party chief while another man still sits in the Speaker’s chair.
Nevertheless, he called Wright and apologized for the whole thing.

O’Neill’s true rival, of course, was still sitting in the Oval Office. For both seasoned pols, 1984 would offer trials neither could have seen coming. What makes politics a learning profession is the need to master situations that elude prediction. That aspect of the game is precisely what makes politics so fascinating to the observer, so treacherous to the ungifted. Fortunately for Tip and the Gipper, their capabilities were perfectly matched to the tests ahead.

O’Neill was a political retailer. His strengths were of the one-on-one
sort: making and maneuvering friends, intimidating, bluffing, outnumbering—or outlasting—challengers. He knew
everyone
, knew their children, knew their problems, and, more often than humanly imaginable,
cared
. He would show he did by calling upon what seemed an encyclopedic stock of information he maintained about so many of the people he knew. He would remember the relative who was sick, which kid had gone to which college. It was a skill he’d finely tuned, and it was one based, as far as I could see, on the fact he simply thought such matters were important.

Reagan was the wholesaler of the two. He had few friends, and saw his associates as largely interchangeable, if not outright dispensable. At one White House reception, he greeted one guest as “Mr. Mayor” only to discover he was a member of his cabinet.
His son Michael had been treated to the same experience at his high school graduation. “Dad, it’s me,” he’d found himself saying.

But if he focused on few individuals in particular, he was superb when it came to addressing the mass audience. That was the connection he never got wrong. When reaching out to his fellow citizens, he had no rival.

Above all, he was convincing. The average guy out there had no way to grasp the craft this man brought to the presidency. Though Reagan was the fellow charged with running the U.S. government, when he bellyached about “the deficits,” he sounded just like your next-door neighbor. The country went for it. Again and again, speaking as the occupant of the White House, Reagan, adopting a scolding tone, would censure not just “deficits” but the government itself, as if he and it had no connection to each other. He could speak and act as if “Washington”—always a villain in his vocabulary—was a place where he only rarely, and then just by necessity, spent any time.

In March 1984, as he was in the fourth year as the nation’s chief executive, I wrote an essay on Reagan for
The New Republic
. I
argued that the role affected by the man now in the White House was very little different from that of the man who’d once hosted
General Electric Theater
. His great achievement, in both instances, was to position himself as existing in a previously unidentified space. As president, where he looked out from was a “unique point—previously uncharted—
between
us and government.”

If you thought about it, the Ronald Reagan we were getting in the 1980s strangely resembled the 1950s version. Back then, just as now, he was handsome, upbeat, and, above all, persuasive. “Here at General Electric,” he would declare convincingly as we sat there in our living rooms, “progress is our most important product.”

Yet that “here” didn’t mean a factory somewhere, one of those buildings where assembly lines turned out GE products. “Here” was the “host’s” chair, located in a mysterious dimension between not just his listeners and the actual corporation, but also between it and him. I’d grown up with that Ronald Reagan, and I came to recognize that if the old one and the new one blurred together for me, there was a reason. On occasions such as when he stood on the West Front of the Capitol beseeching the Congress to produce a constitutionally mandated “balanced budget”—an accounting reality that he, Ronald Reagan, president of the United States, had never once felt the need to send to the Congress—I couldn’t help feeling a bit of déjà vu.

Tip O’Neill gloried in being a man of government, believing he could do good for people because that’s what he’d chosen to be. The downside was that he’d never match Reagan’s ability to connect with the American public at large, and, unfortunately, in the election year of 1984, neither did his preferred candidate for president.

• • •

Like Tip, Walter Mondale—a former two-term Minnesota senator and then for four years Jimmy Carter’s vice president—was quite capable of connecting to individuals. He was even better, though, with
groups. When speaking in public, he’d developed a knack for appealing to agglomerations of people by homing in on the parts that made up the whole. For example, he would reach out to a packed fund-raising dinner with such comforting embraces as “standing shoulder to shoulder with labor,” or “giving teachers the resources they need and then getting out of the way,” or a strong applause line backing the State of Israel. As he went warmly and knowingly on, cycling through the familiar litany of Democratic interests, different clusters of tables would loudly applaud. The folks sitting at them knew he was talking
straight
to them.

The problem was, rarely did he ever manage to hit a note in 1984 that caused an entire banquet hall to roar in excitement. As the candidate anointed by the Democratic establishment to run against Ronald Reagan, he operated under a severe handicap. Unlike the man he hoped to dethrone, he was able to offer neither a fresh message nor a manner that could thrill his entire party, much less a majority of the American electorate. He simply didn’t operate like that. What he operated like was the steward of various interest groups that he was, tending to each according to each’s wants. When urged to display independence, his response was instinctive: “Why would I want to fight with our friends?”

This isn’t to say he wasn’t popular. The elected Democrats in Congress and around the country saw him as their brother in arms, a guy who’d worked his way up “through the chairs” as they had. In his case, he’d worked in the 1948 Senate campaign of Hubert Humphrey, served in the army, then attended law school on the G.I. Bill, stayed active in home-state politics, and wound up himself a senator, arriving in Washington in 1965. A native of tiny Ceylon, Minnesota, he’d been loyal to every mentor and patron along the way, including Jimmy Carter. He would be equally faithful to the Democratic interest groups, especially the big labor unions, if elected president. His
problem was that the world at large knew this, including those who thought the interest groups had enjoyed too much clout for too long already. The same world at large believed it was time for the Democrats to have a candidate free of the musty rooms where candidates swore fealty to the groups before they cut their deal with the voter.

Senator Gary Hart—born Gary Hartpence, he’d shortened his name in his twenties—was such a candidate. Eight years younger than Mondale, but also more stylistically youthful in manner and appearance, he hailed from Colorado. That made him a man of the West, an idea that carried a certain romantic resonance in American public life, and though he’d managed the presidential campaign of leftish George McGovern, he carried the brand of a moderate independent. He was the fresh, outdoorsy breeze that could just possibly blow the septuagenarian Republican out of the White House. Where Mondale would be asking the voter to retrace his or her steps and admit they’d taken the wrong path in 1980, this less familiar face could say it was simply time, once again, to move forward.

In full candor, that’s how I looked at the Democrats running in 1984. But it was not the way my boss did. Tip O’Neill liked political
regulars
. And it would cost him. When the big upset arrived, it came early. Even though it only involved Hart’s coming in a distant second in the Iowa caucuses, the Coloradan suddenly was in position as the Mondale alternative, which is precisely what many Democrats were looking for. In the buzzword of the day, he then “slingshot” himself from Iowa to a convincing victory over the former veep in New Hampshire.

Now came the big test, on 1984’s Super Tuesday, March 13, when nine states held contests. Going in, the Mondale people understood their man was hovering, politically, at death’s door. Fortunately, the not-quite-deceased had Bob Beckel, a clever troubleshooter, working on strategy. Beckel, writing the story his way, put out word to
the media that if his candidate, who was Jimmy Carter’s vice president, tanked in Jimmy Carter’s home state of Georgia, he was finished. Now, on that Tuesday, there were, as I said, nine states voting, including large ones like Florida and Massachusetts. Beckel’s genius was to make it seem, just as he intended, that it was all about
that one southern state
. Losing Georgia would be the knockout punch Mondale dealt to Hart.

Beckel then filled Washington’s Capitol Hilton ballroom to the rafters for the Mondale victory party. Calling in every chit he had out, he instructed lobbyists, contributors, and job-seekers alike that it was “show up, or else.” To make the crowd appear even bigger, he used the old Kennedy advance man’s tactic of shrinking the room itself.
“We threw up a partition that made the room a third the size of the ballroom. You couldn’t move in the fuckin’ place.” He wanted that crowd of meal tickets already in position at ten o’clock when NBC began its hourlong network special coverage of Super Tuesday.

Beckel’s ruse worked. Though Mondale lost six of the nine contests that day—Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Washington—and won only in Alabama, Georgia, and Hawaii (also in American Samoa), he hogged the coverage. Hart’s actual dominance mattered little. Mondale’s ace operator had spun it so brilliantly. If losing Georgia spelled defeat, then winning it spelled victory. It was that simple. And so, a few minutes after 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Bob Beckel announced the great news to a crowded ballroom on live NBC television. To the viewers at home, what they saw was indistinguishable from a Mondale victory party. The next morning, when Beckel appeared on
Today
, host Bryant Gumbel congratulated him. “Yup,” Bob beamed, “it’s the comeback of the year.”

But the old tricks went only so far. They couldn’t make Walter Mondale the candidate to beat Ronald Reagan in 1984. The main issue wasn’t that he came across, as he put it, as “official” that
spring, as he warded off the lanky, mop-haired Hart, but that the economy was turning itself around. From its height in late 1982, the country’s unemployment rate had cascaded three points. And as the numbers were going down, the country’s mood was heading up. Things were looking brighter and people were beginning to feel it. All it would take now would be a Reagan campaign that seized the advantage of that percolating national feeling. All the Mondale people could rely upon, thematically, was the invocation of past eras and past pain.

As the primary season wore on, Mondale’s electioneering—a slog if ever there was one—demanded that Democrats wear a happy face. But it was hard. Especially for such staunch old liberal Democrats as the Speaker. Young voters, in particular, weren’t buying his candidate. Tip could see this and didn’t like it a bit. He’d observed how, at home in Massachusetts, Hart had been the one drawing the younger crowds.
“I think it will be right down to the wire. Hart is the frontrunner, and he will have to make sure there are no soft spots in his armor, because he will be attacked from every angle. I had hoped we could get everything out of the way . . . so we could go for the common enemy—the fitness of the president to run the government . . . his complete lack of knowledge with regard to foreign affairs.”

Tip was not a happy man. The economy was now working on behalf of the Republicans. The Democrats lacked both a coherent message and a charismatic candidate able to forge one.
“We have the Boston Marathon and there is a place called ‘Heartbreak Hill.’ Mr. Mondale is going up that hill.” The Speaker could see that the odds of limiting Ronald Reagan to a single term were beginning to lengthen.

O’Neill’s resentment toward Reagan was growing, no doubt increased by the president’s enhanced election-year standing. There’d been the usual niceties, like the House singing “Happy Birthday”
after Reagan had finished delivering the State of the Union.
“Well, he still calls me on the telephone, and we talk,” O’Neill told a reporter in January who asked about their relations. “That is the way it should be. Our party is the adversaries of those who run the government. We are expected to criticize. Some of us do and there are others out there who should do it more often.”

In late February, he tried a different sort of explanation for the often seesawing relationship.
“On St. Patrick’s Day, I will probably have lunch with him. That is how democracy works. I go to France and Italy, and the majority never speaks to the minority. I can argue with Bob Michel and he can say severe things about me—and we play golf on the weekend. I go with Silvio Conte and play bridge with him. You can disagree, but still be friendly. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

What didn’t go away, and what only got worse as time passed, was the way O’Neill remained haunted by Beirut. In April, when Reagan took unfair partisan aim at the Democrats by citing the deployment they’d agreed to, O’Neill ripped back with a haymaker, saying only one person bore responsibility for the dead marines, and that was “the president of the United States.”

After this exchange, a hard-line Reagan supporter sent a letter of complaint to the White House.
“I must not be too bright,” it began. “You and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill have a few disagreements—but when you are shown together whether on TV or in a photo there is always a feeling of camaraderie, arms around each other, smiling faces. Yet this man O’Neill (and I realize you both are of Irish extraction) holds you responsible for the deaths of 260 of my people—Americans!”