Power Game by Hedrick Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

system, with its revolving coalition governments, while our president reigned above it all, a regal symbol of nationhood.
    “What you have right now is a constitutional monarchy,” asserted Representative Newt Gingrich, a bright Reaganite Republican from Georgia. “What we’ve done is we’ve reinvented Hanoverian kingship without reinventing the parliamentary prime ministership. We have this tremendously nice, likable King Victoria. Everybody likes him but where the hell’s Disraeli? or Gladstone? What I’m saying is that in the age of television, we now have the television-series equivalent of [rotating] prime ministerships.” 12
    Michael Barone, writing in
The Washington Post
, once compared the kaleidoscopic shuffle of political coalitions in the Reagan period to the Italian government, where a relatively small group of politicians shuffle and reshuffle the top government ministries. “Italian politics is often held up to ridicule as comically unstable, with constantly changing ministries, divided responsibility, and splinter parties,” he observed. “But how much different, in practice, is ours?… Functional responsibility—not necessarily the title, but the real decision-making power—gets passed around here as well, to those strong enough to grab it.” 13
    Barone’s analogy fits, not only the Reagan years but the modern presidency in general. The president is always part of the power mix but not necessarily the central part. In 1981, when Reagan pressed his budget and tax cuts through Congress, he was at the peak of his power—the prime minister of his own coalition; his leading ministers were his budget director, David Stockman, and his White House chiefof staff, James A. Baker III. But by that same fall and into the following year, 1982, the critical role of driving economic policy had passed to Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Volcker’s tight money policies were wringing inflation out of the economy and bringing on a painful recession that the president could not prevent; Reagan deficits compounded the problem.
    In the spring of 1982, a new political coalition emerged to take over policy leadership, a surprising partnership between Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker and House Speaker Tip O’Neill. They forced the president to backtrack and accept a $98 billion, three-year tax increase in August 1982. They eventually pushed through two jobs bills, and they worked out a Social Security compromise with the president. In the spring of 1983, the MX issue was resolved by a new coalition spearheaded by two congressmen, Les Aspin of Wisconsin and Albert Gore of Tennessee, and Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia. These three Democrats stepped into a foreign-policy vacuum left by Reagan’s inability to move Congress. In the election year of 1984, little happened and the nation was left with a caretaker government.
    Surprisingly, after his landslide reelection in 1984, Reagan did not reclaim the prime ministership in 1985. His one big policy push was tax reform, but that was slow in coming. The start of Reagan’s second term marked a rapid turnover in national political leadership. First came Robert Dole, the new Senate majority leader, who drove the budget process for six months, insisting on austerity for both the Pentagon and Social Security. When the White House pulled the rug out from Dole and toppled his coalition, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, took the limelight by rewriting the president’s tax-reform bill. Reagan’s role was rescuing it from defeat by angered House Republicans.
    The public was still giving Reagan high marks for strong leadership, but in fact, leadership was largely coming from below. By fall 1985, two freshman Republican senators, Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, became the driving forces, the new prime ministers, for a five-year plan to balance the budget. In early 1986, the