Storming the GatesProtest Politics and the Republican RevivalBy Dan Balz and Ronald BrownsteinLITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANYCopyright © 1996 Dan Balz and Ronald Brownstein.All rights reserved.ISBN: 0-316-08038-1Chapter One The Whirlwind THE FIRST RETURNS reached Washington soon afterthe polls closed in Kentucky on the evening of May 24, 1994,and in the cream-colored, brick building on First Street insoutheast Washington, an explosion of cheers erupted. TheRepublicans were anticipating a long night of counting, and a few ofthe stalwarts from the House had assembled with the campaign staff atparty headquarters to await the outcome. In the annals of Americanpolitics, the contest that held their interest seemed insignificant, justanother special election for a vacant House seat in a mostly rural congressionaldistrict in Kentucky. But the Republicans knew this was noordinary election, and now the early numbers looked far better thananyone expected. Six months later, they would look back on the Kentucky election asthe first volley in the revolution of 1994, but if there was anything notableto most of the country about the contest that night, it was theevent that had precipitated the election: the death two months earlierof the man who had held the seat for more than forty years. DemocratWilliam H. Natcher had come to Washington in 1953, the next-to-lastyear the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives.After four decades in Congress, the courtly and courteous Kentuckygentleman was an institution within the institution. He rose to thechairmanship of the powerful House Appropriations Committee andestablished an astonishing attendance record by casting 18,401 consecutiveroll-call votes--the last four from a gurney rolled onto theHouse floor--before his ailing body finally rebelled and preventedhim from leaving the hospital, where a few weeks later he died.Natcher's long career neatly encompassed the forty-year era in whichthe Democrats had controlled the House and, in a very real sense,controlled Washington itself. Through five Republican Presidents andsix years of a Republican Senate, the House remained in Democratichands, a bulwark against conservative insurgents and the central nervoussystem that maintained and nurtured the tight web of relationshipsand interests that defined official Washington. Kentucky's Second Congressional District long had contributed toDemocratic dominance in the House. Home to both Fort Knox andAbraham Lincoln's birthplace, the Second District had been in Democratichands since 1865, and even in 1994, 68 percent of voters registeredas Democrats. Over the years, however, the voters in the SecondDistrict, which spreads from the Louisville suburbs west along theOhio River and south toward the Tennessee border, had regularly casttheir ballots for Republican presidential candidates. George Bush carriedthe district by twenty percentage points in 1988 and even in theRepublican debacle of 1992, when Bill Clinton was winning Kentuckyon his way to the White House, Bush still managed narrowly to capturethe Second District. On paper at least, the Republicans shouldhave been able to win the Second District. But that was the case withscores of districts around the country. On paper, they always lookedgood. It was finding the right candidate and honing the message andraising the money and building the coalition and all the other elementsof a good campaign that so often seemed to elude the Republicans. So much had escaped from them below the level of the WhiteHouse. After controlling the presidency for twelve years with RonaldReagan and George Bush, Republicans held fewer seats in Congressthan when Reagan took office. During the Reagan-Bush years, theNational Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) had spent$260 million trying to win back the House, but they managed to reducethe GOP numbers from 192 in 1981 to 176 when Clinton tookoffice. The GOP's position in the Senate was similarly shaky: AfterBush's defeat Republicans held just forty-three seats, ten fewer thanafter Reagan's election. In the states, things looked no better. WhenClinton took the oath of office in January 1993, just seventeen of thefifty governors were Republicans; the GOP had not held a majority ofgovernors since 1970. As a party, Republicans appeared demoralizedover the loss of the White House, confused about how to combat thenew President and struggling to find a unifying symbol to replace thedevil of communism that had bound them throughout the Cold War.In the summer of 1993, Newt Gingrich, then the Republican whipin the House, groused that the party's image was that of "a negative,out-of-touch, country club party that failed." At that point, it was farfrom clear that the party could summon the will or the unity to reviveitself. But by the spring of 1994, Republicans had begun to sense extraordinaryopportunities, and some of the more astute Democratic operativesglumly agreed. Among them was David Dixon, the politicaldirector of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, whoquietly called in reporters and independent analysts like Charles Cookand Stuart Rothenberg to point out to them in striking detail theDemocrats, predicament in district after district. Dixon hoped thatthrough them, he could shake the incumbent Democrats from theirelectoral complacency. Beginning a few weeks after Clinton's election in 1992, Republicanshad won a string of elections, including contests to fill Senateseats in Georgia and Texas, governorships in Virginia and New Jersey,and mayoral offices in the nation's two largest cities, New York andLos Angeles. Retirements in the House and Senate had created unexpectedopenings for the Republicans, and for the first time in the postwarera, the round of redistricting that followed the 1990 census haderased many of the advantages Democrats earlier had enjoyed, thanksto a massive legal and political effort coordinated out of the RepublicanNational Committee during Bush's presidency. With all theirother problems, Democratic candidates now faced district boundariesfar more evenly balanced between the parties than in prior years. Inaddition, Republicans reported a banner year in recruitment of candidatesand actually expected to field more candidates for the Housethan the Democrats. With Clinton's legislative agenda--particularlyhealth care, the crown jewel of Clinton's presidency--stalling inCongress, and with the President's popularity sinking in the polls, Republicanleaders like Gingrich, then-Senate Minority Leader BobDole, and Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbourexpressed increasing optimism about the fall elections--and were beginningto believe their own pumped-up rhetoric. The party that lost its way in 1992 once again had begun to act likea political party with a unified message and internal discipline. Overthe eighteen months since Bush's defeat, Republicans had eagerly returnedto the anti-Washington themes that had resonated from Re,publicancandidates since Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign but thathad become increasingly muted throughout the Bush presidency. Recastingthemselves as the vehicle for the swell of anger rising uparound the country, Republicans sought to energize a growing anti-governmentgrassroots army of gun owners, term limits advocates,religious conservatives, small-business owners, taxpayer activists, andfollowers of Ross Perot. With the help of sympathetic talk radio hostsaround the country, the Republicans systematically stoked the populistresentment toward Washington--or simply allowed themselves to beswept along in its wale. In the process, they tried to change their ownimage. "We had to change the definition of who we were," said DonFierce, who directed the RNC's office of strategic planning and maintainedthe party's links with the grassroots organizations. To mostAmericans, Fierce said, Republicans were still the party of "rich,white, fat guys not connected to the people. What we were trying todo was to become a populist party."KENTUCKY'S Second District appeared to be the ideal laboratory totest the limits of this appeal. Two weeks earlier, the Republicans hadwon another special election, this one in a longtime Democratic districtthat stretched from Oklahoma City west into the Oklahoma Panhandle.The Republican candidate, a farmer and rancher named FrankLucas, had pummeled his Democratic opponent, Dan Webber Jr., as acreature of the liberal Washington establishment. Even though Webberworked for popular Oklahoma Senator David Boren, a conservativeDemocrat who frequently frustrated the Clinton White House,he might as well have been part of Ted Kennedy's inner circle the waythe Republicans portrayed him. Lucas, who farmed land his family hadowned for a century, attacked Webber in television ads for having ahome in the capital but not in Oklahoma and for "Washington values"that were by implication antithetical to those in the district. On theground in Oklahoma, an antigovernment army mobilized support behindLucas: U.S. Term Limits sent out fifty thousand pieces of mailand aired radio ads; the Oklahoma Taxpayer's Union spent $30,000 ona radio campaign; and the Christian Coalition passed out eighty thousand"voter guides" favorable to Lucas. WIth all these forces behindhim, Lucas raced to an easy victory. On the night of Lucas's victory,Gingrich turned to John Morgan, one of the GOP's leading analysts ofcongressional districts, and asked, "Can we win Kentucky?" "I've hadmy eye on It for thirty years," Morgan said. Despite the euphoria over Oklahoma, the contest in Kentuckylooked like a terrible mismatch for the Republicans. The Democraticcandidate, Joe Prather, was well known, having served as state partychairman and for a decade as the Democratic leader in the Kentuckystate Senate. The Republican candidate was a little-known ministernamed Ron Lewis, who operated a Christian bookstore and had notrun for office in more than twenty years. But well before the Oklahomaelection, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell had tipped Gingrichand the chairman of the National Republican CongressionalCommittee, Representative Bill Paxon of New York, to the possibilityof an upset in his home state. Flying to Richard Nixon's funeral in lateApril, McConnell pulled Gingrich aside and assured him that, despiteLewis's light credentials, he could win the race against Prather--ifthe party made a maximum-financial commitment to his campaign. The campaign committee earlier had commissioned a poll of theKentucky district, and a few days after Nixon's funeral, the resultscame back. Conducted by the firm of Richard Wirthlin, who was reagan'spollster, the survey showed Prather with a fifteen-point lead overLewis, which was far from insurmountable in a low-profile specialelection. Even more promising were the results on Clinton, whichdemonstrated the President's abysmal standing in the district. Only 30percent thought he deserved reelection in 1996, while 56 percent--includingalmost half the Democrats surveyed--agreed that votingRepublican would be a good way to send a message of dissatisfactionwith Clinton and the Democrats. The poll results dictatedthe Republican strategy. "We're going after Clinton," Paxon told his Republican leaders agreed on one other element of strategy: Theonly way they could win was with a stealth campaign that caught theDemocrats napping. Even though the campaign committee was broke,Gingrich and Paxon ordered the staff to prepare a full-scale campaignplan, then Galled Lewis and quietly advised him to keep organizing buthold on to his money. To reinforce-the message, the state Republicancommittee sent in a staff member to take control of the Lewis campaign'scheckbook, knowing that every cent available would be neededfor a last-minute television blitz. Meanwhile, back in Washington,GOP leaders threw up a wall of disinformation. "We kept sending outthe word around town that-we can't win this race; we're not even goingto try," Paxon said. "We've got the wrong candidate, we have thewrong district, it ain't going to happen." It was not a tough sell. MariaCino, Paxon's aide, who was executive director of the campaign committee,received a telephone call from a friend one Saturday morningproposing an afternoon golf game. Cino begged off, saying she had towork on the Lewis race. "I'll give you Oklahoma," the friend, whohappened to come from Kentucky, told Cino. "But there is just no wayto ever win Kentucky. You're wasting your time." At the Republican National Committee, Haley Barbour also remaineda skeptic, despite McConnell's pleadings for financial help forLewis. "Mitch just blistered me over the phone," Barbour said. Beforehe would agree to commit the RNC's money, Barbour demandedsomething in return. First, McConnell had to agree to help raise asubstantial amount of money too; and second, Barbour wanted TerryCarmack, the Republican Party chairman in Kentucky, to take directcontrol of Lewis's campaign. Carmack later slipped out of his officewithout alerting reporters to his temporary deployment. Shortly afterthe Oklahoma victory, Paxon met with Gingrich at the Georgia congressmanCapitol office for one last, agonizing meeting about money.Their House colleagues had pitched in to help finance the Lucas victoryin Oklahoma, but it took them six weeks to raise the money. TheGOP needed an even larger effort for Lewis, but had a few days to doit. Gingrich and Paxon knew energy already was building for 1994. Ifthey made an all-out effort in Kentucky and then fell short, would thatblunt their momentum? But Gingrich lived to take risks. "The pollingwas clear," Paxon said. "People were pissed at Clinton, so let's take ashot at it." True to their mandate, the NRCC staff had prepared a wickedly effectivecampaign plan built around a single, visually stunning televisioncommercial quickly dubbed "the morph ad." The morph ad cameto symbolize the GOP strategy for 1994. "If you like Bill Clintonyou'll love Joe Prather," an announcer's voice intoned, while on thescreen Prather's face magically dissolved into Clinton's. The ad,whichrepresented an ingenious technique for linking every Democratic candidateto the unpopular President, was the brainchild of Dan Leonard,the NRCC communications director. Leonard had begged Cino forthe money to produce the ad, and a colleague found a computer firmin downtown Washington to create the digitized images for only$2,000. Armed with the ad, the staff convinced lewis to scrap aplanned series of biographical spots and hit Prather head on with themorph ad. "I wanted to get it out as soon as we could," Lewis said. OnFriday, May 13, the Lewis campaign suddenly surfaced across the SecondDistrict with a saturation-level television buy. "Send a message toBill Clinton," the announcer concluded in the ad, reading straight outof the Wirthlin poll. "Send Ran Lewis to Congress." When Gingrichand Paxon showed their colleagues the commercial during a caucusearly the next week, they went wild, cheering, stomping, standing onchairs, and applauding. Overnight, the morph ad reshaped the Kentucky contest. Pratheronce so confident that he had been searching out housing in Washington,suddenly fauna himself on the defensive, unable to respond to thedigital pummeling. Democratic leaders in Washington begged him tofight back aggressively, but he seemed frozen in the headlights by theRepublican assault. Meanwhile, Lewis continued to press his new-foundadvantage. Bob Dole came in to fly around the district withLewis. It was the first time Lewis's wife had ever been on an airplane.On the ground, as in Oklahoma, a storm of direct mail, voter guidesand other pro-Lewis material rained down on the voters from populist,grassroots groups like the National Rifle Association, the ChristianCoalition, Americans for Tax Reform, and United We Stand. TheDemocrats protested that these "independent expenditures" smelledof collusion with the Republican Party and Lewis's campaign, thesame media-buying firm, they noted, was purchasing commercial timefor both Lewis and Americans for Tax Reform. But the Republicanssimply brushed aside the complaint and kept firing. The polls closed at 6 P.M. on May 24. Within an hour, a friendof Lewis's, analyzing precinct returns from the district, told theRepublican he was on his way to Congress. In Washington, NRCCanalysts came to the same conclusion a short time later, and wordspread quickly to the row of House office buildings lining IndependenceAvenue, bringing Gingrich and a stream of Republicans to theNRCC offices on the second floor of the party headquarters. Theyfound a celebration that looked like a fraternity keg party already welllubricated. The giddy members toasted one another with beers andhigh fives, and someone called Barbour in Israel with the news ofLewis's 55-45 percent win. Republicans knew the Kentucky race representeda turning point of enormous significance. "You could almostjust feel that dam burst," Paxon said. Lewis's victory gave sudden credibility to Republican claims that atidal wave of resentment threatened to sweep away forty years of Democraticcontrol of the House. Republican incumbents who had spenttheir careers in the minority began to believe that whet once was onlya dream might actually be possible, that they might hold the gavelsand sit in the majority. They had found in Clinton the glue to unifytheir voter coalition. The next day, speaking of the television commercialthat torpedoed Prather's campaign, Gingrich said, "I wouldn't besurprised to see that ad in two hundred districts this fall." To whichClinton pollster Stanley B. Greenberg replied, "I hope so. I thinkpeople will vote for change rather than negativism and a return to theReagan-Bush years." THE FIRE OUT THEREThe Kentucky election instantly and dramatically changed the complexionof 1994, despite days of denial by the Democrats. Democraticleaders tried to pin the defeat on the inadequacy of their candidaterather than the weakness of their President, but most people knewbetter. Whatever Prather's weaknesses, the loss of confidence in Clinton'sleadership and the intensity of voter frustration with Washingtoncreated a climate for Democrats that had all the stability of a Masonjar full of nitroglycerin. "Even under the best of circumstances, thiswould be a sough year for us," Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster,said one day in the summer. "But frankly, this isn't even close to thebest of circumstances." The evidence of volatility was unmistakable, and yet no one couldbe certain how the voters would express their wrath with politicians inWashington. It was like a power line blown down in a storm, chargedwith electricity and pulsing randomly along the road. Much of theanger was aimed at the Clinton administration. One voter, a participantin a Republican focus group during the summer of 1944, complainedthat in watching the administration, it was impossible to knowif he was watching "a bad rerun of The Little Rascals or The KeystoneCops. Is it a bunch of kids praying games, or are they totally clueless?"But an equal amount of venom spewed forth toward the Congress. Inmid-1994, a Washington Post-ABC News Poll found that six in-tenAmericans disapproved of the 103rd Congress, a level of disapprovaldouble that of twenty years earlier, and the more they knew the lessthey liked. Voters saw Congress as a distant institution where perksand privilege passed for public representation: Four of five voters saidmembers of Congress cared more about keeping power than caringfor the country, while three in four said candidates made promiseswith no intention of keeping them. "I think Democrats and Republicansboth are clones of their own systems and neither of thetwo groups really seems to care about the needs, the desires, the concernsof average Americans," Rik Sawyer, an antiques dealer fromMaine, said. Why shouldn't people believe that? Over the previous decade, congressionalscandals, not great legislative accomplishments, had capturedthe public's attention: Jim Wright's resignation as Speaker of theHouse in 1989, which came after a long ethics investigation; the midnightpay raise that looked like grand larceny to a cynical electorate;the revelation that the House bank had routinely allowed members tocash checks running into the thousands of dollars without demandingthe money in their accounts to cover them; reports that some congressmenhad traded in their official office stamp allowance for cash atthe House post office. The post office scandal produced the indictmentof one of the most powerful men in Congress, Dan Rostenkowski,the burly Chicago pol who chaired the House Ways andMeans Committee. Rostenkowski's legal troubles literally turned himinto a poster boy for the term limits movement. Republicans, led byNewt Gingrich, had done much to amplify those scandals and as a resultto undermine public confidence in the institution, confident thatthe fallout would harm Democrats much more than themselves. Butthe cynicism toward Washington, expressed in everything from focusgroups of voters to the opening monologues of Leno and Letterman,permeated the campaign-year atmosphere like a morning fog on thefreeway, threatening to engulf Republicans and Democrats alike in amajor pileup. "The American electorate is angry, self-absorbed and politicallyunanchored," the Times Mirror Center for The People & The Pressreported in a major survey issued in September of 1994. "Thousandsof interviews with American voters this summer find no clear directionin the public's political thinking other than frustration with the currentsystem and an eager responsiveness to alternative political solutionsand appeals." The report went on to warn that the "discontentwith Washington that gained momentum in the late 1980s is evengreater now than it was in 1992." A computer bulletin board messagesent to Perot followers earlier in the summer gave a more pungenttaste of what awaited the politicians in the fall. The Internet messageread: "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never!!! We will rememberin November!!! Oh yes, we will remember!!!" Equally powerful was a parallel current of anger toward big governmentand a noticeable tilt toward the right among voters who sawthe rising crime and illegitimacy, declining schools, and movies andrap lyrics saturated with sex and violence as symptoms of a broaderbreakdown in traditional values that threatened not on y their ownfamilies but society at large. These social concerns, rather than theeconomic anxieties that dominated the campaign of 1992, stood atrecord levels, and the Times Mirror Center reported voter attitudes"punctuated by increased indifference to the problems of blacks andpoor people" along with growing "resentment toward immigrants."The Republican National Committee conducted a massive survey ofRepublicans in 1993 and found that 93 percent believed the federalgovernment "no longer represents the intent of the Founding Fathers."Even more startling was another finding, which showed that 63percent of Republicans saw the government as "an adversary to beavoided rather than a positive force for helping people solve theirproblems." All the dots stood out in bas-relief on the canvasses of politicalforecasters. The only trouble was, no one knew quite how to connectthem. Would they line up to topple incumbents of both parties in acollective gesture of anti-incumbency? Would they strike principallyat the Democrats who now held both the White House and Congress?Or, might the vibrations of disaffection shake, but not fundamentallyupend, the status quo? The Kentucky and Oklahoma special electionssuggested the answer to the riddle: The Republicans were comingback. The real questions were how far and how last. REBUILDING THE PARTYHindsight is the most reliable lens of all for viewing American politics,for, as the old saying goes, "The only certainty of political campaignsis surprise." In the haze of summer 1994, most experts were cautiouswith their predictions; in retrospect, what should have been clear bythen was the degree to which the Republicans had rejuvenated themselvesafter the demoralizing defeat of 1992, recast themselves onceagain as the guardians of conservatism, restored a sense of unity andpurpose, and begun to think anew of becoming the majority party inAmerica. That alone was not enough to guarantee a majority in thefall, but it represented a considerable first step. Many people could claim part of the credit for the GOP's revival,including Bill Clinton himself, who doubtless would have refused thehonor. But three people stood above all the others: Newt Gingrich,Bob Dole, and Haley Barbour. Each had contributed, at key momentsin 1993 and 1994, the combination of leadership and discipline essentialto the success of a political party. All shared a belief that the Republicansonce again had to stand for the conservative principles thathad defined the Reagan presidency. But they were equally united inthe strategy of opposing Clinton at every turn and finding legislativevehicles to restore their connections to their conservative, grassrootssupporters. Barbour was the least well known of the trio, but no less indispensableto the party's resurrection than Gingrich or Dole. A good-natured,wisecracking Mississippian with a rich southern drawl, Barbour, withthe exception of a losing run for the Senate in 1982, had spent his careeras a Republican operative. He worked in Richard Nixon's campaignin 1968, directed the Mississippi Republican Party in the 1970s,attached himself to John B. Connally's failed presidential campaign in1980, served as political director in the Reagan White House from1985 to 1986, and acted as a troubleshooter for the Bush campaign in1938. After that he settled into a comfortable life as a Washington lobbyistand political commentator. Barbour looked deceptively like an aging southern fraternity boy,all lacquered hair and calculated bonhomie. But he had firm ideasabout the road to revival, a keen strategic sense of how to implementthem, and a knack for putting them in language voters understood."Compromising with the Democrats," he once said, "is like paying thecannibals to eat you last." With Bush's defeat, he blossomed into oneof the party's most effective chairmen, ranking with Ray Bliss, whoguided the party back to life after Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964,and William Brock the former Tennessee senator who led the partyduring major victories after the Watergate debacle of 1974 end JimmyCarter's victory over Gerald Ford in 1976. Barbour had been knownmostly as a self-deprecating, nuts-and-bolts operative. But within daysof Clinton's victory in 1992, another Barbour began to emerge, aphilosophical hard-liner interested in ideas and public policy and determinedto steer the party back to the principles that were at the heartof Reagan's successes in 1980 and 1984. To Barbour, the lesson of 1992was clear: Bush had foolishly reneged on his "no new taxes" pledge,tacked toward the center on other domestic policies, and blurred thedistinctions between Republicans and Democrats. Barbour told Republicangovernors at a meeting in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, "Ourproblem was the people felt we had repudiated our own principles bynot acting in accordance with them." Shortly after Clinton's inauguration,Barbour was elected chairman of the Republican National Committeein a five-way contest. Barbour wanted to reenergize the party's conservative coalition. Hewanted to polarize the debate in Washington and the electorate in thecountry along conservative-liberal lines. He wanted to reestablish Republicansas the party of lower taxes and smaller government. And hewanted to find a common enemy around which Republicans and independentscould unite. That enemy was the federal government."We've got to quit being so Washington-oriented," he told the Republicanofficials in his first speech as chairman. He believed in the power of ideas and the importance of a consistentmessage, and he began to build an infrastructure to meld the twointo a powerful weapon that would, if nothing else, recharge the energiesof Republican true believers who had gone flat in the final years ofthe Bush presidency. He hired a first-rate staff that included Chief ofStaff Scott Reed, a former adviser to Jack Kemp; Charles Greener,part of a family of Republican operatives, as communications director;and Don Fierce, his former business partner, to act as a liaison withcongressional leaders and grassroots organizations. He rapidly built acommunications empire that included a think sank, a glossy magazine,and a weekly television program (housed in state-of-the-art facilitiespaid for with a $2.5 million donation from the Amway Corporation) inwhich he acted as the genial host serving up powder-puff questions toRepublican officials. To influence political insiders, he papered Washingtonwith faxes and dispensed his wisdom through "Haley's Comments,"attacking Clinton every time the President even glanced to hisleft. Barbour began clubbing Clinton the day the President deliveredhis economic plan before a joint session of Congress. The plan calledfor $500 billion in deficit reduction through a combination of spendingcuts, increased taxes on the rich, and a broad-based energy tax."Clinton ran on the promise to "put people first,'" Barbour said."Tonight his plan is to put government first." As much as anything,Barbour displayed a willingness to attack Clinton even when it appearedrisky to do so. "We just hammered him," Barbour said of Clinton."I'll be honest. I had not anticipated we'd be able to go on theoffensive that early, because Presidents get honeymoons, and I knew itwas not the right thing to do to go out and attack him on personalgrounds or anything like that. I actually thought he would move in hisearly phases like a new
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