Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

Who Speaks for the President

Too often, Presidents devote insufficient attention to this task. As top Nixon and Ford aide Tom Korologos notes, President Kennedy had a shaky start with Congress because he did not make it clear that the Special Assistant to the President for Congressional Relations Larry O'Brien was his spokesman. Indeed, three or four months into the Kennedy Administration, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn commented to Bryce Harlow, O'Brien's predecessor in the Eisenhower Administration, that he did not know who had taken Harlow's place. In effect, Harlow let O'Brien know that he was an invisible man, as far as the Speaker was concerned.

Kennedy swiftly corrected the matter by emphasizing O'Brien's role at his next meeting with the congressional leadership. As Korologos recalls:

[The President] interrupted [comments being made by O'Brien], and he said, "Oh, by the way, gentlemen and ladies, I want you to know that Larry O'Brien is our congressional affairs person. When Larry speaks, I speak. He is my voice and eyes and ears. Go ahead, Larry." From that day forward, we all came to know the legendary job that Larry did. ... So the President needs to make clear to the leaders at the outset which of his aides he trusts to negotiate on his behalf. They need to know who can speak for him. They must know that the congressional relations person can get to the President immediately and turn back an issue on which they're working.

Gary Andres, who was President Bush's deputy in the legislative affairs team, adds that it is just as important that Congress know who does not speak for the President. As Martin Anderson, Reagan's chief domestic policy adviser, and others have noted, many Presidents allow their administrations to lose momentum on Capitol Hill by permitting Cabinet secretaries to freelance (See Chapter 4). Presidents must make sure that it is clear which White House and agency staff are authorized to speak with the Hill. According to Andres:

[I]t's important for any White House that's working with Congress to ... have a staff of people that are designated, and kind of anointed, by the President to be his congressional affairs people. The one thing you'll learn if you ever work in a congressional affairs office, in an administration, or in a White House is that everybody wants to do congressional affairs, and not everybody should do congressional affairs. It's important for the President and the Chief of Staff to have an enforcement mechanism in place where his people who are designated to work with Congress are the people who work with Congress, that there are swift and firm sanctions for anyone else who's not supposed to deal with Congress who gets involved in that job.

When Pat Griffin was Director of Legislative Affairs for the Clinton Administration, he also recognized the need to keep staff on a tight rein. But, he says, it became more and more difficult as the term wore on and the Democrats lost the House:

I met with the legislative affairs folks of each of the major departments, and even the sub-Cabinet-level agencies. In the first year that I was there...we didn't have a problem about people getting out ahead of us. What they wanted to do was to bring the White House into some of their issues. What I was doing at that point was managing the issues out of the White House. Given that we had so many, we were trying to prioritize. We were trying to use the agencies to work their people on the Hill for us. However, that changed when we lost control in the Congress. Then we brought all the issues into the White House and were concerned about being able to manage the message, because our fear was that our Cabinet folks would get too cozy with the chairmen of the other party in order to work their agenda and might compromise a larger strategy. So the dynamic changed dramatically.

Getting the Little Things Right

Senior White House aides and the designated legislative staff can veer badly off track if they forget Washington's mores and customs. Jimmy Carter's White House learned early that little mistakes by those new to Washington can be costly, as Korologos recalls:

At the inauguration, when Tip O'Neill, who was Speaker of the House at the time, asked for a couple extra tickets to the inauguration, Hamilton Jordan wouldn't give them to him. From that point on, Mr. O'Neill used to refer to Hamilton, the Chief of Staff, as "Hannibal Jerkin." The little things kill you in this business. As Max Friedersdorf, my colleague in the Nixon years, used to say, the most important thing is to know what kind of cigars Tip O'Neill smokes and where you seat Mrs. [John] McClellan, the Chairman of the [Senate] Appropriations Committee's wife, at the next dinner.

It is also important to remember that the administration's staff exists, in part, to respond to requests for information. And it must keep track of an immense amount of legislation. If the administration is not properly staffed to provide information and track legislation in ways that are satisfactory to members of both parties, problems are sure to follow. As Korologos explains:

[C]onsider the myriad issues that face an executive branch in its dealing with 535 members of Congress; 25,000 or 30,000, however many it is now, staffers up there; 10,000 bills introduced every couple years; more than 250 committees and subcommittees poking and jabbing at every piece of legislation there is. I haven't even touched on the thousands of phone calls that are generated every day. A couple of numbers to make the point: I've read in the paper recently, the Pentagon alone receives more than 100,000 written congressional inquiries a year. That's an average of 200 per Congressman. On every working day, the Pentagon receives 2,500 phone calls from Capitol Hill. Lord only knows how many reports and hearing preparations they're required.

According to Andres, mistakes are often made, particularly by junior staff, because incoming administrations often lack any real orientation program:

[E]ven though it seems obvious that a lot of people who come into the job to work with Congress in moving an agenda have a lot of experience in that area, there really isn't a very good orientation mechanism involved for new people coming into an administration, or coming into a White House, to know what kind of job to do. ... I started on day one for President Bush. We walked into the White House. Were it not for some of the old Reagan Administration holdovers who were still using the phones and helping, we wouldn't know where the bathrooms were.

So I think programs like [Heritage's Mandate for Leadership series] that try to put together some help to future administrations, whether they be Republicans or Democrats, in terms of how to do their job better, and how the White House can work better with Congress, are very valuable and very needed from my perspective.

The Problems of a Divided Government

Thurber notes that this individualism reinforces the challenge that divided government has presented to most administrations:

From 1887 to 1952, there were only eight years when we had divided party government, 12 percent of the time. From 1952 to 2000, we've had divided party government 75 percent of the time. When you have weak parties not controlling recruitment and not having a great deal of discipline over Members in the House of Representatives and Senate, that itself have their money coming from independent sources, specialized interests, combined with divided party government, it's surprising anything can get done.

Thurber adds that the President's difficulties in working with Congress are exacerbated by a lack of comity on the Hill that has resulted from bitter campaigns and partisanship within Congress. For example, Thurber notes, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Minority Leader Richard Gephardt did not meet alone for Gingrich's duration as Speaker, instead talking to each other only in groups or by press conference:

This is an example of the lack of comity, which makes it very difficult to govern on the Hill. The relationship between the President and the Congress is difficult. We also have, as part of the political environment that Pat [Griffin] mentioned, what I would call hyper-pluralism...extreme pluralism that is reinforced by strategic contributions by specialized interests. There's nothing wrong with pluralism. We have it under our First Amendment rights. Groups have a right to express themselves with money. But I think that it makes it very difficult for the President to build a coalition on the Hill, although he can break through it.

Working with the President's Party

Faced with this lack of comity, the President must take great care in the way he works with his own party in Congress, especially when his party is in the minority. As Gary Andres learned:

We had a Democratic Congress and a Republican White House ....We were always facing trade-offs. You tried to negotiate with the Democrats and pass laws. Or you tried to build your party and work with your party in Congress. The Republicans were always mad at us. Sometimes we were working too closely with the Democrats. The Democrats got mad at us if we worked too closely with the Republicans. So there's a whole series of trade-offs there that the next administration is going to have to face. It's really important to recognize that.

It is also important for the President to make sure that his own party in Congress understands his policy and political goals. As Griffin cautions:

I think one of the toughest things that a President has to do, of either party, is to help explain to members of his own party where his interests are not exactly the same as his party's congressional interests. That's a tough conversation, let me tell you. It goes a lot better when you're higher in the polls. ... It doesn't go well at all when you're not.... [I]f you've "gone native" and you're making too many of the sympathetic arguments why the President can't take on the congressional interests of his party, that's a kiss of death inside.

But that tension is an important one. [It's important to get it] on the table sooner, rather than later. Make it clear, that's what [I] may need to do at times, but also when you can count on me being solid. We didn't do a very good job of that. I think there was a lot of uneasiness with us, no matter what we were doing.

Building the Right Relationships

Equally important to Reagan's success, says Washington Times political correspondent Donald Lambro, was the trust and even friendship he developed among his political adversaries:

He kept the lines of communication open. I was reminded of this the other day watching "The American Experience" documentary on Reagan. It showed Tip O'Neill on the phone after he had been defeated, talking to the President, giving him the vote and saying, "Well, old pal, you've won. Wish you the best of luck."

They had a relationship that did develop. They talked after 6:00 p.m., when they could get together and put the partisan war away. O'Neill would go over there. They would have a drink, Reagan and O'Neill, finally willing to compromise at the end of the process.

Thanks to these relationships, says Lambro, Reagan was able to reach the kind of successful compromises on key issues that have eluded Clinton but could await the next President:

Reagan, for all of his combativeness and principle, in the end always was willing to compromise to get what he could. I think when the history of Clinton is written, it will be this incredible political hostility that I think marked his presidency towards the other party on the Hill. You're not going to get anything done with that kind of approach....

[O]n the lines of communications for Reagan, when you think back now, it was really extraordinary. Go back to the budget fights. We're not talking about just lines of communication. The Reagan White House had Democrats in the Democratic caucuses coming out and calling the White House. ... They were working hand in glove with what we call the "Blue Dog Democrats" now. So you had about 60 Democrats, but they were working hand in glove on getting their tax plan through, getting their budget through. Then, after the 1984 landslide, the big thing that Reagan won, of course, was the tax reform, which he ran on. Two people that they eventually worked very closely on were named Bradley and Gephardt. People forget, because Bradley and Gephardt now are so partisan, but back then, they had a bill. Their big shtick was to broaden the tax base and lower the rate. That's what Ronald Reagan wanted to do. You had the 1986 tax bill that he got through, that he got a lot of credit for, but was very much based on the Bradley-Gephardt tax plan.

I think that's the parallel for the next presidency. You have the Breaux-Lieberman Medicare reform bill. They're people a Republican could work with. [Patrick] Moynihan and Bob Kerrey want to let you put two percent of your payroll taxes into stocks and mutual funds and bonds. They'll be gone, but there are Democrats who support their plan.

This does not ignore the good old-fashioned largesse that is usually necessary to cement a compromise or to give the President the final few votes he needs in a close call. Reagan was quite willing to dole out taxpayer money to win the larger budget battle, recalls Lambro:

I remember sitting in a room with David Stockman after one big fight, and he told me, "You wouldn't believe how much money we had to spend for the buy-offs," as he called them, for the giveaways, to get certain Democratic votes.

But giveaways may end up being the price for insufficient attention to other aspects of winning support. As Pat Griffin says of the NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] vote during the Clinton Administration:

I don't think we made the case effectively across the country. We won it by opening up the candy store with highway spurs and trips on Air Force One and State Department dinners. That's how we put that over the top. It wasn't really strategy.

Taking, and Keeping, the Initiative

The President and his staff should realize that political capital is on the line on key votes. Picking these fights carefully, and winning them, is crucial to the perceived power of the administration. As an example, Tom Korologos points to an early Reagan effort to win congressional approval to sell surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia:

President Reagan became President [and] two or three months later they had a big fight on AWACS.... [All] of a sudden the White House is up to its ears in passing an AWACS program. It passed. You never heard another word about it. Had they lost that, the stories out on the street would have been, this is a weak presidency, that they can't even pass a big deal like their AWACS thing, which they had expended so much capital on, and now they suffer the political consequences.

Even with one or both Houses of Congress in the hands of the other party, a President can control the initiative, as both Reagan and Clinton ably demonstrated. According to American University's James Thurber, a President is most likely to be able to build a coalition for a policy if he focuses on certain key tactical requirements:

Very basically, if the President can clearly define a problem, or what the threat is, and go to the American public, usually above the heads of Congress, and then state a clear solution or mission that's very simple, and he has strong interest groups behind that particular mission, there's the perception, if not the reality, that there's no limit on resources with respect to the particular mission and problem. Finally, there [must be] a central core of authority driving that mission to solve the problem. If you have those, if you have that situation politically, you get things passed.

Thurber argues that Desert Storm was a good example of putting these elements in place, leading to a great Capitol Hill success for President Bush:

It was a clear definition of the problem, a clear statement of the mission. "This will not stand." Everybody understood what that meant. He went to the international community, built a coalition, then went to the Hill, had a debate with strong interest groups behind his mission, weak interest groups opposing it.

On the other hand, President Clinton's sweeping health care proposal collapsed because the needed elements were not in place. There was no public consensus on the problem, and the proffered solution involved a mission statement that was 1,585 complex pages in length. Moreover, says Thurber:

It went to 24 committees and subcommittees on Capitol Hill, in a highly decentralized structure. It was bound to fail. You had strong interest groups all over the place fighting each other, saying, "Yes, I'm for reform, but over there, not here."