In the forty-three years since I first ran for Congress, we have seen a revolution in politics. Forty-one years ago marked the last Presidential campaign without television. Since I had won both the Republican and Democratic nominations in the June 1948 primaries for reelection to Congress, I campaigned around the country for Tom Dewey. I found that the content of speeches mattered, newspaper endorsements were influential, the writing press had great impact, issues were more important than personalities, substance was more important than style, the political parties were strong. None of these statements is true any longer. Politics is a more simplistic, less subtle, less thoughtful pursuit today. The reason for the change is television.
Ironically, one event that year presaged the coming dominance of the electronic media: a radio debate between Dewey and Harold Stassen. It led to Dewey’s nomination for President and the end of Stassen’s political career. Broadcast nationwide from Portland, Oregon, the debate was over a bill I had authored with Karl Mundt requiring Communist organizations to register with the government. Stassen favored the bill but inaccurately insisted that it would outlaw the Communist Party—the same position taken by our left-wing critics. Dewey correctly argued that our purpose was not to make it illegal to join Communist organizations, but only to enable the government to identify and publicize Soviet bloc support for such groups.
Dewey carried the day with his moderate, persuasive arguments, picking up momentum that would take him all the way to victory at the Philadelphia convention. While this was the first decisive electronic confrontation in American political history, it was uncharacteristic of today’s politics in that it involved a relatively sophisticated discussion of an actual issue. In the 1980s, the results of TV debates are tallied not by the political writers but by the networks’ instant quip counters and gaff-o-meters. A candidate who would dare discuss the pros and cons of a vital piece of legislation instead of doling out one-liners and applause lines prepared by his media consultants is destined for oblivion.
In the television age, style not only takes precedence over substance but threatens to completely eclipse it. Thirty-second sound bites are more influential than carefully thought-out thirty-minute speeches, campaign joke writers are often treated better than White House speechwriters, and makeup artists are more important than researchers. In one of life’s great ironies, media commentators blame the candidates for these developments, when in fact candidates are only adapting to the limitations of the medium that has come to hold their fate in its hands. You can blame politicians for a lot of things, but inventing television is not one of them.
Next to TV, but in part because of the cost of using TV, the astronomical increase in what it costs to finance a campaign has inalterably changed politics. In 1946, the total cost of my campaign against an incumbent in a marginal district was $37,500. In 1950, it cost $750,000 to run for the Senate in a hotly contested race. Today, the average cost of a congressional race is $223,000, and some have spent over $1 million. The campaign for the Senate seat in California in 1988 cost $15 million. Even taking inflation into account, it can cost on an average over five times as much to finance a campaign for the House and Senate today as it did forty years ago.
Another profound change is the increasing weakness and even irrelevance of political parties. The endorsement of the Right to Life lobby or the National Rifle Association can be more decisive in a close contest than the support of a political party. No one should be surprised that special interests dominate the agendas of congressmen, because it is special interests that get them there.
Another new factor is the obsession with polls. Every well-financed campaign has a private pollster to advise the candidate not on what his position ought to be after studying the issue but on what position will please a majority of voters, even though they may be uninformed on the issues. Candidates used to try to educate the voters. Now they find it safer to placate them.
I strongly believe that candidates should resist the advice to slavishly follow the polls. Taking uninformed voters where they want to go is easy. Taking them where they should go is the role of a leader. To make what is unpopular popular is the supreme test of leadership.
One of the greatest strengths of American politics is that members of the press have always felt free to ask tough questions on the major issues of the day. One of the negative fallouts of Watergate is that a new breed of reporters, seeking money, fame, and Pulitzer Prizes, has elevated Peeping Tom journalism and character assassination to a new level of respectability. Editorials in the nation’s great newspapers pontificate that no public institution or company can investigate itself. But when members of the media engage in questionable practices, the same editorial writers piously insist that the media is perfectly capable of investigating themselves and correcting such abuses. It is interesting to speculate how the Founders, with their concern about letting too much power gather in any of the three branches of government, would have reacted to the rise of this fourth power center.
The incumbency lock is another highly negative characteristic of today’s politics. Congress has become an incumbent’s protective association. In 1988, despite a decisive Republican victory for President, 98 percent of the incumbents who ran for the heavily Democratic House were reelected. Forty-two years ago, one hundred five new congressmen were elected to the much-maligned 80th Congress. Fifty-two of them defeated incumbents. Two of them went on to become President. Ten became senators. Five became governors. Most of those who defeated incumbents would have no chance to be elected today. Unless the incumbency lock is broken by eliminating gerrymandering and allowing challengers to compete with incumbents on a more level playing field, we will have completely vitiated the Founders’ goal of a Congress that renews itself constantly to reflect the changing views of the voters.
After eight years of a popular President in the White House and three Republican Presidential landslides, the number of Republican congressmen is seventeen less than when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President in 1981. This development has profound implications for the future. For the balance of the century, we will probably have Republicans in the White House with Democrats holding a majority in the House and possibly in the Senate as well. Because of the incumbency lock, Republican candidates for President, no matter how great their victories are, can no longer bring along majorities in both the House and Senate.
It is a sign of the intellectual sterility of political science that there is actually a theory among some academics that the American people, in their infinite wisdom, purposely elect Republicans to the White House and Democrats to Congress in order to create a “balance.” This is like saying that the American people enjoy watching political gridlock. The theory probably tells us more about the political inclinations of academics than it does about politics. To most pundits, when the President was Democratic and the Congress Republican, as in 1948, Congress was a reactionary restraint on enlightened Presidential leadership. When the President is Republican and the Congress Democratic, as during my administration and much of Reagan’s, Congress is the people’s safeguard against excessive Presidential power. Historically, however, the Congress and White House accomplish more when they are working together than when they are at odds. The incumbency lock ensures that for the foreseeable future, such a partnership will never recur.
What advice would I give someone considering running for Congress for the first time? First, be prepared to spend an inordinate amount of time raising money rather than campaigning for votes. In 1980, a young conservative Republican, John Hiler, was elected to Congress in a closely contested race in Indiana. He has won reelection four times by relatively small margins. He came to Washington full of high ideals, hoping to make a difference on major issues. To his dismay, he found that because of the need to attend fundraising events, he could not spend as much time as he wanted working for his program.
Except for the first six months of his two-year term, a congressman from a close district today must spend over half his time raising money for his reelection. The results of the non-stop campaign hustle are inevitable. Idealistic young congressmen are disenchanted by the grind. Some who would have sought higher office in earlier eras recoil from doing so, since they would have to raise ten times more money. Scandals such as the one that engulfed Jim Wright become inevitable as members work the angles instead of working for the people. Opportunities to establish policy expertise are lost. Even if given the opportunity, an able young congressman like John Hiler could not afford to risk stepping off the fundraising treadmill long enough to devote the kind of attention I did to the Hiss case. As a result, shots at national exposure are missed as members forsake committee work and even floor speeches in favor of schmoozing with their PACs and fat cats at private cocktail parties.
In sum, my advice to a talented young person considering a run for the House might be “just say no.” But while I might give that advice to others, I must admit I probably would not follow it if I were a potential candidate.
The House’s decline is not irreversible. The most-talked-about proposed amendments to the Constitution—prohibiting abortion, establishing the line-item veto, setting one six-year term for Presidents—all are non-starters. But there is one change that all those interested in better government should support. The terms of members of the House should be extended to four years, with one half being elected in the Presidential year and the other half in the off-year. This would mean that for at least two years of his four-year term, a congressman could be a congressman rather than a perpetual candidate spending 75 percent of his time raising campaign funds and campaigning for reelection.
No matter how long his term of office will be, any candidate, unless he comes from a rural district, must learn to use television. He will be dismayed to find that whether he has had his hair blown dry may be more important than what he has between his ears. He may insist that he wants to be a legislator, not an actor. But unless he learns to be an actor, he will never have a chance to be a legislator. I often wonder whether the two acknowledged giants of the Senate in the post-World War II era, Bob Taft and Dick Russell, could have been elected if they had entered politics in the age of television rather than at a time when the writing press and radio were dominant. I remember seeing a sound bite in the New Hampshire primary in 1952 in which a painfully candid Taft was trying to explain to a little girl why he couldn’t sign autographs because it took more time than shaking hands. He was right, but it was devastating on TV.
No one should enter politics today unless he is prepared for brutal media exposure. To an extent, this has always been the case. But the influence of television and the glorification of investigative reporters have led to increased emphasis on the trivial, the lurid, even the irrelevant at the expense of discussion of major issues.
The candidate must be prepared to put his fate in the hands of professional campaign managers, pollsters, and TV advisers. If he wishes, they will write his speeches, train him for television, pick the color of his ties, tell him where and how to campaign, and advise him on what to say. It is here that he must draw the line. He should accept the expert’s advice on how to campaign. He must reserve to himself the decision about what to say. Even now, when there is so much emphasis on style, the message remains all-important. No one should seek public office unless he has a message. And only he can determine what it should be.
No one should consider becoming a candidate unless he recognizes at the outset that politics is the most hazardous profession. A businessman who fails to make a sale earns less profit. An athlete who loses a championship tries again. But a politician who loses an election must usually look for another line of work. He must be determined to win, but he must not be afraid to lose. Those who will not enter a contest unless they are guaranteed in advance that they will be adequately financed and are relatively sure of winning make poor candidates. Those who are willing to risk all to gain all make the best candidates.
While taking into account all of the hazards, a potential candidate should dismiss out of hand the fatuous nonsense that politics is a less than honorable profession. I have known business leaders who are more ruthless than any politician and church and academic leaders who schemed as deviously as any politician to promote their careers. In politics, the competitive aspects simply get more attention than they do in business, education, or the media. In these other fields, competition is just as keen but better concealed. And when the stakes are large questions of public policy or even the nation’s survival, the competition is nobler than when it involves the market share of a particular brand of deodorant or a point or two in the Nielsen ratings.
The bottom line is the goal. A candidate’s primary purpose in getting into politics should never be self-interest. He can make far more money, suffer far less abuse, and exert far less effort if he chooses some other field of endeavor. But if he has a purpose larger than himself and his personal ambitions that he wants to pursue, he must not hesitate. Win or lose, he will have the ultimate satisfaction of knowing that he did not stand on the sidelines when others were making decisions affecting his fate and that of his country.