Clare, Adam, Sam, and I are squeezed into a toboggan, which is swooshing down a steep hill at an alarming speed, just missing a tree on the left. H-a-a-a-a-r-r-r-r-o-o-o-o-e-e-e-e.
Then bam into a snowbank. Adam and Clare are happily dumped a few yards up. Sam and I take the hit—ice flakes in eyes, ears, and down the back. We laugh, but are chilled to the bone.
The boys are delighted to be back in Boston for a few days. Sam, in particular, misses his friends here. He’s like Clare in the primacy he gives to relationships. Even at ten years old, Sam picks up on the nuances of friendship. He knows when a friend is distressed and how to give comfort; he understands how to mediate conflicts among his friends so that none feels beaten or badly treated. His old friendships are remarkably enduring, and he wants to get back to them.
Clare also yearns to return for good. She misses her colleagues at the law school and at the domestic-violence institute she was building. Potomac fever may infect some who go there intending to return to where they came from, but she’s sturdily resistant to the bug. And Adam wants to begin high school in the same city he finishes it in. He’s already lobbying hard for Cambridge next fall.
But how can I quit now that Gingrich and company have just taken over Washington? Leaving at this point would be worse than deserting a sinking ship; it would be leaving Rome to the Visigoths.
Gingrich is a party joke in Boston. The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas. The tubby man who seems like a harmless circus performer.
We’re trekking back up the hill, pulling the toboggan behind. Some friends speed by in a large blue inner tube. “Hey, Bob and Clare! What’s newt?” The guffaws fade as they disappear over the ridge.
But he’s no joke. Gingrich and his troops are bent on dismantling government, and they’re claiming a mandate from the voters.
“I’ve got to stay in Washington,” I say to Clare as we reach the summit. We’ve been debating next steps all weekend.
She says nothing at first, but I know what she’s thinking. Her two-year leave from teaching is over in June. If she’s not returning, she has to let them know soon and beg for an extension. And we’d have to find new tenants and make all sorts of other arrangements.
Finally, she asks, “Would you be willing to commute? See us on weekends?”
“No!” I thunder. The loudness and definitiveness of the response surprises even me. But I’m furious at the suggestion.
Clare looks hurt. I feel bad about the outburst. “Look,” I say, trying to sound reasonable. “Can’t you get a third year of leave? The boys certainly can bear one more year of Washington.”
“But you said two years. That was our deal.”
“I didn’t count on what happened happening.”
“Newt Gingrich is not going to dictate our lives, Bob. His little revolution will go forward whether you’re there or not.” Clare flashes anger. “Don’t flatter yourself that you’re that important.”
“I just can’t abandon Bill and the department and everything I believe in, not now.”
“What about your family?”
“I’m not abandoning my family! You’re the one talking about leaving Washington.”
We’re getting nowhere. I look around to see Sam and Adam watching, warily. The wind is picking up, and the four of us are soaked through. We start walking down the far side of the hill, silently. We have tacitly agreed to put the matter aside for now.
“Watch o-o-o-o-u-u-u-u-t-t-t-t!” Adam shouts.
It’s too late. I turn my head, to see a large black inner-tubeful of teenagers careening toward me at high speed, waving hands in the air. I can’t move out of their way in time.
Suddenly I feel my body rise over my head, and for a moment I have no idea where the ground is or where I am or where I’ll be landing, or when. It’s all too quick to worry very much about.
And then I’m down, evidently on my back. All I can see is a bright-blue sky, spinning ever so slightly. Too early to know if all of me is still connected. I imagine two legs somewhere to the east, with metal and plastic shards of hip joint littering the hillside between.
“Are you okay?” Clare’s concerned face suddenly appears where the blue sky was.
“I don’t really know. Am I still in one piece?”
“As far as I can tell.” She surveys the damage. “The snow is soft here. I’m sure you’re fine.”
Then she begins to giggle. “I’m sorry,” she says, trying to cover her mouth with her hand, “but I can’t help it.” She laughs out loud. “It was that quizzical look on your face when you saw them coming at you. Not surprised, not angry, but … perplexed.” She’s laughing so hard that tears are streaming down her cheeks. “It was almost as if you were trying to come up with a … solution.”
The press is declaring Newt Gingrich the new king of Washington and according him the celebrity normally reserved for new presidents at inaugurations. Bob Dole has taken over the Senate and is trumpeting his victory. The two of them seem to have taken command of the United States government. In our system, power is found where the public seems to have conferred it, and the two of them are credibly claiming to have most of it.
B is angry and pained. He came to Washington two years ago with his own bold agenda, and now all the boldness seems to be on their side. And part of the reason they’ve gained the upper hand is they spent much of the last year pillorying B and Hillary, attacking and ultimately defeating their health-care plan and raising questions about their ethics.
How to respond? Several of us have joined him in the ornate Map Room in the basement of the White House. We’ve talked for more than an hour but haven’t come up with anything he finds helpful.
Finally, B stands up. Worry and frustration show on his face. “You all have to help me,” he says, slowly. “I don’t want to use their tactics. I don’t want to be mean.”
There’s a long pause. Then he says more softly, “This is a cynical age. Doing good and right aren’t sufficient anymore. Being mean isn’t a disqualification anymore,”
Something is going on here. B’s mind seems to be operating on a different plane than ours. He’s considering questions and choices that none of us completely understand.
His voice rises. “Gingrich isn’t the only mean one. Dole went on TV a year ago today, on the very day I was burying my mother, crapping on me about Whitewater. Then he told his troops in the Senate not to do what was right on the crime bill but to vote to defeat me.” He pleads, “I don’t want to he like them. But you have to help me.”
No one says anything for about a minute. Then Al Gore responds, softly. “The people have to see you as optimistic, confident, sure of the direction you’re taking the country. If I’d been the object of as much unfair criticism as you and Hillary, I’d be much angrier. But we have the time. There’s no reason to panic.”
Time? Panic? I can’t keep a mordant thought out of my mind. If B and Al Gore were to die right now, the law of the land would confer the presidency on Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich is a brilliant political operator and an intellectual opportunist. I’ve met with him several times, and each time gone away with the distinct impression of a military general in an age where campaign strategy has supplanted military strategy, where explosive ideas have become more important sources of power than bombs. He professes to understand this, and in fact spends a great deal of time and energy trying to persuade others that he alone possesses the strategy and the ideas entitling him to be the general of the new Republican right.
Gingrich likes to think of himself as a revolutionary force, but he behaves more like a naughty boy. He grins uncontrollably when I congratulate him on a devious legislative ploy; he becomes overly defensive when I gently scold him for misusing certain historic ideas in support of one of his grand theses; his office is adorned with figurines of dinosaurs, as you might find in the bedrooms of little boys who dream of one day being huge and powerful. To characterize Gingrich as “mean” misses this essential quality of naughtiness. His meanness is real, but it’s the meanness of a nasty kid rather than of a tyrant. And like all nasty kids, inside is an insecure little fellow who desperately wants attention.
I’m riding with B in his bulletproof, bombproof limo, on the way back from a speech he gave at a community college out here. Presidential security guards are riding with us. But the only living things I’ve seen out the window for the last half hour are cows, and they seem peaceful enough. I’m wedged into the tiny jump seat just across from where B sits. No one else in the executive branch of government is able to fit here, which gives me an enormous advantage. Whenever I’m in this spot, White House staff get nervous, and with good reason. In an administration where proximity counts, I couldn’t be better positioned.
My objective is simple: Get B’s assent to a minimum-wage increase. Get him to announce it in the State of the Union address. Leon and Bob Rubin are resisting. Bentsen has ceased being an obstacle, because the old guy has retired to Texas. (Lloyd and I agreed on almost nothing, but I’ll actually miss him. He was the only adult among us. Now I’m one of the oldest members of the economic team. May God bless America.)
“Good speech,” I say.
B is reading through a bunch of memos. He doesn’t respond.
“The part about millions of Americans working harder for less—half of them earning less money now than they did fifteen years ago … It’s good you’re speaking out on this.”
“It’s a big problem,” he says, without looking up.
“And I also liked what you said about the importance of education and job training. Too bad we don’t have enough money in the budget to do much about it.”
He doesn’t respond. He’s putting check marks next to certain items in the memo. It’s the first time I’ve noticed that his check marks are in reverse. Most lefties do normal checks.
“Of course,” I continue, “people at the bottom still need extra help. The expansion of the earned-income tax credit gave them a boost, but not enough to get them out of poverty.”
Still no response, but I know my words are somehow getting through.
“I just heard an interesting fact,” I say. It’s a sure way to get B to stop what he’s doing and pay attention. He loves interesting facts. He looks up. “Whasit?”
“One of my staff calculated that a member of Congress makes more money in just three weeks than a minimum-wage worker earns in a year.”
“Hmm.” He’s back into his memo. Evidently not interesting enough.
I try again. “Don’t you think that we’ll be defined by the fights we have with the Republicans?”
“Yup.” He doesn’t look up.
“The minimum wage will be a hell of a good fight.”
“Yup.”
“New research shows a modest hike won’t cost jobs. New Jersey recently raised its state minimum to $5.05, with no effect on employment. Another study looked at California …”
He puts down his memo and looks up. “You can stop lobbying, Bob. I’ll propose it in the State of the Union.” He’s instantly back into the memo.
Mission accomplished. Leon and Bob, eat your hearts out. I return to looking at the cows. Two minutes later he puts down his pen and looks up again. “You’re right.”
“About the minimum wage?”
“About the fights.” He stares out the window. “We’ll be defined by the fights we have. We’ve got to pick them carefully.”
“Any others you have in mind?” I ask, wanting to say more: Like taking on their capital-gains tax cut for the rich—the crown jewel of Gingrich’s Contract with America? I’ll agree to stop hectoring you for the remainder of the administration if you’re willing to come out against it. Just imagine engaging in these two fights simultaneously—whether to hike the minimum wage for the working poor, whether to cut capital gains for the rich. There would no longer be any doubt about whose side we were on, whose side they were on.
“No,” he says, still staring out the window. “Not yet. They’ll serve them up to us. We just have to recognize them when they come our way.”
What are these Gingrich Republicans really like? Now’s my first chance to find out. I’ve been called to a hearing on the departments budget appropriation for next year.
Ernest Istook, a newly elected Republican from Oklahoma, looks like a high-school debater nerd, with his black-rimmed glasses and bread-dough face. He leans inward from his high perch behind the committee rostrum as if about to pounce on the first liberal that moves.
“Mr. Sec-re-tar-y,” he spits in a low baritone boom-box voice, “I recall April of last year when you made a personal visit to Oklahoma City to my congressional district, to the [Bridgestone] plant there.”
I try to look calm and confident. Istook glares back. He talks slowly, spitting out small mouthfuls of indignation, savoring every syllable. “You made a huge media event out of announcing that you were fining the plant $7.5 million. And that afternoon you sent your attorneys, just before the courthouse closed, to court to get a restraining order that was served on the plant. The company saw no way to comply with it other than to shut down.” The boom box becomes louder. “And one thousand five hundred people in my district were worried about whether they would ever be able to go back to work, because Sec-re-tar-y Reich had come to town.”
I try to explain, but he interrupts. This is political theater, and he doesn’t want to yield the stage. The indignation in his voice turns to contempt. “This became part of the reason that people in Oklahoma turned against the Clinton administration and its advocates, and created a momentum that led to … November.” He utters “November” with revolutionary fervor. November! The Gingrich Revolution! I’m momentarily flattered. To think that my actions could somehow have led to the election of this bombastic fool and others like him gives me far too much credit.
The boom box booms still more loudly. “This at-ti-tude you displayed when you came into my congressional district created a big-time circus event. …” The theatrics are having their desired effect. Reporters are madly scrawling down Istook’s words. C-Span is recording the venom for later use. Were the Democrats still in the majority, the chairman of this committee would by now have stuck a towel into Istook’s mouth. But the new Republican chairman merely looks on.
I know I can’t win, but I try to explain anyway. “Congressman, I have to do what I think is right. I have to make some hard calls. A worker died. OSHA concluded that it was because the company failed to use a simple procedure to turn off the machine. This was OSHA’s conclusion—”
“Which was reached after your personal intervention!” He’s armed with a cannon. I have a Popsicle stick.
“No, Congressman, I decided to intervene only after I got the report from OSHA.”
“You pushed them toward that decision!”
He’s calling me a liar. He’s assaulting my integrity. This is war, and I have no idea how to defend myself. “Congressman, the staff at OSHA—”
The boom box grows more menacing. “They saluted and went along with what you wanted! And now you say you bear no culpability! That you want to blame your subordinates! I hope the people in your department are aware of your attitude!”
I tell myself: Remain composed. Any sign of defensiveness or anger and you’re political roadkill. I try to remember the rules I learned cramming for my Senate confirmation: Always show respect. Don’t act smart. When confronted with a particularly hard or delicate question: Tell them how much you look forward to working on it with them.
But these rules weren’t designed for warfare. They were designed for disagreements over policy. They can’t fend off attacks on personal character. That’s the big difference, I now see. Istook and his ilk aren’t just naughty boys. They’re bullies and thugs. They don’t want to talk policy. For them it’s not a question of whether the Labor Department should have done what it did under the circumstances, or even, more broadly, whether it should have the authority to take such actions. This was the kind of debate I might have had with Republicans in the last Congress. But the new gang wants to assign darker motives. They want to expose evil. They are intent on personal attack.
Tell Istook how much I look forward to working with him on the issue? An absurd notion. How can I look forward to exploring with him whether I’m corrupt and venal?
I end up saying nothing. His diatribe gradually winds down. There will be a few bruising newspaper accounts, but I’m still in one piece. Yet I’m shaken by the sudden awareness that I’m not prepared to fight this kind of fight. I simply don’t know how.
As I leave the hearing, bound for my office, I recall B’s words: I don’t want to he mean. I don’t want to be like them. But you have to help me.
Thousands of Bridgestone employees are on strike, The company’s response was to fire all of them, and it is hiring non-unionized workers to replace them. This is the largest striker replacement in history. Oddly, Bridgestone is a Japanese company. For twenty-some years I wrote about the superiority of Japanese managers—how they consult with their employees, provide them job security, upgrade their skills. What’s going on?
I’ve been trying to arrange a meeting with Bridgestone’s president of North American operations, Matatoshi Ono, the same man I telephoned shortly before serving papers on the plant in Oklahoma. But Ono has refused to meet. Yesterday I called Bridgestone’s headquarters in Japan and through an interpreter told the chief of worldwide operations that if Ono didn’t meet with me there’d be “adverse consequences” for relations between our two nations. The Japanese prime minister is scheduled to meet with B in a few days. Word came late yesterday that Ono will come over today, accompanied by interpreter and lawyer.
Ono is a compact man, with white hair and deep rings under narrow eyes. We shake hands and bow to one another. I ask him to sit at the big round table in my office. He nods and takes a chair.
I take the seat opposite him. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” I say slowly.
Ono nods. “Okay.” His face is expressionless.
“I understand that your company has fired its workers who have been on strike.”
Ono nods again. “Yes. Okay.”
Japanese companies operating in the United States are usually very sensitive to American public opinion. My strategy is to shame Ono into changing course. I choose my words carefully. “We find this objectionable.”
Ono remains silent. His face is blank.
“This action undermines labor-management relations all over America,” I continue, gravely. “It is bad for America. Your company is Japanese. Do you think what you’ve done promotes a good image of Japanese companies in America?”
Ono says nothing.
“Well, it doesn’t. I am very unhappy about it.” I wait for a reaction. There isn’t any. “The President of the United States is very unhappy about it.… Do you understand?”
Ono nods. “Understand? Yes. Okay.”
“Mr. Ono.” I move my chair closer to him. “This is a very serious matter. Would you like to consult with your interpreter?”
“No. Understand okay.”
Ono’s face still shows no trace of emotion. But I’m about to explode. “Tell me, Mr. Ono: Would a large Japanese company fire its own Japanese workers if they went on strike?”
Ono confers with his interpreter, then with his lawyer. Finally, he says, “Japanese worker do not strike. Only American worker strike. So we get new worker.”
“But American workers have a right to strike!” My fist comes down on the table with a crash.
Ono’s eyebrows rise and his mouth opens, but he is silent. Instead, his lawyer—a tall, pale, balding American from one of Washington’s major firms—clears his throat. “Surely, Mr. Secretary,” the lawyer says in a high, thin, officious voice, “you are aware that all companies operating in the United States have a right to replace their striking workers?”
“Yes.” I do know, you $800-an-hour prostitute. And you obviously know that if a Democratic Congress couldn’t pass a law barring striker replacements, it’s dead and buried in this one.
It’s clear that Ono won’t budge. I can’t shame him. I thank him for coming, and I show him to the door. He bows, I don’t.
But I’ll be damned if this is the end of the matter.
B officially proposed a minimum-wage increase in his State of the Union speech last night but didn’t say how much of one. The press smelled a waffle. Mysterious forces inside the White House (Panetta? Rubin?) have been telling reporters not to take the proposal seriously anyway, because the Republicans who now control Congress would never allow it to be enacted.
I’m at another community college event with B, this one in rural Pennsylvania. Thousands of students fill a large amphitheater to hear B talk about the importance of skills in the new economy. The White House press corps is also here, of course, traveling wherever B goes like a swarm of locusts. They don’t want to hear about skills. They want to discover whether B is backing off his pledge to raise the minimum wage.
I’m pacing behind the stage, talking to a cell phone. “Leon, we have to give out a number. Today. Now. The press will be all over him when he finishes this speech. What’s it gonna be? Seventy-five cents? A dollar?”
Leon is back in the White House. “We can’t give out a number. We haven’t consulted with the Hill,” he says.
“If we don’t give out a number, it’ll be another giant waffle. They’re already saying the President’s backing off the minimum wage. What’s it gonna be?”
“We don’t have a number,” Leon says simply.
“How about this: The President is inclined toward seventy-five cents but will be consulting with Congress? Okay?”
“Trouble is, we put out any number, and it becomes the story.”
“But if we don’t put out a number, that becomes the story.”
“Maybe.”
“Okay?”
“Well, I don’t—”
“Okay!” I click off and run into the press room. In less than half a minute the swarm descends.
“So, what’s it gonna be, Mr. Secretary? Is the President serious about raising the minimum wage?”
“Is the President backing off?”
“Why hasn’t he given a number?”
“Is he afraid of the fight?”
“What’s the number?”
I put my hand in the air, palm out, as if to signal I’m about to say something of earth-shattering importance. Lights on, cameras focused, pens ready. I wait for quiet.
“If Congress wants to go higher than seventy-five cents an hour, the President will certainly consider it,” I say. “Under seventy-five cents, we’d have a real problem.”
It’s not precisely what Leon agreed to. Leon didn’t precisely agree to anything. Neither, for that matter, did B. This is not a White House in which decisions are precisely made. Every once in a while, one has to help coax the decision-making process along.
The locusts swarm off to report the news. I’ve locked it in.
After returning to Washington tonight, I rush off to a TV debate with Senator Robert Bennett, Republican of Utah. He has a large head and broad shoulders and his voice is deep and condescending. We thrust and parry until, finally, he reveals the premise lying at the bottom of his argument:
“The minimum wage should be abolished,”—he says with utter assurance. “If someone isn’t worth $4.25 an hour, he should be paid less.”
Hallelujah! He said it! It’s now public! We’re not really engaged in a debate over how much the minimum wage should be raised (in fact, its real value has continued to drop); it’s about whether there should be a minimum at all. The other side believes that people should be paid no more than what they’re worth on the market.
“I completely disagree,” I say “Every hard-working American is worth at least a wage that lifts a family out of dire poverty.”
Note the key word: worth. He used it first. It’s a moral concept as well as an economic one. Can someone’s labor really be worth less than $4.25 an hour? In purely economic terms, surely it can. But in moral terms, the answer’s far from clear.
And herein lies the importance of having this debate: It crystallizes a much larger debate about whether Americans are mere participants in an impersonal market or are members of a common culture and society. Raising the minimum wage is a good thing to do. But quite apart from the wisdom of raising it, having a sharp public discussion about it is itself worthwhile. It helps Americans clarify their beliefs about what we owe one another as members of the same society.
The Wall Street Journal reports that “the White House steamed when Labor Secretary Reich stole thunder from Clinton’s education message by talking about the minimum wage.”
Our nation’s major daily newspapers are vehicles through which high government officials transmit coded messages to one another. When the “White House” is “steamed,” it means someone near the top is aiming a knife at my back. I have to discover who’s wielding it and why.
I phone: “George, what’s up? Who’s mad?”
“Leon thinks you’re trying to keep alive the story about the President’s indecision over the minimum wage in order to force him to get it out in front.”
“Bullshit. The story was already growing on its own. If I hadn’t given out a number, the President would be in deep doo-doo by now. You know that, George.”
“I agree. Just ease up a bit, will you? You’re pushing too hard.”
I phone Leon. “I need your advice.” I genuflect as artfully as I can. “The House Dems want to meet with me today on the minimum wage. Should I go?” Translated: You’re the boss. I’ll be good.
“If they want to hear from you, meet with them,” says Leon. “But we don’t want the President to take the lead on this.” Translated: Apology accepted. You can go. But don’t allow liberal Dems to hide behind the President on this.
I’m off to the Hill.
Any meeting with more than two members of Congress is a free-for-all. They’re all entrepreneurs these days—angling for credit with their constituents, favors for big donors, attention from the national media. Members of the House are especially difficult to harmonize, because the districts they represent are literally all over the map. And Democratic House members are even more unruly than Republican House members (unruliness is part of the Democratic ideology). So my expectations for this meeting are low.
It was supposed to begin at noon and they’re still filing in, forty-five minutes later, yakking and yelling at one another, grabbing cheese and baloney sandwiches from a table at the entrance, tossing each other Cokes. It’s a regular high school. The caucus room in the basement of the Capitol building is tightly packed with rows of aluminum folding chairs. But the room is too small to contain all the members now pushing to get in, which makes this even more of a zoo.
“May I have your attention?” Dick Gephardt is now the House minority leader, with the near-impossible job of maintaining a semblance of order. He’s a mild-mannered man whose politics are on the liberal edge of respectability, which means he supports a minimum-wage hike but won’t stick his neck way out to get it.
“May I have your attention, please?”
They quiet down just enough for Gephardt to be heard over the din.
“We’re here to talk about the minimum wage, and here’s the Secretary of Labor.”
A no-frills introduction if I ever heard one, followed by a few claps. Most of the members continue chatting among themselves.
I spend the next few minutes shouting out factoids: The value of the minimum wage has steadily dropped since 1969 (when it was about $6.50 an hour in today’s purchasing power) to today’s $4.25. More than four million people work for the minimum, they’re mostly adults, sixty percent are women, and forty percent are the sole breadwinners in their households.
I refer to several large charts I’ve brought along for the occasion, but I needn’t have bothered. The assembled legislators aren’t watching. I then ask if there are any questions.
“Mr. Secretary!” yells Barney Frank of Massachusetts. Barney’s political views lie to the left of the rest of the Massachusetts delegation, which puts him in the Twilight Zone.
“Yes?”
“You said that if Congress wants to go higher than seventy-five cents an hour the President will consider it. How high will he go?”
A trick question. I remember Leon’s admonition, so I hedge. “It depends on you guys coming to a consensus about what you want.”
“I think I hear what you mean, Mr. Secretary.” Barney normally speaks in a nasal yell. Today his volume is even higher than usual. “You’re saying that if we could get a consensus on a hike of a dollar an hour, the President would sign on?”
The room is suddenly quieter.
“It’s really up to all of you. We look forward to working with you on it.”
“So your answer is yes! We agree among ourselves to raise the minimum by a dollar an hour, and the President would support it!”
“Yes, but only if—”
“That’s wonderful news! You made my day, Mr. Secretary.”
The room erupts in cheers mixed with howls of protest. A gaunt-looking congressman sitting in the front row lifts up a thick report he’s been thumbing through and smashes it to the floor. “God-damn it,” he explodes and promptly walks out of the meeting.
Gephardt tries to restore calm. “Please. Please. Let’s hear everyone out.” He nods to an exasperated member who’s jumping up and down.
“Take a good look around this room,” the animated congressman begins. “Why do you think there are so few of us left? Why do you think the public rejected so many of us last November? Because this party couldn’t let go of old Democratic ideas that are obsolete, like raising the minimum wage.”
Applause mixed with catcalls and boos.
Gephardt points to another hand in the air. “Rosa?”
Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut stands to address the group. “We Democrats have to stick together, and we have to stick up for the little guy.” Rosa is passionate. “I don’t care whether it’s seventy-five cents or a dollar and a half. What’s important is that we do it. There’s nothing more basic to the Democratic philosophy than the idea that people who work hard should get a fair day’s pay.”
Wild cheers. Several members stand and applaud.
“Tim?”
A young congressman in a well-tailored suit bounces up. “I’ll wager anybody in this room,” he begins in a soft Southern drawl, “if we come out for a minimum-wage increase, I’m not gonna be here two years from now, regardless of whether I vote for it or against it, because the voters in my district just aren’t gonna elect a Democrat again.” His voice rises, and he waves his arm in the air. “Haven’t we learned anything? At this very moment, Republicans are introducing a tough welfare bill, cutting off unwed mothers under eighteen. They want less government, and the people out there”—he points vaguely—“want less government too. But here we are proposing more government, folks. This is the ster-ee-o-typ-ical Democratic response to everything.”
Simultaneous applause and hisses.
Fifty hands are in the air, all demanding airtime. Gephardt’s attempt at order is breaking down. Members begin interrupting one another.
“I can’t believe we’re arguing over whether to raise the minimum wage, for Chrissake! We’re Democrats. In 1989 we—”
“Forget 1989. In 1994 we had our goddamn heads handed to us. If we do this—”
“What the hell are people arguing about here? This is a no-brainer. You tell me how someone is gonna make a living on four dollars and—”
“Whatever we do, let’s do it together. If we go out there and start pissing on each other again, we’ll—”
Gephardt finally gets them to quiet down.
“Now listen, all of you,” he says wearily. “You heard the Secretary of Labor.” Gephardt points to me. “The President is willing to take the lead on this minimum-wage bill, and I think we owe the President our full support.”
Gephardt winks at me. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I think the President just took the lead. Leon won’t be pleased.
Gephardt continues. “Now, the President is going to propose a specific increase in the minimum wage, and he plans to do it very soon. And whatever it is, we have to be united behind him. I propose that we form a committee to decide what we want to recommend.…”
Half the group are already on their way out of the room. The other half are arguing with each other. No one can hear what Gephardt is saying. He gives up.
Why is this such a big deal? Even if the current minimum wage were hiked by a full dollar, its purchasing power would barely reach what it was in the early 1980s. Technically it’s not even an increase. It’s simply an adjustment to take account of the corrosive effects of inflation. A lot of other things get adjusted for inflation—Social Security checks and tax brackets, to take but two that affect the middle class and the wealthy. So what was really going on here?
The answer, I think, is that today’s debate among these House Dems isn’t about the minimum wage itself. It’s a choice about their strategy for 1996. It’s about the Lesson of 1994. Should they fight or move right?
The minimum wage is indubitably a fighting issue. To take it on is to take on the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the fast-food industry, the National Association of Retailers, and all the media that rely on advertising revenues from all of the above. That’s why even House liberals who favor an increase, including Gephardt, want to make it the President’s fight. They’ll join in, but they’d prefer to join in behind B. And that’s precisely why Leon doesn’t want B to be out in front, and why Leon doesn’t want me fomenting.
That’s the real explanation, I’d guess, for this morning’s story in the Journal.
B publicly proposes an increase of ninety cents an hour.
Leon and I watch from opposite ends of the press room. Looked at one way, it’s a victory for me. The pressure built to the point where B had to move, Now he’s clearly on the side of hard-working people at the bottom.
But viewed another way, it’s a victory for Leon. B’s delivery is flat. There’s no conviction. He states the case for raising the minimum wage the same way he’d make the case for extending patents on hybrid corn, as a matter of technically sound public policy. And now that he’s made the announcement, the issue is behind him. There’s no chance Republicans will pass the bill, let alone allot floor time to debate it. So there’s nothing more for the media to write about. It’s over. The minimum-wage controversy is dead, at least for now. Can it be revived?
B takes a few questions from the press and then ducks out.
“Congratulations, Bob,” Leon says with a smile as we exit the press room.
“Congratulations, Leon,” I say, returning the compliment.
Spring training is supposed to begin in a few days, but the strike continues. Baseball is dying. Topps Company, the nations largest manufacturer of baseball cards, announced a few days ago that demand for their product has dropped to its lowest level in thirty years. Still, I think, the nation will endure.
What worries me is that Bud Selig and other owners are threatening to permanently replace the striking players—a far more visible repudiation of the old unwritten code of labor-management relations than Mr. Ono ever dreamed of.
B’s eager to get involved. He smells a deal. He’d like to be savior of the national pastime. He has heard that the two sides are at this moment in Washington. “Why don’t we just call them over to the White House and see how far we can get?” he asks with a grin. By 6 p.m. we’re in the Roosevelt Room with Selig, Don Fehr, and the other owners and players from the two bargaining committees. The players are all big, hulking young men. They look stiff and awkward in white shirts, ties, and jackets, sitting motionless around the mahogany table.
Down the corridor and around the corner, the White House press room is crowded with reporters and cameras, anticipating a story about how the President settled the baseball strike.
After introductions, Al Gore begins, ponderously. “As I understand it, the players don’t want their salaries to be capped, and the owners say a salary cap is the only way to keep the smaller teams competitive. Now, if the owners would agree to tax themselves so that the larger teams would subsidize the smaller teams, we’d be halfway home. And if the players would agree to some sort of a ceiling on their individual contracts, that would get us the other half. S-o-o-o”—Gore seems to be talking to five-year-olds—“the real question here is how far both sides are willing to come in order to strike a fair balance. Am I correct?”
Fehr restates the dilemma in a way that favors the players. Selig promptly puts the owners’ spin on it. Their words fly past each other like spitballs in a fourth-grade study hall.
One of the young pitchers clears his throat. “Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, I love baseball. We all love baseball. This isn’t really a dispute over money. This isn’t about getting $10 million or $6 million a year.” He looks intently around the table. “Hell, I’d be willing to play this game for $3 million if I get some respect.”
After two hours of nonsense like this, we’re still nowhere. “Let’s take a break,” B says quietly. “Maybe if we just talk informally we can make some progress.”
B is an eternal optimist, convinced that there’s always a deal lying out there somewhere. That’s what makes him a supersalesman: He is absolutely certain that every single person he meets—Newt Gingrich, Yasir Arafat, whoever—wants to find common ground. It’s simply a matter of discovering where it is. This is the trait in him that worries me most. What ground will he defend against the Republican assault?
If the owners would agree to binding arbitration, it would be over, but they won’t budge. B and I sit with Selig in Leon’s office. B is next to him on the couch, doing the move. B’s face is six inches away from Selig’s, and B’s arm rests on the back of the couch behind Selig’s head so that his hand reaches around to Selig’s other shoulder. This is full-intensity Clinton. I’m amazed Selig hasn’t already melted on the spot.
“Look, Bud,” B purrs. “You guys can make millions. Millions. We’ll have a b-i-g sendoff for the season. I’ll help you. We’ll all help. I’ll get Dole to go to Kansas, Gingrich to Atlanta. I’ll have every major figure in America out there for the start. Can’t you just see it?” B sketches the vision in the air with his other hand. “This will be the biggest season ever in the history of the game. Now … all you need to do”—B’s voice becomes even softer, and he moves his face even closer to Selig’s—“is agree to have this thing arbitrated. It’s in your interest, Bud.” B pauses and looks deeply into Selig’s eyes. “And it’s also in the interest of … America.”
I think I hear the National Anthem in the far distance. The performance is spellbinding. Selig’s thin body seems to be shaking. “Let … let me just … just check in with the other … the other owners,” he says weakly. I help him out of the couch. He can barely stand, poor man. He wanders out of Leon’s office, dazed.
B shoots me a grin. “I think we hit a homer.”
The reporters down the hall are restive. I can’t help think there are more important things for the President and Vice President of the United States to be doing with their time than waiting for Bud Selig to return with his verdict. Something must be happening in China.
But B is feeling good. While Selig confers with the other owners, B and I joke with the giant players who are leaning against corridor walls, chomping pretzels and slurping Cokes. The West Wing has been transformed into a locker room.
David Cone, a pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, tells me I’d make millions in the majors. “I don’t know a pitcher who’d ever be able to strike you out,” he marvels. “Your strike zone is the size of a peanut.” The giants have a good laugh.
A half hour later, word comes back that Selig and the owners have reached a decision. We regroup in the Roosevelt Room.
Selig looks at B like a guilty puppy who’s just chewed a hole through the carpet. He clears his throat. “I’m sorry, Mr. President.… We can’t do it.”
B seems stunned. I want to strangle Selig.
Experts in the field of collective bargaining always warn that presidents should keep well away from labor disputes. They’re too easily politicized. Occasionally the national interest requires action, as when railroad or airline strikes threaten the entire economy. But the general rule is abstention.
There’s a second precept, this one from experts on the presidency. Power is not to be frittered away on lost causes. Like much of the power in Washington, presidential power derives from the appearance of having it—of being able to make things happen. A president can lose authority simply by exerting it without effect. B lost big tonight.
B moves glumly into the press room, Al Gore and I at his side. The room is a pigpen of half-eaten sandwiches, soda cans, cigarette stubs, and bleary-eyed reporters. Boredom and impatience have evolved into hostility.
“I’m disappointed to say that the players and owners still haven’t reached an agreement,” B says earnestly, as the entire White House press corps begins writing tomorrow’s headline story of administration hubris and humiliation.
I hear angry grumbles and questions coming from several places simultaneously: “Mr. President, why did you invite the players and owners to the White House in the first place?”
“If you can’t even get these parties to agree, what hope do you have in Bosnia?”
“Does this mark the nadir of this administration’s influence?”
“First it was the minimum wage and now it’s baseball. Why do you and your labor secretary think Washington should be involved in every employment issue in America?”
Al Gore is pacing back and forth in the small “holding room” that’s been set aside for us before we meet the presidents of the AFL unions. He’s practicing what he’ll say by reading from note cards his staff prepared for him. Every few moments he stops and asks me a question.
“They’re pleased with our stand on the minimum wage?”
“Yeah. They’d be even more pleased if we fight for it.”
He paces some more.
“Are they gonna oust Kirkland today?” he asks.
“Probably not today, but soon,” I say, trying to sound authoritative, but I’m guessing. For the assembled union presidents, the Lesson of the election of 1994 was the need for more aggressive leadership. Two years with a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic Congress got them zip: no universal health care, no bar against firing striking workers, a North American Free Trade Agreement, and, finally, the loss of both houses of Congress. They’ve decided Lane has to go.
“Does he know?”
“He’s known for some time.” I recall meeting Lane just after the election, when he was mumbling about “treachery.” At the time, I thought he was referring to Republicans. Now I know he was talking about his own ranks.
“So exactly what’s our goal here today?”
“Let them know we know we need them for ’96”
Gore resumes pacing, flipping index cards. The man always does his homework. He leaves nothing to chance. Al is the perfect complement to B: methodical where B is haphazard, linear where B is creative, cautious where B is impetuous, ponderous where B is playful, private where B shares his feelings with everyone. The two men need one another, and sense it. Above all, Gore is patient, where B wants it all now. Gore is content to wait for the right time. He is now waiting to become president. That’s partly why he’s here: laying a foundation with organized labor not just for ’96 but for the millennial election to follow.
We’re supposed to join the union presidents in a few minutes, and Gore is still uneasy about one detail of his presentation.
“Are you sure the President has authority to do this?” he asks. The issue is whether B can prevent companies doing business with the government from firing striking employees. This would be a big consolation prize for the failed legislation. One out of five employees in America works for a firm paid by the federal government to provide a wide variety of goods or services—military equipment, roads, prisons, and so on. Herein lies another well-kept secret: Government is already largely privatized. Most of what it does is done by private, profit-making companies. So the impact of this executive order would be far-reaching.
“That depends on what the federal courts do, and, frankly, I’m a bit skeptical.” I say. “Most judges in the D.C. circuit are Reagan or Bush appointees. But I still think it’s worth trying.” (There’s ample precedent for such an executive order, including one requiring government contractors to make special efforts to recruit and promote women and minorities. Yet this is a controversial area, involving delicate line-drawing. Congress’s constitutional power to make law would be circumvented if presidents could order government contractors to do virtually anything.)
I’ve been pushing this for weeks. Panetta and Rubin have been pushing in the opposite direction. Their concern is not the legality of such an order but the appearance it creates of pandering to the unions. Of course it’s a pander—an entirely justifiable one. Why should government contractors be allowed to sack striking employees? Bridgestone gets millions of dollars of contracts from the federal government each year. If it wants to continue the relationship, it should have to abide by the spirit as well as the letter of the nation’s labor laws.
“Has the President made a firm decision on this?” Gore asks. Silly question. Gore knows that B doesn’t make firm decisions unless pressed. I sense slippage. Gore wants an out. Leon or Bob must have got through to him.
“Well, I spoke with him night before last, and he seemed comfortable.” Translated: I mentioned it casually in a conversation, and he didn’t balk.
“I shouldn’t make this announcement unless the President has fully considered it.” Translated: It’s dead.
“Why don’t we get the President on the phone right now?” It’s the last shot I’ve got—a desperate move by a desperate man. “There’s still a few minutes. This announcement would make the AFL very happy.”
Gore hesitates. “I suppose … Well, we might …”
“Okay!” I tell the White House operator that the Vice President and I need to talk with the President right away Within minutes, B’s syrupy voice is on the phone.
“Hello? Bob?”
“The Vice President and I are down here in Bal Harbour, and we’re just about to speak with the AFL presidents …”
Gore swiftly but gently lifts the phone out of my hand. “The question, Mr. President, concerns a presidential order on striker replacement. Now, there’s something of a difference of opinion among your advisers on this.…”
I can only hear Gore’s side of the conversation:
“Right.” Gore nods his head.
“Because they think it looks like pandering.”
“Right.” Gore nods again.
“Bob says he’s doubtful.”
“Oh, absolutely.”
“No reason.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“So, what do you think?”
“Yup.”
“Me too.”
“Okay.”
“Right.” Gore nods emphatically.
“Okay.”
Gore hangs up and looks toward me. “Well, you’ve got your executive order.” He pauses, and his expression grows even more earnest than usual. “Now that’s what I call full presidential consideration.” Another pause, and then his face breaks out into a broad grin followed by a guffaw.
Another point of contrast: B’s humor is slapstick; Gore’s is ironic.
The Republican attack machine is gearing up, and I’m one of the targets. A “paranoid” is someone who thinks right-wing politicians are after him and who isn’t known as a combative liberal cabinet member.
Today’s hearing of the Joint Economic Committee: cameras, reporters, packed audience, a parade of witnesses claiming that raising the minimum wage will cause widespread loss of jobs.
The Republican House chairman of the committee, James Saxton, a fleshy-faced former real estate broker from New Jersey, begins the proceedings. He says he wants to give the President’s proposal a thorough airing. He then says he wonders how a president who is so smart can continually come up with so many destructive policies that threaten to harm the very people he aims to help. Saxton can find only two explanations. “First, it is pretty clear that some of the ideas put forth by this administration are never intended to become law, they are politically motivated, in my view, to score points with special interest constituencies such as labor unions and to embarrass the President’s political opponents. The political motivation behind Clinton’s minimum-wage proposals then are very clear to me.” Saxton says that raising the minimum wage hurts poor people.
“This brings me to the second reason this administration continues to come up with such policy initiatives,” Saxton says, pointedly. “President Clinton gets incredibly bad economic advice, at least in my view. For example, last year the President defended his health-care mandate by telling Herman Cain, owner of Godfather’s Pizza, and one of our witnesses today, that Godfather’s could offset the cost of the health-care tax mandate: Just raise prices. The President and his Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, want to apply the same kind of what I call—and I can find no other way to describe it—quack economics, and apply the same philosophies and the same theories to the minimum wage.”
When will I have a chance to answer these charges? You’re not supposed to answer. They don’t want you to answer.
Saxton continues: “Mr. Reich has actually said that raising the minimum wage increases employment. You heard me right. Mr. Reich has said that raising the minimum wage creates more job opportunities. As we will see during the course of this hearing, there is virtually unanimous agreement among economists that raising the minimum wage is job-destructive and raises unemployment.”
Saxton points to two charts, placed side by side on easels facing the cameras. “This chart depicts the conventional view of people in the economic profession.” A long line curves upward from the bottom left corner. “As the blue line clearly shows, increasing the minimum wage drives up unemployment.”
Saxton then refers to the second chart, across whose top is written in bold letters: THE REICH CURVE. On it is a long line curving in the opposite direction, from the top left corner downward. “Mr. Reich would have us believe just the opposite. Under the Reich unconventional theory, raising the minimum wage actually leads to more jobs and lower unemployment. The other chart that we are referring to here shows this very clearly.”
I’m hoping to claim a morsel of air time to make the case for why a modest increase in the minimum wage won’t cost jobs, and may even create some. When New Jersey raised its minimum wage somewhat, more jobs resulted because people entered the labor force who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered. But this positive effect is limited to relatively small wage hikes. Saxton’s “Reich Curve” is pure demagoguery.
“If this is true,” Saxton begins to mock, “then we ought not to worry about raising the minimum wage whatsoever. We ought to just have a big increase in the minimum wage. We shouldn’t have to worry about $5.15 an hour, just a 90-cent increase. Shucks, why don’t we just increase the minimum wage by a dollar, or two dollars, or three dollars and create even more jobs?”
He seems to be relishing his performance before the cameras. “Mr. Reich will cite twelve studies. I call them the questionable dozen. As evidence of this administration’s unconventional view, they are centerpiece. Four of these studies are simply variations of one theme by the same three individuals, one of whom was formerly Mr. Reich’s chief economist at the Labor Department and one of whom is Reich’s current chief economist at Labor.”
Saxton has arranged the twelve studies into a small stack in front of him. “We have got Secretary Reich’s twelve studies here on my left. And we have got the conventional view studies over here.” He refers to another stack, towering over the first one, for maximum effect. “There are more than one hundred of these true, tested studies by individuals who are well-respected in the economic profession.”
When, much later, I take my place at the witness table, Saxton grills me. “Can you explain to those of us who are not versed in this new concept of a law—that is, a law sometimes but not all the time—how this precisely works? Take me through an example at the level of job opportunities at the firm level, and explain how an employer has the ability to hire more workers when government forces him to pay more for that commodity, in this case, labor?”
I begin to answer when he interrupts. “I apologize, but I just have a very difficult time understanding how a generally accepted law of economics, or principle of economics, applies on some occasion and doesn’t on others.”
“Mr. Chairman, I was about to answer your question.” I have no real chance of getting a hearing at this hearing.
“Well, I know you were going to give me an answer. I have no doubt about that.” But he won’t let me answer. He continues to talk about why employers won’t pay employees a penny more than they’re worth. “Let me harken back to an old-fashioned economic theory.… Most economists I have talked to believe that the market sets wage rates on the basis of what a worker can produce.”
We skirmish a bit longer, but it’s futile. There was a time not long ago when congressional hearings were designed to elicit information for members in order to help them draft legislation. Now they’re attack ads.
One consolation: These guys are keeping the minimum-wage issue alive. Without their bombast it would die a silent death. But they seem unable to resist the temptation to attack it publicly, again and again. Dick Armey, the majority leader of the House and Gingrich’s right-hand ideologue, said on TV the other day that the minimum wage ought to be abolished entirely and that he’ll resist raising it “with every fiber of my being.” Keep up the theatrics, fellas! Take another bow! Keep hammering away like this, and we have a fighting chance of getting a higher minimum wage enacted into law.
I publicly challenged Dick Armey to debate me on whether the minimum wage should be increased. This morning I receive his reply in the mail:
Dear Mr. Secretary,
Thank you very much for your kind offer to debate the Democrat proposal to increase the minimum wage.
I realize how important this issue is to your efforts to shore up the demoralized Democrat base, but at the moment I am fully engaged in efforts to keep the promises contained in the Contract with America. When that work is done, I would be pleased to discuss with you other issues we may consider in the House, including changes in the minimum wage law.
In the meantime, I trust that my position is quite clear: There is no economic theory under which you can raise the price of something without getting less of it. I am convinced that an increase in the minimum wage would cost American jobs. The best way to help the working poor is through other means—such as easing the tremendous burden of a bloated government on the economy.
Sincerely,
DICK ARMEY
Member of Congress
Tipped back in my chair, hands behind my head, feet on my desk, I’m reveling in the press reviews of a speech I gave at the National Press Club, attacking Gingrich’s agenda. I pointed out all the ways in which it reduced opportunities for the poor and for workers with low wages, while simultaneously cutting taxes on corporations and on the rich. “Did you see this one?” I hand Tom an enthusiastic editorial. “They call my critique devastating. Not bad, eh?”
I’m having fun. A common enemy who espouses exactly the opposite of what one believes clarifies issues and loosens constraints on speaking out. When the Democrats ran Congress, I felt inhibited. Bill Ford and many of his colleagues wanted to keep the economy exactly as it was, and protect every job regardless of the cost of doing so. I couldn’t openly criticize their position without damaging party unity, yet every time I warned in public of the growing inequality of income in America, I was asked about it. This new Republican gang seems so intent on rewarding their wealthy and corporate benefactors, and so insensitive to the problems facing most working people and the poor, that I feel liberated. I can talk about the growing problem of inequality and criticize the hell out of them.
“The speech was certainly … ah … provocative.” Tom stands next to my desk, tight-lipped.
“Provocative and accurate,” I say, enormously satisfied with myself.
“Next time you may want to be a little more … tactical,” he says delicately.
“Hmm?”
“It was a good, tough speech,” says Kitty. “And I’m sure it was therapeutic for you. Must have felt awfully good to vent all that anger,” she adds soothingly.
“Absolutely terrific.” I smile.
“But you need to think about the consequences.” Having softened me up, she now delivers the punch. “Consider our budget. You’re making Republicans furious. You’re endangering the entire department.”
“Whaddya mean?” I sit up. This hadn’t occurred to me.
“If they cut our appropriation to shreds, you won’t suffer, but a lot of people out there will.”
“I refuse to believe they’d stoop to that.”
“Oh no? Well, they already have,” she says with a touch of anger. “They just announced plans to eliminate all funding for summer jobs for poor teenagers—this coming summer and next. Remember the kids you met in South Brooklyn two years ago? How much they wanted jobs? Now another million kids just like them will have to spend their summers on the streets.”
I bounce out of my chair, fuming. “I can’t believe there’s any relationship between what I said in that speech and what the Republicans did to summer jobs. That’s ridiculous, Kitty.”
Kitty stands her ground. “Look, I can’t tell you there was a direct connection. They didn’t give a reason. They didn’t even hold a hearing. But I can tell you this.” She pauses for breath and then delivers a swift succession of pronouncements like rifle shots: “The President is not accusing the Republicans of being tools of the wealthy and powerful. The President is not criticizing their tax giveaways to the rich. The President is not on TV and radio demanding an increase in the minimum wage. The President is not howling about corporate welfare, or the widening gap between the rich and the rest. The President is not out there justifying an executive order on striker replacement.”
Kitty and I face each other. She’s only a few inches taller than I, but right now she seems huge. She isn’t angry so much as worried and tired. “Don’t you see?” she asks. “You’re becoming the President’s point man. His heat shield. You’re way out there, all alone. You’re making yourself a target, and that means that everything you’re trying to do here at the department—everything we’re trying to do—is also a target. I can’t tell you they killed off summer jobs because of one particular speech you made, but I am sure of one thing: You put summer jobs within target range.”
Tom stands by with arms crossed. He nods in agreement.
High government officials typically hear nothing but praise from subordinates. “Great job, Mr. Secretary.” “Superb, Mr. President.” “Never better, Senator.” The compliments from staff flow like sweet honey, drenching official Washington in a thick, sticky smugness. The goo serves a legitimate purpose. To do these jobs well requires an extraordinary measure of self-confidence. To be on for hours at a stretch before cameras, audiences, reporters, and constituents—all demanding, all critical—necessitates a strong ego. Indeed, the pressures bearing down can best be withstood if the ego is a bit inflated, creating countervailing pressure. Yet there is an obvious danger as well: The goo may be mistaken for truth. The official may thereby fail to discover—until it’s too late—that he has made a terrible error of judgment.
I do not suffer this problem. I am blessed with Tom and Kitty. They do not smother me in sticky compliments. They stick it to me. But what are they suggesting I do? Speak out less? I can’t do that. Push B to speak out more? I haven’t been able to do that.
Later in the day, I testify before the Senate appropriations subcommittee in charge of the department’s budget. The committee is now headed by Arlen Specter, known as a “moderate” Republican (although I’ve lost track of exactly what that term means; perhaps just that he wants to cut funding for the poor and cut taxes on the rich less than his fellow Republicans do).
Specter is waving a newspaper in the air. “My concern, Mr. Secretary,” he says slowly, “is about the working relationship between you and me, between this subcommittee and your department.”
He puts on his glasses and reads. “Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich led the Clinton Administration’s first attack on the newly convened Republican Congress, defining the choice between our rival economic programs as a ‘battle for the soul of the anxious class of working Americans.’ ”
Specter looks up. I’m about to respond, when he resumes reading. “Reich blasted the main GOP proposals as ‘retread Reaganomics’ that benefit only the rich.”
Specter takes off his glasses and looks intently at me. “Mr. Secretary,” he asks in a menacing tone, “why start off the new Congress on that line?”
“I didn’t intend to tar all Republicans, Senator. Only—”
“Are you quoted correctly?”
“The purpose of that speech was to contrast the two philosophies of—”
“Answer my question,” he snaps, now the prosecutor.
“Yes, I was quoted correctly.”
“Mr. Sec-re-tary.” His voice is now silky smooth. “There was no reason for that broad-brushed attack.… You and I have a lot of tough work to do together.”
Specter could easily have phoned me about this. Why is he choosing instead to issue this warning so publicly? Not because he wants me to absolve him from my broad-brush criticism. Much as I’d like to flatter myself, my views on that score are irrelevant to him. I think he’s doing it because he wants his more conservative brethren to know he issued this stern warning. They’re the audience he’s playing to. They’re the ones who are ticked off at me and might otherwise seek retribution by slashing the department’s appropriation. If they believe Specter has me under control, they may keep the money coming.
“I appreciate your advice, Senator,” I say contritely.
I hope my theory is correct.
The executive order on striker replacements is causing a furor. Jerry Jasinowski vows to fight it through the federal courts. He’s been joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and none other than Bridgestone Tire and Rubber Company. The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is in high dudgeon. Congressional Republicans are crying foul. C-Span is quivering with Republican rage. “How dare the President usurp congressional power!” “Not since FDR tried to pack the courts have we witnessed anything like this!” “Disgraceful!”
Republicans pledge to bury the executive order. Already they’ve introduced a bill to prevent the Secretary of Labor from enforcing it. But if we can get forty Senate Dems to vote against their bill, it will be filibustered from here to eternity. And that means enough votes to put an end to any future Republican effort to bury the executive order.
The vote is minutes away. I’ve stationed myself in the ornate lobby directly outside the entrance to the Senate floor, precisely where senators have to pass on their way to vote. By Senate rules, the only people allowed here other than senators are members of the executive branch at cabinet rank or above, so I don’t have much competition.
I buttonhole Senate Dems as they emerge from elevators:
“Hello, Senator!” I shake a hand. “Hope you’ll vote against the bill!”
“Yup.”
“Good morning, Senator!” Another handshake. “Please remember to vote against the bill!”
“Okay.”
“Nice to see you, Senator! Just want to remind you to vote against the bill!”
“Sure.”
As the vote approaches, more of them speed by. I call out. I’m at a roadside stand, hawking lemonade.
So many senators move past on their way to the floor that I stop trying to target Democrats and pitch anyone who’ll listen.
“Senator! Please vote no on the amendment!” Bob Dole turns around with a look of bewilderment. Who is this little man and why is he here?
Nancy Kassebaum races by. She’s prim and principled like a school-marm. We disagree on almost everything but I can’t help admiring her. It’s her bill that’s being voted on. “Senator!” I call out to her, with a smile. “I’d appreciate it if you’d vote against the bill!”
“Shame on you!” she shouts back with a sly smile. “That executive order is a disgrace.”
Pat Moynihan shrugs his shoulders as he goes by. “You seem to forget, Mr. Secretary. Our side lost the last election. Save your energies.”
Sam Nunn argues with me as he passes my lemonade stand. “The President has no authority whatsoever to do this. I can-not in good conscience vote with him.”
And so they parade by on the way to the big ring: bearish Ted Kennedy, giraffe Alan Simpson, cougar Pete Domenici, possum Paul Wellstone, eagle Jay Rockefeller, python Phil Gramm, alligator Trent Lott, and all the rest, different shapes and varied ideologies but mostly large personalities. Does the Senate make them large, or do they have to be large in order to make it this far in American politics?
The public has little good to say about them as a group. Politics is assumed to be a dirty business, and politicians are assumed to be corrupt or worse. Not long ago, one of the most thoughtful members of the Senate confided to me that he was leaving at the end of this term because he was fed up with the publics cynicism.
Undoubtedly the cynicism has grown, and has been fueled by decades of disappointments and scandals, beginning with Vietnam and ending, most recently, with the savings-and-loan fiasco. But cynicism toward government is in fact America’s natural state; government has been despised and distrusted through most of our history. This is the way we began. What was unnatural was the long period in this century during which government was held in high esteem. We suspend our distrust only in times of war, economic crisis, or other large-scale threat that convinces us we have to entrust government to meet the challenge at hand. When the mission is complete or we are no longer convinced that the challenge is real, we revert to our natural state.
The Cold War is now over and the economy seems reasonably sound. Only the creeping menace of widening income inequality threatens the nation’s stability and its moral authority, but the crisis is building too slowly to summon the trust necessary to deal with it. Unlike the problem of racial inequality, which pierced the public’s consciousness in the 1960s, the problem of widening economic inequality has not engendered a movement or produced leaders able to focus the publics attention on its moral consequences and its political solutions. Therein lies the real danger.
The summer of 1967. I’m a summer intern in Bobby Kennedy’s Senate office. The civil rights movement is still gaining ground, and Kennedy is crusading for economic and political justice. My job has nothing to do with civil rights, and it requires only half a brain. I’m in charge of the office signature machine, which mechanically scrawls “Robert F. Kennedy” thousands of times on thousands of photographs and form letters. I’m deathly bored—so bored that I’ve started composing mock letters to friends (“Congratulations, Mr. Dworkin, on possessing the largest nose in the entire Hudson Valley. Yours sincerely, Robert F. Kennedy”). One day, I’m standing in front of an elevator when it suddenly opens to reveal the man himself. He’s surrounded by supercharged aides, all of whom are talking at him simultaneously. As he moves out of the elevator he sees me and takes a half step in my direction. “How are ya, Bob? How’s the summer going?” he asks and gives me a toothy grin. I start to respond, but he’s whisked away. No matter. That he knew my name is more than enough to keep me going through the rest of the summer, and for years to come.
“Mr. Secretary!” Tom Daschle, the minority leader, and the first to emerge from the Senate floor, stops by my lemonade stand.
“So how’d we do?”
“Relax.” He grins. “We got the forty votes. Your executive orders safe for now.”
Today’s edition of the National Review: “Labor Secretary Robert Reich claims the GOP’s Contract with America is picking the pockets of the poor to pump up the purses of the prosperous.’ This from someone who believes in sucking the salaries of the successful to succor the system of the socialists.” I can take satire. But this is harder to take: The House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee is bombarding us with a fusillade of letters and telephone calls, charging me with “politicizing” the Labor Department. Hyperactive twenty-something martinets threaten subpoenas unless we deliver piles of documents. Congressman Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the Republican chair and one of Gingrich’s closest collaborators, thunders that I’ve abused my authority. Gingrich himself issues hints about “goings-on” at the Labor Department. Congressman James Saxton of New Jersey, chair of the Joint Economic Committee, hisses threats. The pit-bull Washington Times, under a headline declaring “Republicans Consider Seeking Reich Probe,” claims that Saxton may call for a Justice Department inquiry into whether I “used federal employees to gather political intelligence to combat the Republicans’ Contract with America.” Only a matter of time before all this appears on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
This is how they wage war: steady drops of icy innuendo gradually forming tiny stalagmites of doubt in the public’s mind, until they become mountains of suspicion.
Tom tells me I’ve got to stop this while it’s still a mere drip. “They claim you’ve drafted career employees into the fights to preserve the department’s budget, raise the minimum wage, defend the executive order, target corporate welfare, and other things they find objectionable.”
“I have. So what? Has any law been broken?”
“No, but they want to create an appearance of impropriety.”
“Politicizing the department? What does that mean, for chrissake? I’m not asking anyone to campaign for or against any politician or party. This is about advocating certain policies. There’s a huge difference. The executive branch is intended to argue with Congress over policy. That’s what the Founding Fathers …”
Tom sits, tight-lipped, until I finish my lecture. Then he responds. “The department is involved in many highly partisan issues. The other side is personalizing these issues, so the distinction you’re making is blurring.”
“I’ll be damned if they’re gonna stop us just because they make everything into a goddamn personal issue.”
“They’re not going to stop us. But they may slow us down.” Tom opens a notebook and proceeds to check off certain items. “Now, to avoid problems, we’re going to have to answer every letter they send us, give them every document they want, respond in writing to every charge they make.” He turns back to me. “We’ve got to smother them in responsiveness.”
“Fine.”
“But you must understand what this means. Lots of people in this department will be spending month after month at this. They won’t be able to do anything else.”
“Now I get it. If they can’t kill us by creating a scandal or shredding our appropriation, they’ll simply use up all our time and resources responding to their bullshit. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yup.”
“This is war.” The fun is quickly fading.
I breeze by George’s cubbyhole, which is no bigger than a large closet, to catch the latest gossip and to make sure no knives are aimed at my back. I’m having enough trouble guarding my front. “What’s up?” I ask.
“Not much.” I can tell he’s lying. He looks awful.
“Don’t bullshit me, George. Something’s going on.”
“Can’t talk about it.”
“How bad?”
“Very bad.”
“Tell me.”
George nudges shut the door separating his office from B’s private quarters next to the Oval.
I’ve rarely seen George this upset. In the three years we’ve worked together, first in the campaign and then in the administration, he’s remained one of the coolest. He usually smiles easily and speaks with the calm reassurance of someone who has been in politics for decades, even though it’s been only a few years. Like Leon, George is a political tactician, but his scope is broader than Leon’s. George considers the press, public opinion, and B’s message as parts of B’s legislative strategy, and sees all of them as pieces of B’s larger strategy for getting reelected. As B’s first press secretary, George failed to assure members of the White House press corps that they were getting a straight story. When Leon took over as chief of staff, George became one of B’s key advisers without portfolio, a trusted voice.
George would probably be described as a “liberal,” although day by day I’m never quite sure how he balances his values with his tactical judgment. He began his political career as an aide to Dick Gephardt, who has adhered to the AFL-CIO’s positions on most matters through the years. I’ve heard that George has deep religious convictions. But in all our time together we’ve never had a discussion about what he really believes in or why.
“Ever hear of Dick Morris?” he asks.
“Vaguely.” A political operator from New York, I think. Years ago, after B lost the governorship, Hillary hired him to help restart B’s career. Then he became a Republican. “Why d’ya ask?”
“He’s here.”
“Here?”
“Not exactly in residence. But might as well be. On the phone, with the President, a lot.”
“And you think that’s bad.”
“Terrible.”
“The President talks to Republicans all the time, George. What’s the problem?”
“Morris himself is the problem.”
“How so?”
“He’s a slime bag.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Utterly without principle. Devoid of integrity. The guys been working with Trent Lott [the Senate majority whip]. Still is. Nothing’s beneath him. Hell do anything.”
“And the President’s getting advice from this guy?”
“More and more.”
“Dad, don’t be a chicken.”
“I’m not a chicken. I’m a prudent rooster.”
“It’s completely safe. Just try it. Once.”
Adam is trying to convince me to join him on a roller coaster called The Hurler. I do not find the name confidence-inspiring.
“Please, Dad. It’s gentle. It’s for beginners. Ten-year-olds.”
“That’s the point. I’m not ten. Ten-year-olds are wild. I’m old and sedate.”
He’s wearing me down. We’ve come to this amusement park in the Virginia countryside on this beautiful Sunday because Clare thought I was getting rattled by the incessant battles with Republicans in Congress and Republican Lites in the White House, and the change of pace would be relaxing. But I suspect The Hurler will rattle me even more.
“Once.” I give up. “One gentle, peaceful ride in The Hurler, and then we play shuffleboard,”
“Shuffleboard is for eighty-year-olds.”
It’s an old, wooden, clackity-clack coaster, which begins by moving you ever so slowly up a steep incline. Something tells me the decline will be sheer hell, limes like this, I want vigilant government regulators who thoroughly inspect amusement park rides every half hour.
“You better be right about this, Adam.” I’m tightly clutching the bar that’s come down over our waists.
We reach the summit. “Actually, Dad, I lied,” he says, with a satanic grin. “I’m … a … R-e-p-u-b-l-i-c-a-n!” We plunge.
The world can be divided between people who love roller coasters and those who are terrified by them. A razor-thin line separates excitement from terror, but it’s determinative. B and Newt Gingrich, I suspect, enjoy roller coasters. Al Gore and Bob Dole are probably on my side of the great divide. It suddenly strikes me as extremely important that people in public life who love roller coasters share power with people who fear them. The fate of the nation depends on the right balance.
At last, mercifully, The Hurler comes to a stop. Adam jumps out of the cart. I crawl out.
“You’re in deep trouble,” I tell Adam as sternly as I can without throwing up.
“Sorry, Dad. I really thought you’d like it.”
Clare, Adam, and Sam will be leaving Washington at the end of July. When they came to Washington, I really thought they’d like it. I hoped they’d want to stay. No such luck.
I’m upset with Clare. If she pressed, I’m sure the law school would consent to give her one or even two more years’ leave from her teaching. But she wants to return to her work and her colleagues, and doesn’t see why she should have to remain in Washington one minute longer than the two years she bargained for initially. I can’t seem to persuade her that my work as a cabinet secretary should take precedence over her work as a teacher and a director of the domestic-violence institute. She doesn’t buy the argument that my work is more important. Nor is she moved by my logic that she can do her job for the rest of her life, while I can do this one for only another year or, if B should win reelection, another five at most. She feels she’s made enough of a sacrifice by coming here for two years.
“You should have come with us!” says Sam, bubbling. He and Clare find us sitting on a bench, where I’m still searching for my errant stomach.
“You’re right, Sam. I should have done anything other than The Hurler,” I complain. “What did you guys get up to?”
“Sam had his fortune told,” says Clare, bemused.
“It was spooky,” Sam enthuses. “The fortune-teller knew we were moving! She predicted we’d go back home. Those were the words she used. Back home.”
“How d’ya suppose she did it? What did you tell her?”
“Almost nothing,” says Sam. “She asked me a few questions—my name, my favorite color, my parents’ jobs—that’s all. And then she looked into her crystal ball, and there it was. We’ll be going back home! Amazing.”
The average duration of a cabinet secretary is less than two years. The fortune-teller knows her politics.
Clare and I briefly considered having the boys remain with me in Washington when she returns to Boston, but that makes no sense. As it is, I barely see them. On a good night I get home at 9 p.m. They’re growing up quickly. Adam is now fourteen, Sam ten. Early adolescence is its own roller coaster. One minute they’re up, then they’re down, then wacky and wired. If I lose sight even for a few moments, they’ve rounded another bend.
Why am I willing to sacrifice so much? To fight endless battles on the Hill, and more insidious battles in the White House? I didn’t take this job to be a warrior. I’ve had moments during the past weeks when I’ve been ready to pack it in. Yet every time I reach the brink I pull back. Something in me refuses to concede the fight.
“You still look green, Dad,” says Adam.
“Don’t worry, guys. I’m getting my stomach back,” I tell them with a confident smile.
“Mr. Chairman!”
“Mr. Secretary!”
He enters my office and we hug.
“Come, sit down!” We walk arm in arm to the couch, like the oldest of friends. I haven’t seen Bill Ford since he left the House. I feel genuine affection for him. How easy it is to forget that this stubborn ass blocked the deal I wanted to make on NAFTA and job training. Compared to the new crowd, he’s a teddy bear.
“What are you doing? How are you doing, Bill?” For as long as most people can remember, he was one of the most powerful chairmen of one of the most powerful committees in Congress. Now he’s … what?
“I guess okay,” he says after a long sigh. “I’m with a law firm here in town. They call me a rainmaker, although I’m not really creating much of a storm.”
“Oh, you will With your contacts.”
“My contacts are the Democrats in Congress, and they’re irrelevant now.” He smiles lamely.
“But it must be nice finally to have some time for yourself and your family.” I try to be encouraging.
“It’s hard, you know.” He pauses for several seconds. I don’t ever remember him ceding his time to silence. His monologues never stopped. “May I have a glass of water?” he asks. I get him one, and return with it.
“Thanks.” He takes it and drinks. Then he resumes. “After all those years, you get used to the bustle, the excitement, the fighting.… You get used to the power. And then, when it’s over, it comes as something of a … shock.”
It saddens me to see him like this. “Is there something I can do for you, Bill?”
“You’re doing enough, just seeing me. I’ve got some clients who have some business with the department …”
I raise my hand to stop him from identifying them. “We really shouldn’t …”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not courting favors,” he says quickly. “Remember, I fought big business for decades. The last thing in the world I plan to do is get them off easy, I’m trying to convince my clients to protect their workers in advance, so they don’t have to worry about run-ins with the Labor Department. Now I can tell them I saw you and you’re more committed than ever to vigorous enforcement, so they better shape up.”
He stands. “That’s all I wanted. Just a minute of your time.”
I stand. “It was nice to see you again, Bill.”
“And nice to see you, Bob.”
I guide him to the door. We shake hands. He looks at me intently. “Remember that it’s gonna be hard when you leave here. I know government is tough. You carry around a lot of stress. It’s hard on your family.… But it’s marvelous too. And when it’s over … well …” He looks away. “You don’t know quite what to do with yourself.”
Bill Ford was in government almost all his life. He had no other. I’ve been here only a little over two years. I’ve been warned.
I unlock the door of the tiny one-toilet rest room on the far end of the West Wing corridor and swing it open. Al Gore is waiting patiently in the corridor. “Hi, Al,” I say on my way out.
“Hi, Bob,” he says on his way in.
I’ll wait until he emerges, then try to find out what the hell’s happening around here. B was all set to veto the Republicans’ latest proposal to cut even more out of this year’s budget, including drastic reductions in education and job training for high-school dropouts. Then at the last minute he agreed to almost all of the cuts. And yesterday he was supposed to have given a major speech on education, training, and lifelong learning. But it turned into something entirely different. He spoke of the importance of compromise and specified issues on which he already agreed with the Republicans and those on which he hoped to reach agreement.
The loop has disappeared. It’s not even in the executive parking lot. I can find threads of what’s left of it only by trawling the corridors of the West Wing.
The door opens and I pounce. “What’s going on with the President?”
Gore pauses. “Maybe we should talk in my office,” he says quietly. I’m suddenly aware how discreet he is.
His office is perfectly square, simply furnished, with a large photograph of the earth covering most of one wall. I sit on a small green couch, Gore on a chair next to it.
“What happened?” I ask. “The new education and job-training cuts bring the total under where Bush was in 1992. And we’re not even putting up a fight.”
“It was last-minute,” he says. “A shitty decision-making process.”
“Shitty process and a shitty decision. What gives?”
“He’s afraid of what they’ll do if he doesn’t cooperate on the budget,” Gore says dryly.
“What could they do?”
“Close down the government,” Gore offers without a trace of emotion.
“Would they?”
“Maybe.” He smiles mockingly. “When two sides can’t agree, strange things happen. Nobody believed baseball would shut down.”
“We can’t let them blackmail us, Al. We have to draw the line somewhere, don’t we?” I feel myself heating up even in the presence of Mr. Cool.
“I don’t know.” Gore becomes intensely serious. “Where do we draw the line? Do we draw the line? You’ve known the President far longer than most of us. He doesn’t like drawing sharp lines.”
“And that’s where … Morris comes in?”
“You might say that.”
“Morris wants him to compromise, keep moving toward the Republicans?”
“You got it.” Gore isn’t comfortable talking about Morris. He’s about to stand and usher me to the door.
“What do you think we should do?” I ask.
“Me?” He points toward himself mockingly, as if no one had ever asked his opinion before. “We’re gonna have to fight eventually. When we do, we have to be in the strongest position possible.”
“So what ground do we defend?”
“The high ground.” Gore hints at a smile. “But of course, not everyone agrees.”
I leave Al’s office bewildered. I continue to believe Bill’s heart is in the right place. He’s not letting Morris dictate strategy. He’s using Morris just as he uses hundreds of other advisers, formal and informal, to hear their ideas and test them against his own. If B’s giving up some ground, it’s because he feels he must in order to defend more important ground.
Samantha is a tall, sinewy black woman, age twenty-five, with closely cropped hair and high cheekbones. She drives long-haul trucks. Last year she earned $24,000.
“I dropped out of high school because I just didn’t see the point,” she tells me. “I was pregnant and wanted to be with my baby. And then when my stepfather started making moves on me again, me and my baby moved out, and I went on welfare. But I never liked being on welfare. I don’t know anyone who likes being on welfare. It’s degrading as shit.”
The other women applaud. There are about two dozen of them, mostly young, mostly black or Hispanic, sitting in a large circle in the main room of the Sacramento YWCA. There’s a big stone fireplace behind us and large prints on the wall, but apart from the folding chairs we occupy, the room is virtually empty. These women are participating in an experimental program to train women for jobs traditionally done by men, here in Sacramento and in five other cities around the country. The program is about to be eliminated because B decided to cooperate with the Republicans.
Samantha continues. “I was feeling pretty down, let me tell you, until I found out how I could get a good job. I saw a sign that said: We’re Looking for Strong Women. Good pay’ Well, I said, I’m a strong woman. So I signed up. Took about eight months. It was hard, let me tell you. But I got my cer-ti-fi-cation. And now I’m making money.” Her face lights up. “And I can pay for Tammy’s day care, and even for a nice woman who comes in at night when I have to be on the road. And”—Samantha’s smile widens and the glow radiates—“Tammy and I just bought ourselves a little co-op. It’s ours.”
The room erupts in cheers.
Then Marguerite, age twenty-four, with long, thick black hair and large brown eyes in a round face. “I can get into what Samantha says,” she begins. “I didn’t want to be on welfare, but none of the jobs I could get paid enough, until I got this one. I dig ditches, I fit pipes together, I test the pipes. It takes more than muscle. But I didn’t even have the muscle at the beginning. So part of what I had to do was build up my body.” Marguerite raises her arms and flexes her biceps. The women laugh. “That was part of my training. Body-building. Body and skills. And now I can lay pipe and fit pipe as well as anyone.” Marguerite grins. “And I’m so tough that no one’s gonna mess with me.”
More cheers.
I’m in a revival meeting. These women sound strong. Their voices are clear and sharp. They feel good about themselves, powerful. Annie is nineteen, compact and broad-shouldered, with dark-red hair neatly plaited into braids. “I operate a forklift.” She speaks rapid-fire. “Learned a lot of it on the job, but had to be trained first in how to use the machinery. I can haul more crates and do it faster than any man in the plant.”
Applause.
Annie continues, more softly, slowly. “This job saved my life. I was on the street. My husband walked out on me. Left me with two kids. It happened suddenly. We were all alone.” She stops and looks around the room. The other women are watching intently, nodding their heads, urging her on.
“I tried welfare, but it wasn’t enough.” She is almost whispering. “So I started … turning tricks on the side. And from that I got into drugs. And then everything fell apart. And my two kids …” She stops, choking on her words. The room is completely silent. “My children … got taken away … from me.” Tears flow down Annie’s cheeks. Several others in the group begin crying with her.
Someone offers her a tissue, and she gently wipes her cheeks. She takes a deep breath and sits up. “I really didn’t expect to get into all of this today.” The others reassure her it’s okay.
“Anyway,” she continues, softly. “I was on the street. I had nothing, nobody. I was doing dangerous stuff, probably was gonna get killed or get sick and die. And then one day someone who works here at the Y talked to me, told me I could straighten my life out. They said I could get a job that would be safe, a real job that would pay enough to have a place to live, and that if I had a real job and a place to live I could get my children back.” Annie pauses and takes another deep breath. “It was hard going. I didn’t know whether I could pull myself out. But people were patient with me. They helped me. They taught me a lot of things.” Annie pauses again, and smiles, and her voice becomes stronger. “And now I’m the best forklift operator you can imagine!” Applause. “And now … and now …” Annie’s smile broadens, and she chokes back tears. “And now I have my children back.” The women stand and cheer. I join them. This is a revival meeting. I can’t remember feeling more revived. Washington is a million miles away.
I’m on my way back when I hear that a third of the federal building in Oklahoma City has been blown away by a bomb that went off outside. I don’t know how many people were killed, but it’s a god-awful mess. What was once the day-care center is now a hole in the ground. The son-of-a-bitch who drove the truck with the explosives had to have seen the faces of little children.
My mind flashes to the Labor Department people from the Oklahoma regional office who helped in the Bridgestone case last year. I pray they’re safe.
After a few frantic phone calls, I discover they’re all accounted for. The one Labor Department employee who had an office on the side of the building that was blown away is still alive, thank God. She was late for work and missed the explosion. Had she been on time she wouldn’t have survived.
I reach her at home. “Are you okay?” I ask.
“Shaken up, but okay,” she says. “My husband didn’t know I had to run a few errands before work. He thought I’d died. He’s more upset than me.… It’s a horrible thing, Mr. Secretary. You have no idea. A terrible thing. I can’t believe someone would do something like this.”
Why would someone do something like this?
B is heading out to Oklahoma City right now, to provide words of healing. He is the nation’s Preacher-in-Chief. He was born to it. As he did with Rabin and Arafat, B can talk about harmony and reconciliation better than anyone I know. Preaching that we are all in this together is his greatest gift.
B is on his own. Gore tells him as much today, stating the obvious after all of his economic advisers object to putting a balanced-budget plan on the table. “Mr. President, you’re in a different place from your advisers.”
B nods blankly, and after a long pause says simply, “I just don’t want to be irrelevant to the process.”
The process in question is this: Gingrich and his gang have called B’s bluff. They’ve produced a budget plan which they claim will eliminate the deficit in seven years. Even though it adds money to defense, cuts corporate taxes, and awards the wealthy a capital-gains tax reduction, it still reaches balance—by slashing and burning everything else, especially programs for the poor, the near-poor, the elderly, the disabled, immigrants, and the lower middle class. And it decimates investments in education, job training, child nutrition, and infrastructure. In the name of balancing the budget, it drives an even deeper wedge into a nation already splitting apart.
Conservative Dems on the Hill are intrigued. Other Dems are scared. Many are willing to negotiate, with or without the President. And that’s precisely what B’s afraid of. He figures that unless he has his own plan to balance the budget, they’ll decide on one of their own.
But here’s another interpretation: B’s silence on the subject has made even his potential allies confused and nervous. They’re willing to deal with the Republicans because they’re afraid that if they stand tough, B won’t give them cover. The only possible way for B to muster the political support he needs to take on Gingrich is for B to draw a sharp line—stating clearly what he’ll veto, and why.
B’s silence on welfare is having the same effect—emboldening those who are cooking up a cruel bill, undermining his potential allies.
B preaches harmony, but he’s tolerating the most divisive social agenda in memory. This seems to me to be the dark side of B’s impulse toward tolerance and reconciliation. His eagerness to reach “common ground” is causing him to give away too much ground along the way. If he stood his ground and fought for it, he’d gain more support than he believes he has.
He doesn’t want to listen to any of us who are now sitting with him around this table. Who’s he listening to? Astronomers learned of the existence of “black holes” in space—matter so dense that its gravitation sucks in all light—by watching their pull on other planets nearby. Regardless of what any of us tells him, B is still gravitating to another spot, a black hole whose pull is overwhelming. The hole doesn’t show up at any of our meetings, but its presence can be detected by watching the influence it’s exerting on the biggest planet of all. I can’t ignore it or rationalize it any longer, The black hole is Dick Morris,
I remember B and Hillary using Morris in 1981 to plot their successful comeback to the governor’s mansion the following year. They continued to rely on his polls and his advice through the next three gubernatorial elections, even as Morris drifted rightward. By 1992, most of Morris’s clients were Republicans. I didn’t hear about him during the presidential elections, although it’s likely that B sought his advice from time to time.
Morris is a “political consultant,” which until very recently wasn’t recognized as a legitimate profession. Some might still dispute its legitimacy, although all politicians rely on consultants like Morris. They sell candidates exactly the way Madison Avenue sells cornflakes and soap. They do phone surveys, opinion polls, and in-depth “focus groups” in a never-ending quest to discover what the public wants. They then use the techniques of advertising and marketing to convert the candidate into that product. At best, political consultants help men and women of principle win election by educating the public about what such candidates believe and why. At worst, political consultants fight ferociously against any spark of principle, fashioning a candidate whose only characteristic is his or her marketability. Morris is reputedly one of the best technicians in the business, and the most adamantly opposed to any principle whatsoever.
I have not met the man, and should not rush to judgment. But everyone who describes him to me uses the same set of adjectives: mesmerizing, cynical, unscrupulous. I’m not offended by these qualities in used-car salesmen, but they worry me in politics. Democracy is a fragile experiment. In an era when almost everything is bought and sold, when packaging and spin are often indistinguishable from reality, and when ulterior motives seem to lurk behind almost every friendly encounter, our democratic process needs special handling. Morris and his ilk are debasing it, and the people who hire them are playing with a fire that one day could consume all of us.
“Mr. President.” I lean into the table, trying to increase my own tiny gravitational pull. “The Republicans have given you a gift. Their budget is a moral outrage. It demonstrates who they’re for and who they’re against. It’s a perfect platform for fighting on behalf of hard-working people and the poor.”
B doesn’t respond. Then he says to everyone around the table: “I must propose a way to balance the budget. I want a balanced-budget plan. The swing voters care about this.” The reelection campaign has officially begun. I’m worried about where this may lead.
I’m prowling around machine-tool shops and classrooms in Eastern Iowa Community College, talking mostly to middle-aged men who’ve lost their jobs, poor young women trying to enter the job market, and teenage dropouts seeking vocational skills. Most of their stories are by now familiar: The men were laid off after fifteen or twenty years with the company; the women don’t want to be on welfare; the teens can’t hack it on the street. The place is bleak and antiseptic, located in the middle of a wide, flat Iowa tract. Everyone inside seems weary. The good news is the job market out here is tightening, and employers are coming here looking for prospects.
A hundred or so people gather in the cafeteria to hear me brag about what the Clinton administration is doing to help them afford the training: our one-stop job centers, low-interest direct loans, school-to-work apprenticeships, and so forth. They applaud politely and then return to their shops and classrooms.
Afterwards, in the parking lot, I’m about to enter the van bound for the airport when a man approaches. He looks to be in his late fifties, thin, tall, neatly dressed in slacks and sweater. “Mr. Secretary, may I have a word with you?”
“Sorry. I’m just heading off for—”
“I must talk with you. Just a minute, please.”
“A minute’s all I have.” I climb down from the step of the van. The man is well over six feet, but there’s nothing menacing about him. Despite the urgency in his voice, he’s polite and soft-spoken. He could be a college professor.
“I heard you speak. You said you and the President were doing all you can to help people get the skills they need.”
“That’s right. The budget’s tight, but—”
“Peanuts.”
“Hmm?”
“I said peanuts. That’s what you’re offering.” The tone in his voice changes ever so slightly.
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you know what’s happening right across the river?” He points toward the horizon, accusingly.
“No, but you’ll have to forgive me.” I take a step back toward the van. “I have a plane to—”
“They’re rioting. Right now, as I speak. Hundreds of people are breaking windows, looting stores. They’re desperate. And you’re offering bullshit.”
I start to climb back into the van. One of the security officers traveling with me jumps between us.
“People are desperate, and you’re talking about little programs that don’t add up to shit!” His fist is in the air, his eyes are wild.
The security officer pushes him back as the driver starts the van.
“Why don’t you tell the truth? Admit what’s really happening? The poor are getting fucked! Working people are getting shafted! The rich are making out like bandits! And you aren’t doing shit! Nobody is doing shit! Your tiny programs aren’t worth shit! It’s a big lie! You should be ashamed of …” We drive off.
I look back and see him in the parking lot, in the wide, flat Iowa tract, still shaking his fist and shouting at the fading image of the small cabinet secretary becoming smaller and smaller and smaller until the van is far away and he gradually disappears from view.
B gives a five-minute TV address calling for a balanced budget in ten years. “It’s time to clean up this mess,” he says intently into the camera.
What mess? We’ve been cutting the deficit for two years running. It’s already less than two percent of national output—the smallest of any industrialized nation, the smallest it has been in two decades. (The only part that’s out of control is Medicare, yet we offer no answer on how to stanch this bleeding.)
B’s cave-in brings us halfway down the slippery slope. If balancing in ten years is good, why isn’t balancing in seven even better? If eliminating the deficit is so important, why worry overly much about who bears the pain? There’s no stopping now. B has thrown in the towel. I’m sure Morris is behind this.
This is wrong. Everything I see and hear when I travel around the country tells me the deficit obsession in Washington is nuts. Balancing the budget has little or nothing to do with solving the problem of widening inequality and stagnant wages. It may aggravate it if it reduces what otherwise could be invested in education and job skills, or if it results in major cuts in food stamps or other strands of the already frayed safety net for the poor.
The real story of what’s going on is contained in three new pieces of data:
First, the Census Bureau just finished analyzing who voted last November. Their conclusion: The rich are voting more. People on the bottom half of the economic ladder are voting less. And those at the very bottom are hardly voting at all. Sixty percent of Americans with family incomes over $50,000 said they voted last November, up from fifty-nine percent in 1990. By contrast, just twenty-seven percent of those with incomes under $15,000 said they voted, down from thirty-four percent in 1990. And of course, the rich are making substantial contributions to the political parties, in order to finance TV advertising for candidates. Average working people don’t contribute much. The poor don’t have an extra dime.
Second, just in from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Average wages went nowhere last year. This, too, has been the trend. Most workers in the bottom half continue to experience shrinking paychecks. The gap between the best-paid ten percent of Americans and the lowest-paid ten percent is wider than in any industrialized nation. Every rung on the economic ladder is growing wider apart.
Third: The economy continues to boom. The stock market’s rise over the last year has been enough to give every family in America a $5,000 bonus, if distributed across the whole of America. But of course, it isn’t. Almost seventy percent of its value is owned by the wealthiest ten percent of the population.
Put this all together: Most of the growth of the economy continues to go to the people at the top. The bottom half continues to lose ground. And they’re voting less and less. It’s a vicious circle. Politics often rewards the wealthy because they participate ever more effectively in it, and these rewards inspire more active participation. Politics often penalizes the bottom half because they participate less and less in it and have far fewer financial resources to donate to it, and the results confirm their cynicism. The Republican budget illustrates the trend: Capital gains tax cuts for the top, major cuts in spending on the poor and near-poor.
B could be mobilizing the non-voters. Instead, he’s trying to appeal to the suburban “swing.” It’s probably a wise choice if he wants to be reelected in 1996. The mobilization strategy would be more risky. But his choice may not be so wise if he wants to be remembered as the president who put America back together again.
His announcement today is a turning point, and there’s no turning back. The war is lost. It’s now official: Balancing the budget is more important than investing in our future. I’m angry and dismayed.
I tell myself B has the right values and wants the right things for this country Maybe this is just a tactical retreat, necessary to win reelection. Perhaps he’ll rectify it in a second term. He may even begin to mobilize the non-voters. But deep down I worry he’s so eager to accommodate the other side that he has lost sight of the larger goals he came to Washington to accomplish.
When B, Hillary, Clare and I, and a few other friends enter Kinkead’s—an elegant restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue a few blocks northwest of the White House—the other diners don’t seem to notice. Perhaps they’re jaded. Kings, queens, Hollywood celebrities, media moguls, and cybertycoons regularly swish through here, so what’s the big deal? The maître d’ ushers us through the crowd and into a small private dining room at the top of the stairs.
“I’m h-u-n-g-r-y,” Hillary declares, with a belly laugh. When she relaxes she’s down home, even in swanky Kinkead’s.
It’s the first time the four of us have had time together since the election. We talk about Adam, Sam, and Chelsea. We share gossip and funny anecdotes and recommendations for books and movies. B and Hillary are no longer President and First Lady; they’re one of the dwindling number of couples we’ve seen on and off since college. My frustration with B begins to melt. I start once again to rationalize his cave-in to the Republicans on the balanced budget as a campaign tactic. His heart is still in the right place.
“I’m gonna miss you, Clare,” he says. He and Hillary have planned this occasion as a going-away dinner. Clare is touched.
“Not as much as I will,” I say morosely.
Clare flashes me a disapproving glance. Don’t spoil this beautiful evening by guilt-tripping me again.
“Bob, you should move into the White House with us!” Hillary offers cheerfully. “Plenty of bedrooms on the second floor.” She looks at B. “After all, Eleanor Roosevelt filled up the place with her friends.”
B is less than enthusiastic. “You wouldn’t be comfortable in a museum.” He quickly changes the subject to the latest Republican outrage, which provokes fits of indignation. Then we entertain each other with stories about the antics of several Republican freshmen.
The dessert tray arrives. B and I go for the pies.
We’re feeling mellow. The conversation turns to larger themes. B is philosophical. “The problem for us is that they offer an explanation for why wages are stuck and why people feel insecure,” he says. “They pin blame on taxes, deficit spending, immigrants, and welfare mothers. All that’s just displacing the real problem. But when we tell people they need better skills and more education, we seem to be blaming working people themselves.”
“Exactly,” I say, delighted with his analysis. “Their explanation is dead wrong, but more appealing. That’s why we shouldn’t talk only about personal responsibility.” I use the pronoun “we” as he does, referring mainly to B himself but also to everyone else in the administration who will espouse the same message.
I sit up in my chair. “We should talk about society as a whole, including the private sector. After all, we’re balancing the budget and sacrificing public investment so that corporations have more money to invest. At the least, we should expect them to invest with their employees and communities in mind.”
There’s an awkward pause. Have I overstepped the line? The private dining room in one of Washington’s classiest restaurants suddenly feels like an inappropriate place to entreat the President of the United States to speak out against corporate irresponsibility.
“It seems to me,” says Clare, weighing her words carefully, “that corporations are downsizing not only themselves but also a big part of the middle class.” She’s bailed me out. I want to kiss her on the spot.
I throw caution to the winds and ask B, “Would you be comfortable saying what Clare just said?”
“I have to keep myself from saying it every day,” he says softly. There’s proof! B really does care about these things. I should stop worrying about Dick Morris and B’s retreats on the budget. At bottom, he’s still with me, and I with him.
“These are real issues, Bill.” Hillary is fired up. “Executive pay, for example. The average CEO of a big firm is now earning—what is it?—two hundred times the average hourly wage. Twenty years ago, the ratio was about forty times. They’re abandoning loyal workers. They’re leaving their communities. People all over this country are really upset about this.”
“I know, I know,” says B. “But I shouldn’t be out in front on these things. I can’t be criticizing.”
Clare sees me about to ask him why, and tells me with her eyes that I shouldn’t. I think I understand anyway. He wants to be seen to be above the fray, above division and resentment.
“Well, somebody in the administration ought to be making these arguments,” says Hillary, glancing at me.
“I agree,” says her husband, nodding in my direction.
I think I just got put on the firing line again. Kitty and Tom wouldn’t be pleased.
We get up to leave. B takes the check. Hillary and B hug Clare and wish her well. The four of us walk back down the steps into the main restaurant.
Everyone in the entire dining room stands and applauds. Perhaps I was wrong about how jaded Washington has become. (Maybe they simply hadn’t seen us walk in.) B spends ten minutes shaking hands. And then we’re out on the sidewalk, where two hundred others who evidently heard that the President was here have gathered, and they also applaud and cheer. There are klieg lights and cameras. B waves. Hillary waves. Somewhere in the distance a clock chimes midnight. A reverse Cinderella: These two human beings are once again transformed into royalty. And Clare and I, back into members of the royal court.
I have two perfectly sensible reasons for feeling blue. First: Clare, Adam, and Sam have just headed back to Boston. Second: I’m stuck in the dog door.
The two are connected. They left this morning, and I planned to sweep out the house after the movers had gone, then move my things into an apartment. The movers came and went this afternoon. But Clare took the house key with her by mistake. So what was I to do? The windows are locked tight. The only way in was through the little square doorway we created for Waffle under the deck. It’s too small for a normal-sized person, but I figured it would be a cinch for me.
I got my head and one arm and shoulder through, then twisted around to get the other arm and shoulder. But by doing so I screwed myself into the dog door like a lightbulb into a socket. Now I’m wedged in. Literally screwed.
What are my options? I could yell, but there’s no one home, and I’m stuck in the wrong direction to be heard on the street. I’m not sure I’d want to be heard on the street, anyway. Cabinet members aren’t supposed to be in these positions. Besides, what could anyone do even if they did hear me? Push? Pull? Knock a wider hole through the wall? Maybe I’ll just stay here several weeks until I lose enough weight to slide through. Maybe I’ll just die here. Serve Clare right for leaving me trapped in Washington.
I’m more upset about their leaving. I know: Clare and I had a deal. Two years. And the boys didn’t want to stay here either. But I miss them already. I’ll get home to Cambridge on weekends, but hell, that’s no way to belong to a family.
Single-parenting will be hard on Clare as well. She has had a taste of it here in Washington. I’ve come home late, and most Saturdays were shot. She ended up with most of the home responsibilities, which we used to share. Millions of women across America are trying to parent their children alone while at the same time managing a full-time job. I’ve spoken to hundreds of them. The stresses are enormous, and the children inevitably feel them too.
Between them, Adam and Sam have grown fourteen inches since they arrived in Washington, and I’ve missed most of the growing. I missed Sam’s class play. I missed Adam’s eighth-grade graduation. I missed driving Adam on his first date. I missed helping Sam study for his final exams. It’s not that I planned to miss everything. It’s just that this job is overwhelming. Clare filled in for me, or tried.
And now they’ve left me here, in the dog door.
I can get myself out of this. Just turn my arm and shoulder in reverse, and twist myself back out. There. Almost free.
But I don’t see any way out of the bigger trap I’m in. How can I do this job and be with them? I’m desperately lonely for them. But I’m obsessed by the job. I’m screwed, for now.
Sweatshops are back in America. A few weeks ago, Labor Department investigators discovered a group of Thai immigrants imprisoned in a sweatshop in El Monte, California. The owner had strung barbed wire around the compound and threatened to kill the immigrants if they tried to escape. They were paid pennies a day. It’s only the latest outrage.
I’m meeting with some big clothing retailers to try to find a solution. The department’s eight hundred inspectors can’t possibly eliminate sweatshops on their own. Clothing is cut and sewn in 25,000 to 30,000 small factories around America, many of them loft or basement operations that can disappear overnight and reappear elsewhere the next morning. But the biggest manufacturers and retailers contract directly or indirectly with the sweatshops. Some even inspect the shops to ensure they’re getting precisely what they pay for. Surely the big guys have a responsibility here.
Our investigators found invoices at the El Monte sweatshop and traced them directly to several big-name retailers. We went public with the names. That’s what got the big retailers—their top executives, legal counsel, public-relations flacks—to today’s meeting in a dreary conference room in downtown Manhattan. They’re furious.
“You had no right to tarnish our image like that.”
“We had no way of knowing what was happening in El Monte.”
“It’s not our responsibility to crack down on sweatshops. It’s your responsibility.”
At least I got their attention.
I tell them we’ll continue to publish names of any of them receiving clothing made in sweatshops. “Your customers are concerned about this issue,” I tell them. “If they weren’t, you wouldn’t be here today. So it’s in your interest to police against sweatshops.”
They yell, they complain, they threaten. But shaming them publicly is the only way we’re going to get them involved in cleaning up this mess.
After almost three years in this job, I’m becoming impervious to hostility. Truth be told, I think I’m even beginning to like it. My skin is so thick that it needs continuous blasting to maintain its tone.
Later, I meet with a few of the many people whom our investigators have found working in Manhattan sweatshops. Most are from Southeast Asia. None speaks English. Ying Yi Chan’s story is typical. She’s a tiny woman, thirty-five years old, who lives in Brooklyn with her husband, her parents, and three children. She tells me through an interpreter that she began sewing garments in a Seventh Avenue garment shop two years ago. She worked sixty hours a week, earning $2.50 an hour without overtime pay. She says forty other women were crowded into the same small space on the top floor, with dim lighting and no fire exits. For the three months before the shop suddenly closed, they weren’t paid at all.
I ask her why she took the job. She explains that she didn’t have a choice. She needed the work, she doesn’t speak English, the boss told her she was earning what she was entitled to earn.
I ask whether she is here legally. She says yes. I have no way of checking whether she’s telling me the truth, although I doubt she’d willingly talk with the Secretary of Labor if she were an illegal immigrant.
More than eighty years ago—on the afternoon of March 25, 1911—only a few city blocks from here, hundreds of immigrant women were bent over their sewing machines doing what they did every day for twelve to fourteen hours. They too were paid very little by the standard of the time. They too were crowded together in the top floors of a building, without adequate ventilation. And like Ying Yi Chan, they felt they didn’t have much choice. A fire began in a rag bin and soon spread. According to the New York World of March 26, 1911: “They jumped with their clothing ablaze. The hair of some of the girls streamed up aflame as they leaped. Thud after thud sounded on the pavements.… From opposite windows spectators saw again and again pitiable companionships formed in the instant of death—girls who placed their arms around each other as they leaped.”
In all, 146 were burned or crushed to death. Out of this tragedy was born the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and state and federal legislation to eliminate sweatshops.
But sweatshops are back.
“He’s here,” Kitty says as she flies into the office, giddy.
“Who?”
“Him, The man. The ruler of the free world. In our own waiting room!” She circles and then comes in for a landing next to my desk. Kitty is spending most of her time at the White House these days, running interference between cabinet secretaries and White House apparatchiks.
“The President?”
“No! Dick Morris.”
“Show him in.”
It’s the first time I’ve met the black hole in person, although I’ve felt his gravitational pull for months. He initiated the meeting. Wanted to talk about ideas, he said.
“Hello, Mr. Secretary.” He walks in briskly with hand already extended, presumptuous even before crossing the threshold. We shake, but he doesn’t wait for me to reciprocate the greeting. “I’m very glad to meet you. I’ve read all your books. You’re the smartest person in this administration, save, of course, the President.”
I’m struck by the economy of his fawning, almost as if he had decided in advance precisely how much groveling was necessary and then got it out even before I had a chance to speak.
I ask him to have a seat, which he does in an instant. Everything about him suggests an economy, a precision. He’s compact and intense, and appears to know exactly where he’s heading, like a heat-seeking missile.
“It’s nice to meet you too,” I say, sitting down on the chair next to him. “I’ve heard a lot about you, from all sorts of places.” I smile, inviting him to join in the gentle joke.
He doesn’t. He’s humorless. I’m sitting with a robot.
“You have a lot of good ideas,” he says. “The President likes your ideas. I want them so I can test them.” Morris speaks in a quick staccato that doesn’t vary. Sentences are stripped of all extraneous words or sounds. The pitch is flat and nasal.
“Test them?”
“Put them into our opinion poll. I can know within a day or two whether they work. Anything under forty percent doesn’t work. Fifty percent is a possibility. Sixty or seventy, and the President may well use it. I can get a very accurate read on the swing.”
“Swing?”
Morris turns into a machine gun. “Clinton has a solid forty percent of the people who will go to the polls. Another forty percent will never vote for him. That leaves the swing. Half of the swing, ten percent, lean toward him. The other ten percent lean against him, toward Dole. We use Dole as a surrogate for the Republican candidate, whoever it may be. If your idea works with the swing, we’ll use it.”
I want to ask a hundred questions. Who’s “we”? Will B use it? In the campaign? Is this how policy is going to be formulated from here on? Where exactly do you get your figures on the size and characteristics of the swing? Who gave you the right to come in here and be such an arrogant ass? And so on. But there’s no time. The missile is launched.
Morris pulls from his jacket pocket a hand-held computer and begins tapping something into it.
“So what are your ideas?” he asks after a few seconds. He is still tapping. His tone is slightly impatient, which makes me feel an urgent need to satisfy him.
“Well, I’m not … exactly …”
“You can take your time.” Morris crosses his legs and places the small computer down on the arm of the chair. I feel like a contestant in a high-tech game. I’m tempted to thank him for his patience, until it occurs to me that of the two of us I’m the only one who’s been appointed to office.
“Look, why don’t I just get back to you, Dick …”
My use of his first name seems to open the door to a more intimate relationship. “That would be just fine, Bob.” He picks up the computer, puts it back in his jacket pocket. “I’m really looking forward to working with you. I sense that we can accomplish a lot together.” He stands and extends his hand. “Your mind is razor-sharp, and you have loads of good ideas.”
We shake, and he moves toward the door. Just before exiting, he turns. “By the way, Clinton will get a balanced-budget agreement with the Republicans.”
“I don’t know,” I mutter. “Their plan wipes out the President’s investments and shits on the poor. And those tax breaks for the wealthy … Hell, I just don’t see us getting anywhere close.”
“No choice. Clinton has to reach agreement. He won’t let them have the budget issue for the election.”
George said this guy had no scruples. George was being generous. There’s no longer any doubt about the source of the gravitational pull.
“The same with welfare,” Morris continues, definitively. “Clinton will sign a welfare bill.”
“But that abomination the Senate just passed puts a million kids into poverty.”
“He’ll sign. He will not let them have the welfare issue for the election.” Morris and I are no longer having a discussion. It seems more like a briefing on decisions already made.
He turns to leave. “Bye.”
I take a deep breath.
“One final thing.” His head pops out from beyond the door. “Get back to me personally with your ideas. Don’t talk to anyone about any of this except Al Gore, Hillary, or the President, will you?”
The head disappears.
Morris does a wonderful impersonation of a villain in a pulp thriller. “So …” Kitty says, as she flies in with an impish grin. “Whatja learn?”
“Nothing, really. He didn’t share any information, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
But in fact I learned a great deal. I came face to face with all I detest in American politics. Morris’s craft is the antithesis of leadership. Leaders focus public attention on the hardest problems even when the public would rather escape from them. Morris, by contrast, offers nothing but diversions. That’s what his polls and his ads are all about. He’s a packager and promoter. To the extent B relies on him, B will utter no word that challenges America, no thought that pricks the nation’s conscience, no idea that causes us to reexamine old assumptions or grapple with issues we’d rather ignore. B will pander to the suburban swing, tossing them bromides until they buy him like they buy toothpaste.
Morris makes my hair stand on end. I feel as though my office is filled with static electricity. Anything I touch may give me a slight shock.
The luncheon for Mexican President Zedillo is a lavish affair in the Greek-columned Great Hall of the Organization of American States. A harpsichordist plays soothingly as the guests—mostly corporate executives and Wall Street investment bankers—file in. There are enough bouquets on the tables to have cleaned out every florist in Washington. Kitty told me I had to be a “host,” which means locating the numbered table I’m assigned, standing behind it at the place marked “host,” welcoming and introducing myself to the executives and bankers also assigned to that table, and then sitting and eating. A baboon could be a “host.”
I move into position. Someone taps me on the shoulder. I turn to find a heavy-set middle-aged man in a dark suit. “Excuse me, but I’m hosting this table.”
“There must be a mistake,” I say politely. “This is Table 24. I was asked to host Table 24. You might check with the luncheon organizer over there.” I point to a thin woman from the State Department hovering near the entrance.
“Don’t give me that. I’m hosting this table. I paid good money for it and I’m entitled to host it.” His face is flushed.
“All you need to do—”
“This table is mine. It cost me $15,000 and I was told I’d be the host. So if you don’t mind”—he gently nudges me aside—“I’ll just stand right here.” He stands in the place marked “host.”
It’s lunch break in third grade. I race to the cafeteria to get my favorite seat at the big table in the corner, where Harry Anderson and Billy Taylor and the other cool fellas eat their lunches every day. I’m just about to sit down when Jimmy Grant pulls the chair away. “It’s mine,” he yells. “No, I got here first,” I yell back. “No way,” he screams. He sits in the chair. I remove a tomato from my lunch box. “Get up,” I warn him. “Drop dead,” he says. “You better get up,” I warn again. “Buzz off,” he says. My honor is at stake. I squish the tomato hard into his ear until juice runs over his cheek, down his neck, and all over his shirt.
But I’m older and more mature now. “You can be the host. Fine with me.” I smile and step completely out of his way. “Would you mind giving me your name?” I ask him, imagining what I might do with it.
He mumbles his name, still irritated.
“Who are you with?” I ask.
“Tenneco,” he says gruffly. “Who are you with?”
“Oh, a big outfit. I’m one of the top officers.”
“How big?”
“Very big.” I nod confidently.
“Have I heard of it?”
“Probably. It’s really v-e-r-y big. The biggest. Definitely bigger than yours.” With that, I turn on my heels and walk to another table. I’m no longer in third grade. I’ve reached puberty.
I find an empty seat between Robert Crandall, chairman of American Airlines, and Alex Trottman, chief of Ford Motor. I’ve met both men before.
We banter over squash soup, followed by fresh salmon amandine, asparagus, and baby new potatoes.
Its not until the chocolate mousse with raspberry sauce arrives that I begin acting out. I tell both of them I have a serious question, and then I launch into it. “Suppose you were President. What’s the most important thing you’d do to reverse the widening income gap and declining earnings of half the American workforce?”
“I’d change the bankruptcy law,” answers Crandall, immediately. “It’s being abused by airlines that go out of business. Then they cancel all their debts and reappear with new names. No way a legitimate airline like us can compete with that.”
“Interesting,” I say, baffled by his response. “And what’s your solution, Alex?”
“The trend can’t be reversed. It’s inevitable in a global economy. Some will get richer and richer, some poorer and poorer. Nothing we can do about it. Wonderful chocolate mousse, don’t you think?”
Then I ask them both: “We’re cutting social programs so companies have more money to invest and grow. Do corporations have an obligation to invest in ways that help more Americans to succeed?”
“No,” says Crandall. “A company exists to make a profit for its shareholders.”
Trottman agrees. “Ford isn’t even an American company, strictly speaking. We’re global. We’re investing all over the world. Forty percent of our employees already live and work outside the United States, and that’s rising. Our managers are multinational. We teach them to think and act globally.”
After the tableware is cleared, Zedillo speaks. It’s a pitch for more investment in Mexico. The corporate officials listen respectfully and applaud politely.
There was once a time when the attendees at head-of-state luncheons like this were diplomats, artists, and Nobel Prize winners. Now the audience consists of executives of global corporations and Wall Street bankers. Prime ministers and presidents have become traveling salesmen, eagerly hawking their countries to anyone large enough to buy them. Global money is the new sovereign. B and Newt are cutting the federal budget deficit to create more of it.
The harpsichordist resumes her soothing melodies. The luncheon guests shake hands and begin to file out. The thin lady from the State Department is smiling, so all seems to have gone as planned.
Its Dick Morris on the phone. His staccato, nasal, insistent voice is drilling a hole in my head.
MORRIS: I tested your ideas. One worked. Two didn’t.
ME: Thanks. [I’ve sent him a few proposals for encouraging companies to train their workers rather than lay them off.] Want to give me any more details?
MORRIS: I’ll send you copies of the polls. Well do more polling on the one that worked, and if it holds up it will go to the President. But that’s not the main reason I’m calling you. I need your help in a different way.
ME: Shoot.
MORRIS: The President should not be talking about job insecurity or stagnant wages or the widening gap between the rich and the rest. I know you’re pushing him to do this, but you’re wrong.
ME: Most people out there do feel insecure, Dick. Their wages are stagnating. For many, they’re dropping.
MORRIS: That’s not the point. A president tells a nation how it feels. He interprets reality. He should be telling the public that things are wonderful. They never had it so good, and they “ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” If he tells them they’re feeling good, they’ll feel good.
ME: But if what he says contradicts what they know to be true, he’ll seem out of touch. Look what happened to Bush in ’92.
MORRIS: We were in a deep recession then. We aren’t now. The swing can be persuaded they’re doing terrifically well.
ME: It goes beyond the business cycle. The President can’t appear complacent about what’s been happening to a large portion of our population.
MORRIS: True, but he shouldn’t go around saying we need change, that we’re headed in the wrong direction. That’s just depressing people.
ME: The heart of what Bill Clinton stands for is reversing the widening inequality of wealth and opportunity.
MORRIS: Look, Bob, try to think about this in terms of family images. When he first ran for governor, Clinton was seen as the child brimming with potential. Then after he lost in 1980 and got reelected, he was the chastened and reformed young man. In 1992 he was the older brother. He was empathetic. He felt your pain. Now he has to move to the next level of maturity. He’s the father. He’s reassuring. He tells the nation everything will be fine.
ME: That’s not Bill Clinton.
MORRIS: Bill Clinton can be anything he wants to be.
ME: But that’s not what he wants to be.
MORRIS: Leave that to me. I’ve already rehabilitated him somewhat from the ’94 election. I took two steps. The first was to move him to the center. He had to show America he didn’t side with the left. The second was to tell the public that the key division in America isn’t between rich and non-rich. It’s over values, and he represents the values of family, community, responsibility. Now I’m going to the third step. This isn’t a president who shares your pain. He’s a president who shares your bright future.
ME: If he talks that way he won’t have a mandate for the second term.
MORRIS: You Democrats have a fundamental problem. You always want to be crusaders. You want to change things. Create and surmount challenges. This isn’t the time for any of that. Not if he wants to be reelected.
ME: But what happens after the election? How do we get a consensus to deal with the long-term problems if he doesn’t talk about them during the election?
MORRIS: Bob, your job is to advise the President on what he should do in office. My job is to get him reelected so you can have four more years to worry about whatever you want to worry about. I know my job. You don’t. Now is not the time for the President to talk about any long-term problems. What good is a mandate if you don’t get reelected? Forget mandates. You get your mandate after the election.
ME: What’s the point of an election, for chrissake?
MORRIS: To be elected. If Bill Clinton had already deployed optimism as a weapon, his poll numbers would be eight points higher than they are today. They’ve gone up since last December because of what I’ve told him to do. If he takes my advice now, he’ll go from being a good possibility for reelection to being a shoo-in. But I need your help.
ME: No way. If he takes your advice and wins, he’ll stand for nothing.
The only good news I take away from this exchange is that Morris thinks he needs me in order to sell his snake oil to B, which means B hasn’t bought it yet, which means there’s still time to stop the final sale.
I’ve whipped them into a fever.
“Will we let them ax education for our kids and health care for our elderly, in order to give a huge tax break to the rich?”
“N-o!” The crowd roars.
“Will we let them strip OSHA of its power to keep workplaces safe?”
“N-o!” Another roar, louder than before.
“Will we let them block an increase in the minimum wage?”
“N-o!” A third roar, even louder.
“Will we let them fire striking workers?”
“N-o!” Another roar, louder still. They’re standing, hands cupped around mouths, yelling.
“And will we let them cut welfare for the poor in order to give more welfare to corporations?”
“N-o!” The loudest roar of all. They’re on their chairs, applauding, shrieking.
It’s the first meeting of the new AFL-CIO. Lane is gone. John Sweeney is in. Thousands of delegates are below me. I’m rocking and bobbing, waving my arms in the air, preaching hell-fire and brimstone to the already converted. The crowd is eating it up. This is the climax.
“YOU MUST ORGANIZE! YOU MUST MOBILIZE! YOU MUST ENERGIZE THE WORKING PEOPLE OF AMERICA!”
“Yeeeeeaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!” Thousands of whoops, howls, screams.
“TOGETHER WE CAN PUT THE AMERICAN DREAM WITHIN THE GRASP OF EVERY AMERICAN! THAT IS YOUR MESSAGE! THAT IS YOUR MORAL! THAT IS YOUR MISSION!”
“Yeeeeeaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!” Thunderous, deafening.
I’m done. Breathless. Spent. I want to collapse. But the crowd keeps thundering, and their energy keeps me standing.
The Republicans deserve much of the credit. I couldn’t possibly arouse this level of enthusiasm were the Democrats still in control of Congress and had Newt Gingrich never appeared on the scene. But NAFTA is now forgotten. All is forgiven. We now have a common enemy.
Sweeney and I lock hands together and bring them up high above our heads. He is all smiles. This is the day he’s been waiting for. The delegates have made it official.
Sweeney looks more like a kindly Irish grandfather than the new leader of 14 million unionized workers. He’s pink-faced, bald, and rotund. In person, he speaks softly and is quick to break into a grin. But those who have worked beside him organizing janitors, secretaries, and hospital workers know he’s tough as steel. The service employees’ union he has been running is one of the fastest-growing of all, and the most diverse.
Another consequence of the 1994 Democratic debacle was the soul-searching in the AFL-CIO that toppled Lane and anointed John. If anyone can reignite American labor, it’s he.
But Sweeney faces an almost insuperable challenge. Union membership fell another 200,000 last year, as labor leaders scrambled merely to protect the pay of current members at the expense of enlisting new ones. If the proportion of unionized workers in the American workforce is to remain simply what it is today—about eleven percent in the private sector—at least 400,000 additional workers will have to join this year and every year in the foreseeable future. That means turning to groups that have never before been organized, and are the least powerful in the entire economy: the working poor.
The crowd hollers again and stamps its feet.
Aretha Franklin’s exuberant voice is piped into the hall:
Baby, I got.
Hoo. What you need.
Hoo. You know I got it.
Hoo. All I’m asking is
A little respect.
Just a little bit …
Hey baby.
Just a little bit …
R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Find out what it means to me …
R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Da da da da de de dee
Sock-it-to-me
Sock-it-to-me
Sock-it-to-me
Sock-it-to-me
Thousands of cheering unionists undulate with the music. Middle-aged men with thick necks and blue collars dance on their chairs, crooning along with Aretha.
I come down off the stage and into the crowd. Hundreds of hands grab for my hand, hundreds of arms grasp at my shoulders, flashbulbs spark, faces glow. This is the closest I’ve come to the narcotic of demagoguery. The combination of adrenaline and adoration has a sweet intensity that’s almost sexual. I understand how human beings can succumb to this dangerous addiction.
We march out of the cavernous hall and onto the street. Trade unionists, boisterous and jubilant, move in a great wave down Eighth Avenue, stopping traffic along the way.
We reach 38 Street, the garment district. Hundreds of garment workers—mostly Latino and Chinese—already fill the sidewalks. They’re chanting in accented English and waving placards: STOP SWEATSHOPS. NO SWEAT.
The mostly white, mostly middle-aged men who have marched down Seventh Avenue join in the chanting. “No sweat. No sweat. No sweat. No sweat.” The crowd now fills the street entirely, extending up and down the avenue for several blocks.
Other garment workers peer out of the cutting and sewing lofts of the dingy buildings lining the avenue. Some of the windows are open, and they join in the chant.
Sweeney and I stand on a makeshift platform on the sidewalk. He addresses the crowd through a bullhorn—condemning sweatshops, extolling the virtues of trade unionism, calling on workers to join together. The crowd cheers.
Then it’s my turn, and the words come out of my mouth so naturally that I wonder where they have been stored: “Brothers and sisters, a new day is dawning for working people in America, a day when anyone who works hard will be paid enough to support their families, a day when mothers and fathers can go to work in the morning knowing that they will return home as healthy as when they left, a day when anyone who needs a job will be able to find a job. A day when all hard-working people are respected and valued.”
The crowd roars.
I’m in a time warp. It’s as if we’re all playacting, like the people who dress up in period costumes to celebrate great moments in American history. Today, thousands of factory workers joined together to proclaim an end to sweatshop conditions. Defying local ordinances, they gathered on the streets of New York City and committed themselves to the new dawn of trade unionism in America. The mood is sincere, but a certain nostalgia also hangs in the air. This was what it was like then. This is what they said then. Sweeney’s words, my words, are almost a century old. Does anyone in this rollicking crowd still believe this is possible now? I’m far from certain I believe it.
And yet, what other possibility is there? American politics and much of American economics ultimately come down to a question of power—who has it and who doesn’t. The widening economic gap is mirrored in a widening gap in political power within our society. I came to Washington thinking the answer was simply to provide people in the bottom half with access to the education and skills they need to qualify for better jobs. But it’s more than that. Without power, they can’t get the resources for good schools and affordable higher education or training. Powerless, they can’t even guarantee safe workplaces, maintain a livable minimum wage, or prevent sweatshops from reemerging. Without power, they can’t force highly profitable companies to share the profits with them. Powerless, they’re as expendable as old pieces of machinery.
Organized labor is an aging, doddering prizefighter still relishing trophies earned decades ago. But it’s the only fighter in that corner of that ring. There’s no other countervailing political force against the overriding power of business and finance. Sweeney’s awesome challenge is to rebuild the muscle.
Gingrich is now threatening to close down the government if B doesn’t agree to balance the budget in seven years and do so in a way Gingrich approves of. (Dole and Gingrich have now worked out most of the details in their seven-year plan, which redistributes the benefits of federal programs from the less wealthy, especially the poor, to the better off, and thus further widens the income gap. Almost half the savings in the bill would come from entitlement programs targeted for the poor—Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches, and welfare—even though these programs account for only about one-quarter of entitlement spending. Some of these savings are used to pay for a capital-gains tax cut that will mainly benefit the wealthy.)
For the last ten months, the House Speaker’s ranting and whining have steadily escalated. Since June, when B threw in the towel and agreed to balance the budget over a period of ten years, Gingrich’s rhetoric seems to have grown even more shrill. The victory emboldened Gingrich, making him even naughtier and nastier, like a spoiled child whose demands are met and who can gain further attention only by throwing a tantrum. It’s almost as if Gingrich can’t stand B’s solicitude. This latest threat may force B to fight despite himself, even though he’s already ceded most of the ground.
Tonight Gingrich and I are both receiving awards from an organization that finds jobs for kids who graduate from high school but won’t be attending college. In this town, awards are distributed like baloney sandwiches. Virtually anyone can get one from anybody for doing almost anything. The purpose of giving out an award isn’t to confer an honor. It’s to attract a crowd of potential donors who want some of the baloney. They’re hungry to see or be seen with the person receiving the honor. So the broader the ideological span of the awardees, the larger the pool of potential attendees. Between us, Gingrich and I cover the pool from edge to edge.
I seek him out before the ceremony, during the obligatory cocktail reception. Newt doesn’t seem thrilled to see me.
“So, I understand you’re planning to shut the government down,” I say as casually as if I were commenting on his plan to spend Christmas in Florida.
Gingrich stiffens. “Tell your boss he has to show some flexibility on the budget. He’s trying to jam us.” He looks around for someone else to talk to.
“Really?” I won’t let go. “I thought agreeing to balance the budget in ten years showed quite a bit of flexibility. Some people think he bent over so much he broke.”
Gingrich tries to smile. His eyes still wander the room, looking for an escape. “If we don’t get an agreement, interest rates are gonna take off and the markets are gonna crash. Greenspan said it, not me. Your boss will get the blame, not us.”
“You shut down government, you’ll be blamed.” I keep smiling, although I feel like spitting at the big brat. Gingrich is rescued by an autograph-hunting intern from the Heritage Foundation. Gingrich excuses himself. We drift our separate ways into the crowd.
Later, Gingrich gives his acceptance speech in techno-babble. It’s all third waves and webs and digital bits. I can’t quite follow. His words gush out like water from an open fire hydrant.
My turn.
“Some people want a smaller and more efficient government,” I begin, looking pointedly at Gingrich. The room grows tense. “Well,” I continue, “I challenge anyone to find a smaller and more efficient labor secretary.”
Loud guffaws.
“I can get by on eight hundred calories a day. Try to match that, Newt.” The place erupts. Gingrich tries to smile, but he looks eager to be somewhere else.
Clare and I are trying to stay warm by walking at a fast clip, but the air is so cold that the exposed portions of our faces are beginning to freeze. We dash into a coffee shop in Harvard Square. Somehow, though, I don’t mind this bone-chilling weather. It’s a relief to be home and to be out of Washington, which is moving into its own deep freeze.
“So how do I go about laying off seventeen thousand people?” I ask Clare, as we begin to sip coffee and thaw.
“You have to be simple and direct with them,” she says. “There’s no reason for you to feel defensive. You’re not responsible.”
“I feel responsible. I’m their boss. I can’t pay them after tomorrow.”
“But you didn’t make it happen,” she says, looking intently at me over her cup. “You know it and they know it. Just explain to them as clearly as you can what’s happening and what they can expect. They’ll find that reassuring.”
I stare down at my cup. “But how can I reassure them if I’m so uncertain myself? This is uncharted terrain. No one knows what’s going to happen. This is so goddamn stupid.”
We sit in silence. Finally she reaches over to me and puts her hand on mine. “Bob, it’s not your fault,” she says softly.
I shake my head. “I don’t even know what the fight’s about anymore,” I say. “Bill already gave the store away last June when he agreed to balance the budget. Whether we do it in ten years or seven doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. In the end, most of the burden will fall on the poor. We’re going into battle after losing the war.”
“So,” she says, and then smiles. “Are you ready to come home?”
“No. I have to be there for the battle. And then for the next war.”
“We’re shutting down the Labor Department, effective immediately,” is how I begin the town meeting in the large open area in the center of the department’s second floor. The assistant secretaries, their deputies, and all the political appointees are here, along with a number of the career staff. Most of those who aren’t here are watching this on C-Span. “You will have to leave your work behind,” I say. “After today, Congress hasn’t appropriated any money to pay your salaries.”
The group is stone-faced. No one thought it would come to this. How can the government of the United States close?
I feel like shit.
“I wish I could tell you when you’ll be able to resume your work. I simply don’t know. I have to be candid with all of you. I can’t even say for sure that you will get your jobs back. I can’t promise you’ll ever receive a paycheck from the Labor Department after today.”
I pace back and forth, talking into a hand-held microphone.
“This isn’t because you’ve failed. This is no reflection on your work. The public values what you do—protecting job safety, guarding pensions, fighting sweatshops, helping people get new jobs. It’s just that … politics has failed.”
Why not tell them the truth? They’re pawns in an idiotic game of bluff. B has already lost the real war—the contest over whether balancing the budget is more important than investing in our future. He threw in the towel last June. All that remains is a political game over who appears to have won, how badly the poor get shafted, and who gets blamed for this train wreck.
“You’ll get specific instructions from the heads of your agencies. We’ll try to keep you informed. There’ll be an 800 number you can call from your homes.”
I don’t know what else to say. The entire hall is dead silent.
“I hope to see you at the end of all this. I’m … sorry.”
They rise and shuffle out.
A tall, lanky, middle-aged man with a bald head and thick glasses approaches. “Mr. Secretary, may I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Will we qualify for unemployment insurance?”
It’s an obvious question, but I have to admit I don’t know. I should have the answer. I suggest that he ask the personnel manager.
“How long have you been in the department?” I ask him.
“Almost thirty years.”
“Anything like this ever happen before?”
“Oh, from time to time we’ve had to shut down for a day,” he says. “But nothing like this. Never this big. Never worried about getting a paycheck before. My …” He’s about to say something else, but he stops.
“Yes?” I encourage him.
“My … wife. She’s … sick. We … don’t have anything saved.” His eyes are moist. He’s embarrassed. “Sorry … I just … don’t know what to do, that’s all. I never thought …” He begins to cry.
I’m embarrassed for him. I don’t know what to say. I put my hand on his elbow, which is at about my eye level. He takes a Kleenex out of his pocket and wipes his eyes. Then he mutters “sorry,” and walks off.
“Goddamn it, Tom,” I explode, back in my office. Tom Glynn stands in his usual pose—arms crossed, lips pressed tightly together. “This is crazy. Gingrich doesn’t care if government goes to hell. He’d like it to go to hell. Clinton is playing a silly goddamn game. He’s not leading the country. He already caved in on the budget. Meanwhile, we aren’t protecting American workers. We can’t help them get jobs. And I just laid off seventeen thousand people!”
Tom remains silent. I pace around like a caged animal. “I’ll tell you something, Tom: This is the last chapter in the plot cooked up by right-wing Republicans fifteen years ago to destroy government. First, bankrupt it. Then get everyone worked up over the goddamn budget deficit. Then cut back programs so government can’t do a damn thing. And then close down the whole goddamn place. Demoralize the hell out of every government worker so that no one with half a brain will ever even consider working in the public sector again.”
“I’m going back to my office,” Tom says, simply. He’s had enough of my raving. “If we’re gonna close this place down today, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
By 4 p.m. the only remaining souls in the entire building are those who have been officially classified “essential,” according to government regulations. It’s a demeaning way of categorizing people. I’d hate to tell my family I was sent home because I wasn’t thought “essential.” I can only imagine what Gingrich will do when he discovers ninety percent of the government isn’t essential. It’s eerie. Desks, files, papers, computers, and coffee mugs are still in place, but the people have vanished. It reminds me of a science fiction story.
The heat is off and my office is getting cold. I look at Frances Perkins behind my desk. She’s still smiling. But I notice something I never saw before. Dozens of tiny white specks have formed all over her portrait. This is indeed the end. Saint Frances is beginning to peel.
At 6 p.m. the cabinet convenes in the Roosevelt Room. B looks grave. He speaks softly and carefully, as if trying to justify to himself (or to Dick Morris) what’s happened. “They don’t believe there should be any government except for national defense. I had to set a limit with them.”
Ron Brown tells him he’s doing the right thing. Ron often takes the role of cheerleader when the cabinet wants to fortify B. He’s an old and trusted adviser to B who never hesitates to say in front of the others what’s on his mind. As chairman of the Democratic National Committee before B was elected, Ron did more than anyone to revive a sleepy organization and raise the money needed to secure the White House in 1992. I’ve come to admire him and respect his political instincts. Ron is not among the initiators on the economic team, but I can usually count on him as an ally. Even as Secretary of Commerce, he never hesitates to support the little guy. B depends a great deal on his judgment.
Others of us follow Ron with our own words of encouragement. The discussion seems to enliven B. “You ought to hear them—Gingrich, Dole, Armey, Lott,” he says. “I’ve sat here with them. I’ve tried to understand them. They have a whole different way of viewing the world. They think all we need as a nation is a big military and a few billionaire entrepreneurs.”
It even feels like a war. The commander-in-chief has tried to reason with the enemy, but appeasement ultimately won’t work. And now, finally, the bombs are going off and the lights are going out.
B continues to speak—a long, rambling soliloquy about Republicans and Democrats, the nation’s future, the 1994 election, the upcoming election. I’ve heard most of it before, in bits and pieces. He’s in one of his discursive moods. The very act of talking seems to reassure him that he has a core set of principles.
By 8 p.m. I’m back in my office, which by now is quite cold. When I exhale I can see my breath. There are still papers to be signed and memoranda to be approved before we disappear into oblivion.
The phone rings.
“Hello, Bob, this is Alan Greenspan.”
What can the most powerful man in the world possibly want at this hour from the secretary of a minor department that’s in the process of disappearing?
“How are you, Alan? The Fed still open for business? Got any heat over there?”
He chuckles. “As far as I know. Look, I wonder if you can do me a small favor.”
“Of course.”
“Can you make sure that Cindy remains at work during the shutdown?”
Cindy? Who’s Cindy? Why Alan, you old devil, you. Have a little “friend” over here at Labor, eh? Want the Secretary to protect her job, do you? Tsk, tsk. V-e-r-y naughty, Alan. Could get even the most powerful man in the world into a world of trouble.
“Well … I’ll have to … er …” I stall.
“But of course.” Greenspan hears my confusion. “You may not know her. Cindy McMann. She works in the Employment and Training Administration, several levels down. She tallies the weekly number of new applicants for unemployment insurance, and phones it in to me every Wednesday morning. Very useful data.”
This is the first I’ve heard that Greenspan gets a weekly report on sensitive economic data from someone deep down in the Labor Department. Who knows how many other moles he has throughout the federal government? He’s been at the Fed since the Reagan administration.
“I’ll check on it tomorrow. I’m sure there won’t be a problem,” I say.
“Thanks very much, Bob.”
“Good night, Alan.”
The rest of Washington may be under siege, but Alan Greenspan and his Federal Reserve Bank forge on, quietly threatening havoc unless there’s a balanced-budget agreement, gently reassuring Wall Street in the meantime that it will maintain an iron grip on inflation by keeping millions of Americans unemployed.
The year is ending. I’m Secretary of Nothing, in a department that’s doing nothing, in a government that’s shut down.
Down the corridor are fifty crates of unopened mail. Sixty-three thousand phone calls to the department have gone unanswered. Unemployment insurance offices around the country are closing. Three thousand investigations of unsafe workplaces have stopped. Three thousand five hundred investigations into pension fraud have ground to a halt. Coal mines aren’t being inspected. Sweatshops are free to do their worst. Job-training funds are being frozen. Soon, hundreds of thousands of students and displaced workers will have to stop courses. And there is no end in sight.
B continues to cave. Now he’s agreeing to balance the budget in seven years. Of course, Gingrich still isn’t satisfied. He wants even deeper cuts in spending, mostly penalizing the poor, and even steeper tax cuts, mostly benefiting the wealthy. B seems likely to go along. Morris, the black hole, is sucking him in. Greenspan, the green eyeshade, is subtly coaxing him on.
In public, B demonstrates indignation only about Gingrich’s threat to slow the growth of Medicare spending. Yet this is the least offensive part of the Republican plan. Medicare is out of control, and too many of its beneficiaries are wealthy enough not to need it. The Republicans deserve credit for saying that something has to be done.
At a cabinet meeting today, several of us urge B to hang tough.
Afterward, I follow B back into the Oval. He’s tired and nervous, and gives every impression of not wanting to talk. He walks toward his desk. I pad along behind. “Their plan hurts the poor and benefits the rich. Even if you don’t want to criticize them publicly for it, you can’t sign on to anything like this,” I plead.
He doesn’t acknowledge my words. He lifts a manila folder from the top of the desk and begins leafing through it.
“I implore you, Bill,” I say, using his first name in the safety of our solitude. “Don’t agree to their budget. It would be immoral.”
He glances at me. The last word I uttered seems to have gotten his attention.
“I’ve asked the Treasury and OMB over and over again to let me know the distributional impact,” he says angrily “But they still haven’t given me a goddamn thing.” He deflects responsibility so artfully that for an instant I blame Rubin and Rivlin for letting things get to this point. But I catch myself. The effects of the Republican budget are obvious. B doesn’t need elaborate analysis.
He resumes leafing through the folder. “Thanks,” he says, without looking back at me. My private audience is over. I leave him alone.
It’s 10 p.m., and I’m back in my chilly office. The night security officer opens the door and pokes his head in. “Oh.” He’s surprised to see me. “Sony, sir. Saw the light Didn’t know you were still here.”
“No problem, Officer. I’m just puttering around.”
He’s a giant of a man. I’m glad he’s on patrol tonight. He smiles kindly. “Did you know you’re the only person in the building, sir?” he asks.
“No I’m not.”
“Someone else here too?” He looks worried.
“Yeah.”
“Who? I haven’t seen another soul.”
“You.”
We laugh.
“Happy New Year, Officer,” I say.
“Happy New Year to you too, sir,” he says as he closes the door. “And I do hope the next one is better, for all our sakes.”