(00:00:00) Before I get to the heavy lifting, let me just take a discourage a little Excursion into the Silly (00:00:08) Season wherein of course the presidential campaign. (00:00:11) This is that time and of course the dolls are in the news Elizabeth and Bob I happen to travel around with Senator Dole a number of times as he was stomping around the (00:00:20) middle west and so forth and he tells a story that I want to share with you now. (00:00:24) It's a story when his wife was first picked to join the cabinet as Secretary of Transportation. And of course there were lots (00:00:31) of pictures of Elizabeth Dole (00:00:33) the new secretary of transportation and there would be cut lines underneath (00:00:36) the picture and it said Elizabeth Dole new (00:00:39) secretary of transportation and the man and the side of the picture is her husband and it went on like this and they were pictures of her with a present in the man. And the side of the picture is her husband and sober no mention of Senator Dole. No ambition to be present. None of that strictly second fiddle for him. And finally People magazine came and they send a photographer around with the dolls for three or four days and they took pictures of absolutely everything and there was a big huge spread and picture magazine and again the same darn thing, you know, secretary Dole the man in the corner of the picture is her husband and so forth. There was a picture of them in the end making the bed together in their (00:01:17) apartment. (00:01:18) Well the center got a letter from a guy in California who said look Senator, so I'm real proud of your wife. I think it's wonderful. She's got a good job. We need women and important job. She's in the cabinet, but he said you got to cut this stuff making the bed with your wife. He got a cut that stuff out my wife's making me make the bed and our house now, too. And dull wrote the guy back and he said listen Buster. You don't know the whole story. He said the only reason she was helping me is because they were taking pictures. And I want to tell you I interviewed them together and she admit it. In fact that he made the bed most of the time and she did the cooking. Of course this whole business of self-deprecating humor is one of the things that attract certain politicians to us and if there's anybody who has patented that kind of humor it is certainly (00:02:11) Ronald Reagan and I could tell you it (00:02:13) dozens of Ronald Reagan's drives it just tell you won the whole thing about Reagan in the second term and thinking and worrying about his place in history. He had a we had a journalistic dinner one night and he came and he said listen fellas. He said I'm not worried about my place in history. He said it's (00:02:28) secure. I know I've already got my place in (00:02:30) history. He said I can see it a plaque on the back of my chair and the cabinet room Ronald Reagan slept here. But one of my favorites is told by that wonderful Democrat Mo Udall Morris Udall of Arizona who ran in 1976 for president against Jimmy Carter and kept coming in second. Now, you know in the presidential campaign one of the big moments for the media consultants and the political strategist is how the the candidate is going to announce that his candidacy to the people normally somebody like John Glenn will go back and make the announcement from the steps of his high school or somebody like Fritz Hollings will go down to South Carolina make it from the steps of the governor's mansion and ever the state capitol in South Carolina and then quickly fly to Washington and make a speech at the national Press Club. So he gets double coverage so forth. Well Morris Udall szedvilas users had a big powwow to figure out how he was going to do it and they decided not this big fancy stuff. He was going to announce his candidacy to one single solitary. Person and they picked a barber in a small town, you know, we're in New Hampshire. Now this spontaneous event had to be coordinated with the three television networks. And of course, they got their cameras into the barbershop, right and at the appointed moment Morris Udall walked into the barbershop stuck out his hand and said Hello, I'm Mo Udall. I'm running for president of the United States and the Barbara looked at camera, right all those cameras right in the I said I know it a bunch of us were laughing about it this morning. What a my favorite election stories. Is it true one that that I ran into down in Texas about four years ago. When I was covering Congressional elections, I really wasn't following the local election much but you know local election. Sometimes the parties kind of scratch for candidates and so forth and there was a small item and a Texas rural newspaper for one of the rural counties there and they had picked up an item from one of the candidates who said he it's the kind of line that you wish more politicians with use. He said I know I ain't much but why settle for less I don't you like that kind of Candor. I gotta I kind of like that. One of my Pleasures in Washington and and it's been a pleasure tonight to meet so many of you who have come up to me and said that you watch Washington, we can review the Friday night PBS program on on the news of the week. One of my Pleasures there is to is to be on the program with Charlie Mcdowell who was a down-home southerner from the Richmond paper and he usually sits we have a four-member panel Charlie usually sits in the for seat. And so while three of us go through what we have to say Charlie asks a lot of questions, we get a fair amount of mail in that program and I want to share one letter that Charlie got from an elderly couple in Northern New York State. They said it was the three sentence letter and the first sentence said, mr. McDowell. Sometimes you see it seems as though you don't understand what the others are saying and the second sentence said neither do we In the third sentence said so it's a comfort to have you there. So kind of program it is it may be the kind of evening is going to be I want to take my text for tonight though from peanuts. It's that peanuts strip where Lucy has a card table set up in the back of the room and it says Psychiatry one cent and Charlie Brown inevitably walks up scuffing his shoes in the dirt and he wants to give her a penny wants to get her advice on how to handle life. Well, she said Charlie you're going to have to answer a question for me first before I can give you advice. She said Charlie think of life this way think of Life as a voyage on a great ocean liner. Now, there's one group of people who take their deck chairs up to the bow, and they look off into the future to see where they're going and there is another group of people who take their deck chairs to the stern and they look back into the past to see where they've come from. She said, Early, which group do you belong to? He looked down for a moment. He said Lucy. I'm having trouble getting my chair unfolded. Well, I want to I want to look back a bit to the past and forward a little bit to the Future and see whether or not we're having trouble at times getting our chair and folded. We are here tonight to celebrate a remarkable document and remarkable wisdom on the the part of a group of relatively young men in their late 30s and early 40s a couple hundred years ago. And I have to say I'm honored to be coming after so many distinguished Scholars and jurists and political scientists and experts in public policy. But I want to talk to you perhaps slightly differently from the way they have talked to you about at least from a reporter's point of view how power really works at in Washington as I see it and talk about some of the things that really are not constitutional but outside the Constitution which very much affect the way the Constitution works today in our system and practical ways I'm talking about Tangible things that can't really ever be written into the into a legal document like the Constitution things that make president's successful or speakers of the house or majority Leader's or committee chairman or chairman of the Federal Reserve board something like that intangibles like credibility. We think of Presidential Power often in formal terms the position and the powers enumerated in the Constitution, but if the people and the Congress in the Press, don't trust the president, then he can't get very much done or if they do trust him. He can get a great deal done so that power of credibility that intangible which can't be written down anywhere often determines whether or not a president is successful with the Supreme Court nomination or an energy proposal or a budget or a treaty with the Soviet Union because it determines whether or not he can persuade other politicians to go along with him. I'm talking about things like television Lord knows the founders never could have thought about television the visibility that it gives to people who are relatively Junior in our system of come in as for relatively young congressman and who can suddenly be pushing ideas and beginning to affect the national agenda. And we didn't we hadn't even heard of them four five six years ago and in terms of seniority or committee chairmanship, they're not very far off the line and television itself can put problems in South Africa or Vietnam or out here in the Dakotas. If it's a farm problem at suicides of farmers in Iowa can put that on the national agenda simply by being in reporting that's nowhere in the Constitution and yet it has enormous impact on the way. It operates. I'm talking about things like political parties the founding fathers were they didn't think much of political parties and they certainly didn't mention them in the Constitution and if we look back in the history of our government, it's certainly wouldn't have function very well without political parties and we may be having trouble today and I'll get into that because of the way they are functioning or are not functioning. I'm talking about things like the fragmenting power of Special interest in particularly political action committees, which are the primary engine or a primary engine of the financing of our political campaigns today and which have a very particular impact on the system. I'm talking about the very campaign process itself and whether or not the kinds of tests that are built into our primary and caucus system bring out the kinds of qualities that actually produce leaders who can govern effectively once they win the office or whether or not they're different kinds of skills involved the power game and I've just written a book which I call the power game which will be out in January which lays out some of the ideas I'm talking about tonight much more fully but the power game the way the Dynamics of power operate and I don't mean that term frivolously but more in terms of the patterns and and habits and channels of power that we have in our system. The power game has changed tremendously in the last 10 or 15 years in the United States and I would maintain that power floats in our system. We tend to think of In terms of those three bodies legislative executive and judicial but it's more Mercurial than that and often we think of it almost as duel between the Congress and the white house but it floats around. It's almost Mercurial. I think if you look at it much more closely, but our tendency our tendency in this country is to focus on the president enormously, we're beginning that cycle now with the election, but we do it even after the elections are over we do it for a variety of reasons. And in my opinion, we exaggerate the power of the president in our own minds and in our daily discussion and it is one of the reasons why we don't understand why things seemed to go wrong so often and our system. I like to share with you a story about the presidency that Howard Baker told me when he was the Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker's Hometown is Huntsville, Tennessee a real small town slice of Appalachia up in the Cumberland Plateau up in that Northeastern neck of Tennessee, and he's a very proud man for that region and Knoxville. To see back in 1982 was host to the World's Fair. So Howard Baker and his wife Joy Baker got the idea of inviting President Reagan to come down and make a speech in open the World's Fair and then to invite him to their house overnight. Well, these people have been in politics for a long time, but they were absolutely naive about it what it means to invite the present to your house overnight and what it is like to have the presidency right in the bosom of your home. It's overwhelming as I said, it's a tiny little town. There's only one stoplight and it's basically a blinker except when school is in session. Main Street is one block long and there's a gazebo down in the center of the park and I've seen aerial photos and I've been there and you can't even see the town basically from the are there just a few houses and it's just beautiful for US country up there in the Upland area. So it's deserted and they had built several years ago quite a long time ago a cabin on the ledge of a river looking. On over River Gorge up into the mountains with an absolutely gorgeous view. The quiet of the place is just medicinal. I think you people here have got some sense of what that quiet and Repose is like Senator Everett Dirksen who is Baker's father-in-law used to come there and rest and relax and this is where they were going to put the president up. Well the first thing you know, of course the White House communications office got involved because when the president goes anywhere, of course, the global command post goes with the president so they immediately went and they case this tiny little cabin with a couple of rooms this rustic cabin and they decided they had to run in 57 telephone trunk lines to connect Reagan with everything. They wanted Senator said to me only still got holes in there which they drilled up through the floor. My wife is still mad about it. And and there's they have a Rural Electric Cooperative that up there. They said they didn't even have 57 trunk lines. They had to bring extra lines in so that was the first thing they did then they brought in a Communications van and they wanted to put it right next to this cabin and the center says no you can't do that this wonderful picturesque spot. I'm not going to have the communications van there. You can put it up in the back. So they put it up in the back near where he keeps his dogs and the dogs bark the whole time. Then of course they were worried. This was not too long and no less than a year or so after the attempt on the president's life. So security was a big worry, so they began to they began to bring in swat teams and they put them all out in the woods and they put flood lights up all around this cabin and down in the river and they and they got the volunteer fire department. They got all the deputies involved and I got all the sheriff's deputies in the next couple of counties to get involved and they brought in highway patrol in and they brought in some troops from Fort Campbell Kentucky, you know, and they had the whole place seated and someone wearing camouflage outfits and everything all going through in the center said, you know, there's nobody anywhere around you can look a half a mile and any direction from the Senators house. You can't see anything except trees, you know in the sky. That's all there is to it. Well, you know, then then of course, the next thing they had to do was they had to get two place settings of mrs. Baker's China and silverware to fly it to Washington to have the president's dinner made in Washington and then brought down on the plates and then served alongside. Everybody else and of course along with the Caterers the baker's higher there were some Secret Service chefs who got included wearing the same uniform as the as the regular Caterers and they were just taking care of the Reagan's. Well, we finally get to the moment when the Reagan's are going to arrive and a presidential rival ladies and gentlemen is something to be witnessed. This was a small one. This was not a not a big town and no chief of state involvement. Nothing fancy. There were just coming to the Baker home. Well the first way we're three helicopters bringing in the press and they landed in a field some some three or four hundred yards away and three truckloads of the press were trucked in to witness. The president's arrival kind of messed up the front yard a little bit the way we do the next thing was that they had the staff helicopter had to come in they put a big red pillow down the middle of the front yard so that the helicopter pilot knew where to land the helicopter and he came down they deposited all the Press. I mean deposit all the staff and then it flew off and then finally Marine One Came careening over the skyline and came in well had about 40 people up around the baker's driveway to meet the president when he got there and mrs. Baker and Sissy baker their dog their daughter had a wraparound dress and and they were all standing there. And of course the helicopter came down into beating, you know, throbbing in the grass is flattened out and the lawn furniture is all skittering down the hill and everybody's leaning into the wind of the backwash of this helicopter and whoop sissy Baker's wraparound skirt got unwrapped and I just came it came right off her. You know, she had a grab it put it back on and the Yard Man had to run around and pick up the furniture and all that kind of stuff. Why is everybody was gawking at the helicopters as Howard Baker told me so they're more excited by the helicopters and they were by the president. So his big moment came and he took the president and mrs. Reagan down the walk to his wonderful walkway to this to this cabin and there was a picture window of course, and it looked right out on Ounce to Senator Baker went in the door and he was just about probably take the present up to this picture window and the Secret Service had pulled the blinds down and nailed them to the floor because they were worried about Securities because they were worried. So Howard Baker was so frustrating this point and the president, you know, he was not to be stopped. He reached over and pull the blinds up and as Howard baker said to me now, I know why he was President, you know, bull right through that problem. I took him out and took him out on the took him out on the porch to look at the view and they admired The View and then they went and they play tennis for a while and they went in to have dinner. Well just before they're getting ready to have dinner Dinah Shore flew in Dinah Shore lives down in Tennessee, and they now had security cutting off all the roads in the whole area, but they had theoretically at least closed off all the (00:18:12) air space in the area (00:18:14) and she flew in low over the trees and a little helicopter and the (00:18:18) Secret Service Center bakers. That was absolutely (00:18:20) apoplectic that she Through the security barriers. Anyway, she came in and she and the governor governor Lamar Alexander who plays the piano let him through a sing-along and Senator baker said, you know, we had a wonderful evening and the chickens crickets were chirping and there were two or three hundred security people around and he said, you know, it's just wonderful evenings is only one problem. The problem was that there was so much security to protect the president that the man next door is house got robbed now, you know to some degree. I think that is our picture of the presidencies absolutely overwhelming when it's up close, you know their security and there's Communications and you know, their regulations and everything in this all the ceremony and there's the press and their troops. The power of the thing is absolutely awesome particularly when seeing through the media and in a way, I think we have a picture which is really quite ask you with what the founding fathers had. I call it the John Wayne presidency. (00:19:21) It's a (00:19:22) simple plot line. So it's easy to follow on television day in and day out. We've got an easily identifiable hero a single figure and basically our politics gets portrayed to us as if the president were John Wayne and every He strapped on the six-shooters and he went out to duel in the okay Corral with Tip O'Neill or Mickey Gorbachev or you name who it is. And the question is did he win or did he lose and we often lose sight of what was it all about that he was going out to do battle over and what about the rest of the separation of powers and the sharing of powers and the policies that we're trying to move forward because political news in many ways has become binary is our hero up or down has he won or has he lost the presidency becomes almost a running TV serial, and one of the things that you find is that presidential staff spend a great deal of their time getting rid of the bad sitcoms and trying to create good sitcoms, you know, if we have a journalist captured taken in Moscow and a spy taken here. Let's make the Swap and get the story out of the news because it's bad news and sometimes the argument over policy gets lost and if it's a good story and it's favorable to the present. Let's keep it running as long as We can and a great deal of our politics is devoted to that kind of media game something which simply wasn't conceived of at the time that that the constitution was originally formulated. But beyond that the reality (00:20:54) is is I said before is that (00:20:56) power floats power (00:20:58) moves away from the presidency. (00:21:00) I'm going to suggest (00:21:02) what to me at least is a (00:21:03) fairly radical idea. And that is that far more than we realize or discuss. Openly. We really have a European parliamentary system of government. We have rotating prime minister's we have a president who is clearly the chief of state who is the ceremonial leader of the country and I don't think we've had anybody since Franklin Roosevelt and maybe even including Franklin laws about who's been better at that job than Ronald Reagan. He's magnificent at that and then we have somebody who was the political leader of our (00:21:35) government and sometimes it's the (00:21:37) president and sometimes it's not if you think The Reagan period and we could take other presidencies and look at them the same way (00:21:44) but do you think of the Reagan period (00:21:46) and his first year 1981 when he was pushing through the budget cuts and the tax cuts. There's no question. Ronald Reagan was the Prime Minister. He was the driving force behind the main governmental policy debate and the main governmental policies and our system and David Stockman was his Chancellor of exchequer and Jim Baker. The chief of staff of the White House was really, you know, another member of the cabinet. These were the people who moved our government (00:22:12) but within a year by 1982, I (00:22:15) would submit that the prime minister of the United States was Paul volcker the chairman of the Federal Reserve board. He was the man who is driving Economic Policy tightening credit beating inflation pushing the economy into a downturn and really determining the most important policy of our country and indeed the fate of the rest of us and Ronald Reagan was really kind of on the sidelines. He really was not the main mover of the main policy. Then later in 1982. The major political event in Congress was the passage of a major (00:22:45) tax increase (00:22:46) and the two primary forces. The prime minister's Co prime minister's at that time. We're Tip O'Neill the speaker of the house and Howard Baker the Senate Majority Leader. They were the people who were driving policy Reagan eventually went along. He got behind it. It was presented in the press in the end as an up or down vote for the present but the initiation of the policy and the pushing of that policy came not from the White House. It came from the legislature. So here already we've had the White House leading at one point the chairman of the Federal Reserve board not even mentioned in the Constitution and the two leaders of the Congress coming from opposite political parties something certainly the founding fathers never thought of we can go on in 1984. I would submit we had a caretaker government. We really in the election year often don't have a government being driven very much one way or another but 1985 enormous Reagan Landslide. He gets in office. What happens Bob Dole the Senate Majority Leader becomes the leader of the budget battle he (00:23:40) What's a (00:23:40) coalition together on the budget in the Senate and Ronald Reagan is really rather Passive by the Fall. Ronald Reagan gets going on tax reform and he's for prime minister for a little while, but it gets taken over by Danny rostenkowski who is Chairman of the house Ways and Means Committee and he's really driving it and then two freshmen Republicans won as Juniors, you can get the 99th ranking (00:24:02) Senator (00:24:04) Phil Gramm of Texas and Warren Rudman. Remember the Warren Rudman program. Now who authorized them to take the lead of the government where the heck was that in the Constitution? Where is that in our notion of the president being the most powerful figure in the Land. Once again, Reagan saw that this was smart and he got on the bandwagon and his people were very clever in the way. They played that and in the end a lot of people thought that was Reagan's idea, but it wasn't the people who were driving the policy where to freshman Republican Senators. They were the prime ministers and then what about the end of the year remember what happened the end of (00:24:35) the year Philippine elections (00:24:38) Marcos gets pushed. Who's the Prime Minister was Ronald Reagan pushing the policy to get rid of Marcos Richard Lugar chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was the Prime Minister of our government and the way he did it was through television. He went to Manila. He was an observer to those elections. He said they were crooked elections. We saw it with our own eyes. He confirmed it. He was a guy we trusted he was conservative. He wasn't Auntie Administration. He had credibility he had visibility and he had a policy. Let's get rid of Marcos and he called he called for it on three Sunday television shows at the same time on the same day and the next day Paul laxalt the president's right-hand man in the Senate and and very close political buddy called Marcos on the phone said time to go buddy. And Marco has left the driving force at that point was a senior Republican senator, but not the majority leader and certainly nobody in the (00:25:33) president's cabinet (00:25:35) when I'm suggesting is that power is fluid and we need to think about it that way. As we approach our elections and as we think about our government because otherwise we're really dealing in a dream world and those seven Democrats and six Republicans are going to do everything they can to keep you living in that dream world, but you better think about it realistically if you're going to make sound choices not only about them, but about the rest of government because it's really important. The president does have enormous power and I don't want to say doesn't (00:26:03) but the president's main (00:26:05) power is also an intangible power. It is the power to command attention. It is the power to get that tube over there to pay attention to him. It is the power to set the agenda and say the issue is Judge bork. The issue is Aid to the contras when Jim Wright and Dick Gephardt and the others are saying no the issue is jobs and the trade deficit and what are we going to do for our industry and competitiveness? There is a battle going on ladies and gentlemen over what the agenda is and the president has the primary power their number. One because he's the top elected official and the land number two because he's one person and it's easier to follow what one person thinks if he says it again and again and again it is what Teddy Roosevelt called the bully pulpit that is really in many ways the principal power of the president it is that capacity to draw attention and then to persuade because our system of government was set up two hundred years (00:27:04) ago (00:27:05) deliberately deadlock and some way so that it only moved in a coordinated fashion when the leader or leaders were able to persuade each other to form coalition's and to move forward together. So the president has more power than any other official in the government, but it's still a much more fluid Power system than most of us think and even then we discuss when we're talking about. The Constitution now I want to talk about some Modern influences on this power system for just a moment because that has been developing over time over our history. But in the last 15 years there have been some very important changes in the way our power system operates some of them in law some of them totally outside of Law and none of them mentioned in the Constitution because what I'm really talking to you about tonight is the non-constitutional factors and how they impact on the (00:28:00) Constitution and what effect they have (00:28:03) on how we are actually governed and whether or not our government works well or not, the first external fact of the first external non-constitutional (00:28:11) factor is a set of legal factors. It is the what I would call the Watergate Watershed of (00:28:17) 1974 the legal reforms the changing of power the challenging of Presidential Power by Congress the War Powers Resolution the budget and empowerment resolution both of which in both of which Congress took more power (00:28:31) to its (00:28:32) Of and and set itself up to challenge the president more permanently. And then there were internal reforms in Congress the spreading of power within the Congress from the committee chairman the old Power Barons to lots of subcommittee (00:28:46) chairman, which made Congress a lot harder to manage by its own (00:28:49) leaders you no longer have a few whales as they call them in Washington who can strike a deal with the present and then push something through Congress Congress is much more unwieldy much harder to manage than before there are many more roadblocks and the result is that lobbyists and special interests can go to work and cut (00:29:06) off legislation at the pass at many many more places in the process. (00:29:11) I remember having dinner one night with President Carter and a small group of people in the White House Mansion and it was a very nice dinner after dinner. Of course people wanted to have the president answer questions and we sat around the dinner table and ask questions. And the thing that I remember most strikingly about that session was the president complaining that there were 26 different committees and Congress that had jurisdiction over his (00:29:34) energy program and how (00:29:35) hard it was to move the program through Congress because so many different parts of Congress had a piece of the action and that epitomizes the kind of problem that I'm talking about when Congress passed the budget act in (00:29:47) 1974 it set up its own budget office. Why because they didn't really trust but the executive branch what the White House was putting out and it was an enormous shift of power very subtle one. I'll give you a couple of examples. I talked with Stu eisenstaedt who was President Carter's Chief domestic adviser and he told me an interesting story back in 1977 Joe califano who is then Secretary of health education and Welfare had an idea for welfare reform changing the program a bit, which he said would cost about five billion dollars a year. They were going to add some things but they were going to make some efficiencies and that's all it would cost Carter sent the proposal up to the Congress. And it went to the Congressional budget office and the Congressional budget office made its estimate of how much it would cost us to eisenstadt told me he came out of his front door one morning to pick up the The Washington Post this morning newspaper and right on that on the front page on a headline was CBO Congressional budget office to Carter welfare reform 17 billion dollars Isis that told me the minute he saw that headline that the CBO estimated the cost of this program at more than three times as much as califano. He knew the program was dead. It never got voted on nothing that single set of facts that that shows the power of information and the importance of the spreading of power back in the 1970s same kind of thing happened just recently in the (00:31:17) 1987 budget the Reagan Administration sent (00:31:19) up its budget at this point. The budget office was being run by a nice quiet scholar named Rudy Penner and at one point. He said the Pentagon has (00:31:30) I (00:31:30) underestimated how much it will spend by fifteen billion dollars that totally changed the debate in Congress about how much to cut from The Pentagon budget because if the Pentagon was going to spend fifteen billion dollars less the president could argue you don't have to cut much from the Pentagon to get it in shape and the people in Congress that it's going to cost fifteen billion dollars more than you say. We're going to have to cut more. So once again the facts the power of knowledge the power of Staff the power of distributed power within our system had an important impact on the present as a matter of fact in both of those cases the staff the Congressional budget office had more power than either the president or individual Senators, once again an illustration of how hard it is to find out where power actually lies in our system and remember it Congressional budget office isn't mentioned in the Constitution at all fact, it didn't even exist before 1974. What about other factors? Some of these aren't even in law at least the Congressional budget office is Then the law what about other factors television the new breed of congressmen who came in in the 1970s really a very different group of people people like Dick Gephardt. He came in a 1978 Paul Simon came in the class of 1974 the class of 1974 was the big class that came it was the Watergate class when the Republicans were in Dutch. It was also a time of the Vietnam War and it was a time when Authority in this country was even more under question than it is now, so you can't you add a new group of politicians coming in with a very different attitude towards power towards seniority. They were impatient to get ahead. They wanted to articulate their own policy ideas. They were policy entrepreneurs in their own right? They didn't care that much about seniority. In fact that year, they threw out three old chairman who had been in charge of major committees in the House of Representatives through seniority and periodically, they've done it a few times since then, so there was a whole different breed of people that Did though the way it operated and first and foremost these were people who were skilled at media politics. So television itself began to affect the way our system operated what happened was in the old days the machine politicians the organization politicians people particularly from Massachusetts people from Chicago the daily machine and so forth these people depend very heavily on party organizations and there were lots of others who did to a greater or lesser degree. In other states the New Breed tend to come very independently, they raise their own money. They create their own organizations. They communicate with you directly people say to me nowadays a political party is three things. It is the candidate the TV set and you you don't need anybody else in between. You don't need Party leaders to say, you know, so and so is a good candidate and sounds I was not a good candidate labor union leaders have much less influence business leaders religious leaders as a direct communication between the candidate and the voter and what that's telling you is that television is affecting the whole way. Political system operates and what it's doing by and large what it has been doing for quite some time is eroding the importance of political parties. I most of you will say fine. We (00:34:41) want to decide on the man or (00:34:42) the woman. We want to pick the candidate. We don't want to pick the party. You want to be independent voters. We want to be free to split our tickets. Well, that's all very well and good. But if you do that the kind of people that you send to Congress once they get the Congress they don't feel any great ties to the party. They don't feel beholden to party leaders to follow them. If a party helps get you in power then when the party leaders turn around say hey, we want you to back our we want you to vote for our program because this is the party program and we the party helped you get in the guy has gotten into office. Independence is fine. I'll make up my mind whether or not I want to vote for it or not. Well makes it pretty hard for a (00:35:20) present to line up (00:35:21) all the people in his party or an opposition leader to line up all the people in his party and that's why you find an awful lot of votes in Congress fragmented their Because your fragmented the (00:35:32) parties don't hold things together as (00:35:34) much political money. It's completely different from the way it was before before 1974. There was a lot of under the table money. There was slush funds that were Brown envelopes that showed up and Senators offices to pay them off. They were relatively modest in size compared with what we have today, but it was an informal fluid and largely hidden system. It's much more open. Now, we have political action committees, but the system is Awash with money in night, you know, 1974 (00:36:03) the Congressional races (00:36:05) raised and spent 72 million dollars in 1986. That's last year 450 million dollars was spent and that's money (00:36:16) registered with the Federal Election Commission on Congressional (00:36:19) races. And with the presidential race. It'll be six hundred million dollars anyway in 1988 and a lot of people estimate some of the experts estimate that if you take in all kinds of Informal contributions what they call soft contribution soft money support in kind advertising help party get-out-the-vote things and that kind of stuff. There may be a billion dollars or so spent on elections. The system is Awash with money and most importantly the growth area is political action committees. These are committees set up by trade unions by businesses by interest groups by trade associations to help support their lobbying operation. They raise money from their members and then they distributed to various candidates and they can't do that in the presidential general election. So they have concentrated much more in recent years on Congressional elections a couple of numbers will tell you what's happened in 1974. Money from political action committees. We call them packs in (00:37:16) Washington amounted to 8.5 million dollars in (00:37:19) 1988 a hundred and thirty (00:37:21) two million dollars. So the number is going way up. The number of (00:37:24) packs was about 608 in 1974. The number of packs right now is over 4,000 so it is become the vehicle well, so what a lot of people say that's better than the old system and there are ways in which it's better than the old system. But what happens is that when people went candidates raise money from Individual voters you the individual voter most of you have many interests may be interested in foreign policy may be interested in the environment. You may be interested in sewage treatment plants for your area may be interested in certain things in the budget and so forth. So when you're talking with your Congressman, you're making a contribution you write a letter to him what not. You may do it on several different issues. You have multiple interests, but a political action committee operates almost like a laser beam. If it's the tobacco Lobby it wants tobacco price supports if it's the milk Lobby it wants that you have yours in your area here. And what that tends to do is it tends to fragment the Congress more and contributions get focused by the political action committees on the congressional committees that deal with their our area of operation. And again just like television tearing away at the cohesive fabric of the political parties. You have the political action committees pulling away at the unifying effect of political parties and of the leadership in the Congress and and focusing much more on special interest. And again, none of this is mentioned in the Constitution, but all of it affects the way that things operate and let me get to my basic points. That is that we now have because of these almost extraneous factors not mentioned in the Constitution. We now have a number of structural maladies in the way that our government operates. As I said before parties were not well thought of by the founders James Madison said, they were Sinister combinations and they were a dangerous Vice and the system was set up almost so that you theoretically couldn't have a single party because that might create tyranny of the majority. But in fact ladies and gentlemen in the first hundred and sixty years of the American constitutional history, we had single-party government 80% of the time that is the president house and the Senate all came from the same party 80% of the time and that produced much of the time cohesion so that the government could move in One Direction or another if we didn't like the way it was moving we could vote it out, but what's happened in the last 34 years since Dwight Eisenhower is that two-thirds of the time are nearly two-thirds of the time we have Partisan divided government. We have a president from one party and at least one house of Congress from the opposite party, which means you have built-in Deadlocks. You have Deadlocks based on differences of philosophy and I would maintain that we have an extremely serious problem at the moment in the House of Representatives. I happen to be a Democrat but I think that it is very dangerous for our representative system of government that the Democrats have controlled the House of Representatives continuously for 34 years, and there is no way ladies and gentlemen that the Republicans are going to take it away from him. And the reason for that is the way the incumbency is set up. There are so great advantages to being a member of Congress and being able to come and television time and being able to send out newsletters and mail and being able to do constituent work for your your constituents casework. They call it in being able to raise money and being able to get Pac money because why it why do packs give so much to incumbents and in the last The ratio is six-pack dollars to every incumbent for $1 to every Challenger and why is that because the packs want to have influence after the election is over and the odds are the incumbents going to win. So you bet on the incumbent that reinforces the chance that the incumbents going to win challenges won't take them on in 1986 In The House 97.7% of the incumbents who sought re-election got re-elected 2.3 percent lost and something like 60% plus of all the elections in the House of Representatives are not close by any manner of means not even by any matter of means they (00:41:36) either have no opponents (00:41:38) or they win by 65% of The Ballot or above and and everybody knows that there's not much chance. They'll lose. If you don't have much chance of losing the House of Representatives, then you're not going to be very sensitive to the way political opinion is moving in the country. It means that there gets to be a kind of self confidence maybe even an arrogance of power on the part of people who are not seriously That's one cost. The second thing is if you know and ladies and gentle we know tonight that the House of Representatives in 1989 for the next president is going to be Democratic count on it. There's no way it will happen. Any other way I won't make any other political predictions that flatly but that one I will make that means that we have a Republican president. We better have a Republican president who can deal with Democrats because if he can't he's doomed he's not going to get anywhere now. I don't think that's healthy for our system but it is part of what has become built into our system by the way, its operating. So we have divided partisan government. That's the main problem. I think that we have today here in and yeah. Secondly, we have no majority party in this country the Democrats ever since Franklin Roosevelt on up into the Eisenhower era and Beyond where the majority party but they began to lose that with Eisenhower bit by bit then with Nixon and finally with Reagan. They lost in the South a lot of southern white voters people who are disaffected by the Civil Rights policies and disaffected by the Vietnam. Position of the democratic party and that base of support began to erode and leave the Democratic party and then in the late 70s and the early 80s in the north particularly in the urban areas Catholic ethnic voters began to leave the Democratic party because they lost faith in the ability of the party particularly Jimmy Carter in dealing with the nation's economic problems. And the result was the Democrats from went from being a majority party to being almost even at the time of Reagan's election in 1980 81 and again in 1984 85 with the Republicans and the Republicans thought first with Eisenhower then with Nixon finally with Reagan ha ha were finally going to become the majority party in this country and we will prevail and our conservative philosophy will prevail for a long time to come. Well, it has not happened Republicans moved up and they've moved down the Democrats are now stronger than the Republicans and by that. I mean when you ask people are you Democratic or republican or independent and they answer you back in terms of their behavior? This is what I'm talking about Grassroots opinion. Parties the Democrats are ahead by seven or eight points, but they're no longer a majority. What does that mean? What that means is that our government lacks a popular base for a consistent philosophy and a durable set of policies which can guide our government. And the reason for that is basically the growth of independent voters. They're probably 10% more independent voters in the country today than there were 15 years ago and the growth of ticket splitting ticket splitting is enormously important in American politics today in the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan won with a 59% Landslide virtually every state in the Union except Minnesota and the District of Columbia. And in a hundred and ninety two congressional districts Democrats (00:44:44) running some very openly and (00:44:46) some less openly against Ronald Reagan won re-election to the House of Representatives that meant starting in 1985 this powerful that I was talking about before was inevitable Ronald Reagan had a very hard time moving the government because you because we the people put a divided government in power. So that's a very important thing. We have not got a majority party. We did not have what the political scientist and the politicians call a realignment from democratic to Republican majority. We had D alignment. We had the loss of a majority party without anything taking its place and then finally I would submit that the third major problem we have today is that the campaign's don't fit governing. We have a disconnection between the kinds of skill that lead to success particularly in the presidential primary in the presidential race and the kinds of skills. Skills that are needed to run the government what's primarily needed in and what works so effectively in the presidential election now because it is election to the masses Run for the masses run (00:45:50) largely over boss tube (00:45:52) the television set it is a system that puts a premium on theatrical skills on the ability to make one liners to frame themes that are memorable to people to have a telegenic presence to have people feel comfortable with you. It's personality politics and it is direct with you the photos. Whereas in the old system used to have to go around and deal with the political party leaders daily in Chicago and people in Boston and people in Michigan and self-worth and you'd had to put it together the nominee had to put together a very different kind of a coalition and Eisenhower had to do that certainly Roosevelt and Truman people like that to do. Yes, they had to play the public but they also had to win the support and confidence of their political peers don't have to do that so much today, but what happens The election those are the people you got to deal with the president has to deal with this political peers in Congress and the skills that are needed at that point. Our people skills persuasion judgment wisdom tenacity patience consistency things that may not be very important in the campaign because it comes and goes so quickly. So we've got a system which throws up leaders and I would say sadly that Jimmy Carter is one of the Prime examples. He was a man and his people around him knew very well how to operate in the primary system in order to win and they did it very effectively, but when they got to Washington, they did not know how to make that government work. They had run against the Democratic party establishment running against Washington's very popular. It's great makes great campaign stuff. But when you get the Washington, those are the people you got to do with you got to persuade them. You've got a wise energy policy. You've got a good budget. You got to sit down with him. You got to deal with him. You got a horse trade. You got to listen, you got to compromise and you To be the kind of person that makes experienced politicians believe in you. Jimmy Carter couldn't do that very, well Ronald Reagan did that extremely well particularly in his early years. So we were lucky with him. He was a politician who dealt very well with the media with a theatrical skills with television and also on a man-to-man basis but over time and now particularly with Iran, he's lost credibility the political pendulum has swung and he's now, you know in much more trouble, but he has run into another problem that we have with presents and that is overreaching particularly after a landslide re-election. Finally. Is there anything that can be done? Do we need to worry about doing something important? Should we have a constitutional convention are their structural reforms that we ought to have our their structural reforms people are talking about to deal with things like television like money like divided government like the dispersal of power in Congress like the lack of the majority party. I think there are things that could be done in terms of presidential overreaching. I'm going to suggest something rather unusual and it is a throwback to Europe and that is maybe we ought to have the president the United States have to go through with the British prime minister or the Canadian Prime Minister has to go through and that is parliamentary Question Time many people ask me as a reporter and I think correctly so who were you to stand up and ask the president whether or not the Iranian policy was right? Well, I'm an American and there's nobody else does ignited to do it and I've got a White House Press pass and I'm going to do it on your behalf, but it would be a lot better if it were the elected representatives of the American people. If once a month at least the president United States had to go up to Congress for a Flowers and answer questions and that would take a constitutional amendment but it seems to me that in terms of presidential responsibility. We've had problems with Iran had problems with Watergate. We've had other problems with Lyndon Johnson. I'm not trying to pick parties here. We've had difficulty with presents maybe the way to make presents more accountable at least one way is to have Parliament your crescent time certainly one way is not to give them one term. A lot of people talk about one six-year term for the present bad idea president becomes a lame duck fairly early on that is everybody all the other politicians know that he can't run again and at some point he can't penalize them or you can't help them and that's a bad idea. And the second thing is he doesn't have to face you again. He doesn't have to face the voters presidents are always little bit more careful in their first term because they got to run again. Why is it that all these problems with presents come either at the very end of the first term as with Nixon or really in the second term as with Johnson was with Reagan another set of problems divided government any thoughts on that. How do we get the government more unified pull the cohesion? Other there are several ideas. One of them is to have more synchronized terms that is instead of having the House of Representative have two year terms so that an off-year elections in the second year in the sixth year of presidency. You have them go out and almost inevitably the presidential party loses some seats in the off year election. So it weakens the present instead of doing that just have elections every four years have the house turned before years have the Senate term be eight years to me eight years with the senator is an awful long time, but for years with a house it seems to me is a very sensible idea you'd have house members spending a lot less time out running for re-election soon as they get elected. They turn around they start running again. If you had it once every four years, they might not do that another idea that's being kicked around is a team ticket. That is when you vote. You vote for president vice president Senator and Congressman of the same party that is a party ticket and you go in you can't split you're taking a split it elsewhere on your ballot, but you can't do that. There are people who are pushing that idea that's a fairly radical solution. Obviously, that would take a constitutional amendment. I think that's going too far. I'd rather see the term synchronized and try that but if that doesn't work, we may have to think at some point about having a team ticket, but I think the most important thing that in terms of this Symposium and in terms of my talk to you and in terms of yourselves, I think one of the things that needs to be done is stop the make-believe and campaigns about the presidency stop believing that the president is all that powerful. We all know that there's a certain amount of malarkey and presidential campaigns, but we very much get caught up in the in that choice. There are other elections going on that are enormously important and if there's any way that you voluntarily can live with the senator and the congressman who was on the same ticket in the same party without there being an enforced mandatory team ticket if you Live with them then then give that President a chance by voting for the same people recognize that you're making a choice stop splitting your ticket at least at that level and give the government a chance to work better because the tendency out here and I don't mean just here in Moorhead, but I mean all over the country is to say on the politicians are messing it up. Well one reason is they are responding to what you were telling them and you're telling you giving them very conflicting messages. You're splitting your ticket. You're not you're not picking one party or the other and you're not making things coherent even on even on the budget specifically you say cut the budget but don't cut the programs. I like on Central America you say we don't want another Cuba down there, but we also don't want another Vietnam. So I think one of the key things in this year of the bicentennial of our anniversary of our constitution is to understand that we as voters have a role in the problems in our own government and to understand that it takes an effective governing Coalition the pulling together of forces of overcoming the separation of Ours and acknowledging that it is a sharing of powers to make it work effectively. It seems to me that's the central lesson that we have to keep in mind if we want the Constitution and our system of government to work more effectively for the next 200 years. Thank you very (00:53:15) much. Mr. Smith, one of the questions from the audience. How important is it to make National policy and public. Is it ever good to formulate public policy and secret as in the case of Colonel North Admiral Poindexter Etc. I think the answer is basically that it is never a good idea to make public policy that is National policy and secret. The reason is certainly not a national (00:53:51) policy which differs from what you're saying publicly which was certainly one of the critical flaws of the Iranian policy, but the but the point is and it is a constitutional point. It is a separation of powers point. No president can sustain a policy without support from the public or support from the Congress over time. (00:54:10) Jimmy Carter could sign an arm's agreement with Brezhnev back in (00:54:13) 1979, but it was unsustainable because he couldn't get it through Congress and the same thing has been true of some of Reagan's budgets the Iran-Contra thing. As another example then the Johnson eventually got in trouble with the Vietnam War. He did have a vote with the Tonkin Gulf resolution, but it was not a vote that was understood at the time to mean what it came to mean later. But covert policy can only be sustained for a brief period of time and if it is within the framework of the publicly stated policy of the administration, it won't be sustained over time if it's not Mr. Smith, you have suggested that TV has focused on the president creating an illusion that the presidency maybe the central factor in government it. Can you suggest ways in which TV might focus on Congressional functions and on functions of the Supreme Court in a way that would balance our sense of the national government better. Well, I don't think the television can do anything about the Supreme Court until the Supreme Court is willing to let the cameras in the court. So I (00:55:28) don't think that you can blame the (00:55:29) Network's for that. The first thing is the court has got to be willing to say, you know, we're willing to have the cameras in and and let people see the argumentation of very important issues in front of the court. But I think that that the Network's can make a judgment of will to cover Congress more what's interesting is a Of Scholars, Michael Robinson and Norm Ornstein did a study back in 1985 of the coverage of Congress and they wrote an article for TV Guide and they compared the amount of coverage Congress got on the three Network evening news shows in 1985 compared to 1975 and they pick the month of September which is the most heavily active month of Congress because it's near the end of the fiscal year and they're a lot of actions on the budget and a lot of other things and they found out that that television coverage of Congress declined by almost 50% between 1975 and 1985. It was a Pure News judgment on the part of the television networks. It seems to me they can reverse that but one of the reasons they don't reverse that is they're afraid you'll flip the switch. They're following their picking the most visual most attractive and often the most entertaining news and the News That's easiest to follow Congress is hard. Follow, it's not easy to follow what I've been talking about tonight and I've been dealing in great simplicity's and not the intricacies of Congress. So in part it is a public that says we want it that way we're willing to sit down and listen. I think the macneil-lehrer report is an effort having to be on public television. I'm not just trying to push that but I think the notion that you take serious issue seriously and you devote more time to them and you risk a smaller audience is something that television has got to be willing to do it right now Dan rather's worried that Tom brokaw's got a higher rating and you know, and whether or not the you know, the US Open is going to take six minutes of his time instead of saying, you know, how much do we put in on the substance? I you know it I think we got to demand it.