Armey of the Right

Majority Leader Dick Armey may well be the next Speaker of the House. What's his agenda?

Carolyn Lochhead from the July 1997 issue

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"At every juncture you've got to make a decision," he says, explaining his approach to legislation. "If I'm going to take this course of action, is the policy gain more than offset by the political loss? [In the last session], we were getting political losses and no policy gain. That's like saying, 'I'm ready to give my life to have all debts and no assets.' So we have to be smarter."

Armey points to the two government shutdowns in 1995 as examples of "big" political mistakes that led to no policy gains. "We telegraphed punches that sometimes we didn't even have to throw," he says. And, in the months leading up to the showdown, "we had Republicans out in the world talking about shutting the government down. Then we had the unbelievable circumstance where the president vetoed the bill, shut down the government, and we got credit for it. Why? Because the president never talked about it until the day it passed, and then he only said one thing: 'The Republicans are shutting down the government.'"

"The challenge facing Dick Armey," observes political scientist Pitney, "is that the strategies and tactics for winning a majority are not necessarily the same for exercising power. It's one thing to be confrontational when you're in the minority and another when you have to hold together a very narrow majority."

Armey is well aware of the difference. Indeed, as majority leader, he may now spend as much time forming a consensus within his own party as he does sparring with the opposition. He says he must serve as an "honest broker between the warring factions" within the party, which means scaling back the legislative agenda to areas of common agreement. "Nobody in the room doubts where I am on [any issue]. But they also need to know that I'm going to be there to facilitate them working out a point where they can stand with 218 votes on that point. Now that probably will not get me 100 percent of what I want, but from my personal point of view, it gets the ball someplace down the field," says Armey, alluding to William Bennett's observation that in politics you are either moving the ball on your opponents or they are moving the ball on you. "As long as I'm moving the ball on them," says Armey, "I think there's progress being made."

That said, it's not immediately clear that the House Republicans are gaining much yardage or even that they are headed toward the goal line of less government and more freedom. Certainly, the goals envisioned by Armey these days are a far cry from the heady early days of the Republican "revolution" when a dramatic downsizing of government seemed imminent. Armey insists he has not walked away from smaller-ticket items such as abolishing the National Endowment for the Arts and reducing the estate tax, or bigger-ticket items such as Social Security reform and the flat tax. The reality of leading, however, has changed the time line somewhat. "I still intend to get there," he says, "but I'm smart enough to know that I ain't going to get there overnight."

One lesson that the majority leader has learned is the need to explain an agenda to the public. Voters, he says, have to understand what Congress is doing and why, whether it's ending farm subsidies or introducing vouchers in Medicare. "You've got to do it in a methodical way, which is a hard concept for those of us who waited forever and ever to take over," says one Armey loyalist. So, for example, Armey says the time to have a "responsible public discourse" on Social Security has not yet arrived. Medicare, however, is now a different story, despite the whipping the GOP took on the issue before and during the last election. Because the system's insolvency is imminent, says Armey, serious debate is possible.

On the one hand, such a rationale comes dangerously close to justifying inaction and failure. Consider Armey's analysis of his opposition to last year's minimum-wage increase. "When I jumped up and said I will fight the minimum-wage increase with every fiber in my being, what I did--and frankly completely unnecessarily--was I gave [opponents] a sound bite," he says. "And that sound bite, remember, was not a policy victory, that was a political victory [for my opponents] that resulted in a policy loss. We allowed ourselves to be drawn on the political field of battle when we didn't have to be." Perhaps. But if a Ludwig von Mises-reading, Milton Friedman-quoting free-market majority leader does not publicly speak out against a minimum-wage increase, who will?

On the other hand, however, Armey's new approach could potentially lead to more productive, if less bombastic, legislative sessions. With arts funding, for instance, he predicts that as Congress searches for places to trim spending--a goal largely embraced by the voting public--"People will find their own way to the National Endowment for the Arts," he says, noting that the last Congress halved the NEA's budget. "But if I take them on head first, then I'm just some troglodyte who is opposed to art. And I lose that debate."

Similarly, Armey stresses that, as a majority party, Republicans must use new strategies to counter Democratic attempts to expand the welfare state through such warm and fuzzy proposals as mammogram requirements or expanded health care spending on children. Every time Democrats propose that the government provide some new entitlement such as a three-day hospital stay for new mothers, says Armey, the traditional conservative response has been to denounce the plan as costly and ill-considered. It's an argument, he says, that Democrats will always win, "because they've got love and compassion and heart on their side." What his side must do, says Armey, is recast its positions in terms that reach the heart as well as the head.

He uses Superfund as an example. Rather than harp on what a disaster it is and try to eliminate it, says Armey, Republicans plan to talk about doing a better job of protecting children from toxic waste. "We've poured $34 billion over 16 years into Superfund and got damned few clean sites out of it," he notes. "The traditional Republican way of going about that discussion is to say, 'Boy, we're really going to get those trial lawyers--they've been profiteering off this.' So everybody says, 'Oh, I get it. Republicans are mad at trial lawyers.' Who wants to get excited about that? So we say instead, 'We want to clean up these sites, we want to fix them.' If we talk in those terms, everybody says, 'Yeah, let's go do that.' And as trial lawyers see this train going down the track, they're going to jump up and say, 'No, no, no, don't do that.' They'll show themselves [as] the bad guys in a way that will be recognized."

What Republicans must do, says Armey, is to move beyond simple nay-saying toward presenting positive alternatives to past failures, whether in the environment, public safety, education, or anything else. The public, says Armey, wants a cleaner environment, safer communities, and better schools; to be successful, Republicans must demonstrate a better way to get them.

Public housing is an obvious target for Republicans, he says. Governmental failure is so obvious and so widely conceded--by the public, by Democrats, by big-city mayors, and by tenants themselves--that Republicans can step in with alternatives. Armey is calling for a repeal of the Housing Act of 1937 and a movement toward more local, flexible control and greater accountability on the part of both tenants and management. There needs to be more latitude, he says, in evicting bad tenants and rewarding good ones.

Reducing corporate welfare, expanding medical savings accounts, reforming product liability laws, deregulating utilities, reforming taxes--each offers similar possibilities and each has widespread political and public support, says Armey. Once enacted, such policies also can widen public experience with--and embrace of--more-market-oriented approaches to problems for which Democrats have always said bigger government was the only answer.

Armey's new tactics will be put to the test during the budget battle looming this summer. By politely receiving Clinton's plan and letting the press attack it, the Republicans are already off to a better start than last year, he says. "Rather than have Dick Armey jump up and say the president's budget is as phony as a $3.00 bill, the press says, 'We've got a problem--it's got net tax increases. We've got a problem--his plan for Medicare won't work.'" If the press reveals these things, he says, the GOP is in a better negotiating position to cut overall spending.

"We're still going to end up with a budget that we have prepared," Armey says. "There is nobody that I know of in our majority, House or Senate, who says, Let's go with a wink and a nod again. But in the meantime, why not have the public appreciate the way we're going about it, rather than thinking we're a bunch of mean-spirited naysayers just looking for a chance to criticize the president? Most of our folly is borne out of own sense of insecurity and impatience. We want everybody to know our virtues and to know it right now, today. And we live in fear that they may never know. So we try to force it. The truth will come out."