Who Stole the American Dream? (43 page)

As a Republican from Kansas dealing with a Democrat-controlled Congress,
Eisenhower regularly shared drinks of bourbon and branch water at the White House with Lyndon Johnson, then the Senate Democratic majority leader, and with House Speaker Sam Rayburn. Ike’s openness was reciprocated. Once, when the archconservative
Senate Republican leader William Knowland of California left his front-row seat and refused to floor-manage the passage of an Eisenhower foreign policy bill, Johnson took over and passed Eisenhower’s legislation—cross-party collaboration that is unimaginable today.

Although Nixon won the presidency in 1968 by running as a conservative and forging a new Republican electoral base in the South, he governed more from the political center. His historic anticommunism, pursuit of the Vietnam War, and strong law-and-order stance at home won favor with conservatives. But his governmental activism won favor with liberals. He took strong government action in the economy, imposing wage and price controls, taking America off the gold standard, and shocking balance-the-budget conservatives with the surprising admission “
I am now a Keynesian,” meaning that he supported deficit spending to stimulate the economy. On Capitol Hill, Nixon’s environmental, consumer, and regulatory legislation won strong bipartisan support, as did his modest expansion of Social Security, his tax increases on the wealthy, and his novel idea of guaranteed income for the poor.

When Johnson was in the worst jams of his political life, he often turned to Republicans for help—and got it. Right after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Johnson made one of his first phone calls, as the newly sworn-in president, to Eisenhower, asking for help and advice. Ike promised to meet him in Washington the next day and delivered an eight-page memo that Johnson used as a blueprint in his early months.

On the most contentious legislation, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson reached across the aisle to the Senate Republican leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, for help in breaking a determined filibuster by southern Democrats. With that kind of bipartisan cooperation, Johnson and Kennedy compiled
the most productive legislative records during the half century from the end of World War II to the year 2000, according to an in-depth study of the work of each session of Congress.

Perhaps the most compelling demonstration of bipartisanship came during the battles over the civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s. Without major Republican support, President Johnson could not have enacted those historic laws.

The pivotal figure was Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen. From his long years in the Senate, Johnson understood the political risk of his taking on the entrenched southern Democratic barons of the Senate, especially his old mentor Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, on civil rights. Johnson saw Dirksen and the Republicans as the key. He needed to harness them to a bipartisan coalition.

As a business-friendly midwest conservative, Dirksen initially opposed a new law and regulations requiring desegregation of hotels, restaurants, and public accommodations. But patiently, methodically, Johnson worked on Dirksen. Bill Moyers, then LBJ’s press secretary, recalled seeing Johnson grab a
New York Times
article reporting that in 1964 racial segregation was still increasing in the South. He scribbled, “
Shame, Shame, Shame,” on it and sent it to Dirksen. As longtime friends, they would sit together at the White House for a quiet drink in Johnson’s small private room just off the Oval Office, where the president would josh and cajole Dirksen.
He worked on Dirksen’s pride in America, arguing that the time had come to grant Negroes their rights and that Dirksen, as a patriot, should support that goal.

But LBJ also played to Dirksen’s vanity with an arsenal of flattery, according to Harry McPherson, Johnson’s longtime Senate aide and White House speechwriter. Imitating LBJ’s Texas drawl, McPherson acted out the famous Johnson treatment on Dirksen: “
There is no way on earth that I’m going to be able to pass this without you, Everett, and I want to tell you that you’re going to hear yourself referred to in the warmest terms you’ve ever heard. I’ve told Hubert [Senator Humphrey of Minnesota] I don’t want any bad word about
Everett Dirksen ever to issue from his mouth…. You know, Everett, I’ve been to Pekin, Illinois [Dirksen’s hometown]. I’ve seen that statue of Lincoln in the town square, and I want to tell you, Everett, if you help with this [civil rights bill], and make it possible for Nigras to live like decent human beings under the law like the rest of us, one day there’s going to be another statue in that town square, and it’s going to be a statue of you—you and Abraham Lincoln in your hometown.”

McPherson paused, then added with an impish grin: “Now, you know, that’s pretty broad paint, but, Judas Priest, hard to resist.”

Slowly, Dirksen morphed from adversary to ally, but not before mildly recrafting the civil rights bill to insert some limits on the powers of federal enforcement. Yet when the crucial moment came—the vote on a motion of cloture that is the parliamentary procedure for killing a filibuster—Dirksen produced twenty-seven Republican votes, joining forty-four Democrats. That easily quashed the southern filibuster and paved the way for final passage. True to Johnson’s word,
Democrats fell all over themselves praising Dirksen as the savior of the civil rights bill.

To Johnson, Dirksen’s decision was natural and wise. Not only was it morally right, in Johnson’s view, it was smart politics: Dirksen had moved toward the middle, where Eisenhower had been. As Johnson saw it, the genius of American politics was that the two parties “
pull to the center, where the vast majority of the votes traditionally are in this country.”

But even as Johnson uttered those words, the precious political center was under assault. Right-wing Republicans, with a power base in the Sun Belt, had taken control of the party, and in the 1964 presidential election, Johnson would face a challenge from the champion of the Republican Right, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Johnson felt Goldwater was too extreme to win in the general election,
and he thought Goldwater’s loss would fatally wound right-wing extremism. He was right about his beating Goldwater but wrong about its impact. Goldwater’s loss in 1964 did not quiet the right wing, which fought back against the political center over the next four decades.

Johnson was prophetic about something else—the way America’s political map was about to be redrawn. He foresaw a political transformation of monumental proportions taking shape. He understood that the foundations of the two major parties were about to be shaken to their core, with the southern reaction to the new civil rights laws fracturing the old New Deal coalition of the Democratic Party and with militant new forces altering the traditional conservatism of the Republican Party.

Johnson had been euphoric as he signed the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 within hours of its passage in Congress. But that very evening his press secretary, Bill Moyers, found the president in bed, brooding. When Moyers asked what was the trouble, Johnson replied: “
I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

Johnson was right. As a Texan, he knew his region and its politics. He understood that by pushing a Democrat-controlled Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he had triggered what would be a prolonged backlash against the Democratic Party among southern whites. The once “Solid South,” the historic bastion of the Democrats, would go Republican.

The realignment began even faster than Johnson expected. In November 1964, Barry Goldwater carried only six states against Johnson: his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In 1968, Richard Nixon broadened the GOP’s southern beachhead, piling up enough electoral votes in the Old Confederacy to narrowly defeat Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the White House. From 1972 onward, the South and the Sun Belt Southwest became the most reliable voting base of the Republican Party.

Moderates in both parties came under pressure, but especially moderate Republicans. As the South went Republican, states in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic swung more Democratic. Moderate northern Republicans became an endangered political species—either defeated, purged, or gerrymandered out of their seats by party leaders eager to craft safe seats for more militant party loyalists. Or else moderates were defeated in party primaries engineered to favor extremist candidates. Democrats did much the same, crafting House districts to favor reelection of liberals, especially in big cities. And the conservative wing of the Democratic Party shrank as Republicans took away seats in the Sun Belt from conservative Democrats.

In the latest Congress, Republican Senate moderates have dwindled from the twenty-two recruited by Dirksen on civil rights to just three—Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine. But now Snowe has decided to resign, like Evan Bayh, out of frustration with the brutal partisanship on Capitol Hill. The seats of northern Republican moderate senators such as Javits in New York, Case in New Jersey, Scott in Pennsylvania, Aiken in Vermont, and Saltonstall in Massachusetts are now held by Democrats. Where Kentucky once elected Republican moderate John Sherman Cooper, it now has Tea Party libertarian Rand Paul. In the House, the sixty-five moderates who voted for Medicare with Johnson have shrunk to fewer than a dozen.

The swing to the Republican Right has been especially strong in the South. From 1964 to 2010, Republican strength in Congress from the eleven states of the Old Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma shot
up from just 4 Senate seats to 20, and from 14 House seats to 102. Those gains helped power Republicans to control of the Senate in 1980, the House in 1994, and periodically since then. The impact of the Republican surge shows up not only in the numbers, but in the tenor of politics. Sun Belt Republicans have typically been
opposed to the government’s social programs and economic intervention that old-line Republican moderates used to support.

The parties used to overlap, with conservative Democrats joining forces with Republicans on some issues and moderate Republicans voting with Democrats. But over time, the political center has been chewed away from both sides, mainly from the right. “Over the past thirty years,
the parties have deserted the center of the floor in favor of the wings,” concluded the authors of
Polarized America
, an academic study of Congress.

Political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have literally diagrammed the demise of the center. They have constructed inkblot charts that graph the growing gulf between the two political parties by plotting the votes of individual members of Congress on many issues. You can
see the widening gulf between the parties. Over time, the R dots marking Republican vote patterns can be seen migrating away from D dots marking Democratic vote patterns. At one time the two clusters overlapped, but today the inkblot charts show clear white space between the parties. No overlapping vote patterns. The parties eye each other warily, like two armies, across a no-man’s-land.

The few remaining moderates who might be inclined toward bipartisan cooperation are under intense pressure to prove their loyalty to their political tribe, said Tom Mann, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington think tank. In earlier times, Mann recalled, “there wasn’t
this sense of the tribe, this sense that no one can venture out of the tribe. Today, there are still some people in both parties who would like to do [bipartisan] deals, but the camps are too far apart. They don’t play that game. They are two teams and they are at war. You don’t fraternize with the enemy.”

The partisan vitriol during the fight over Obama’s health care reform
in 2009–2010 epitomized the ideological schism that now divorces the parties from each other. “In the forty years that I have been here,
this is the sharpest, most rancorous polarization that I have seen,” said Norman Ornstein, a well-known congressional scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “We have had sharp divisions over Vietnam, around the impeachment of Nixon, real issues when Reagan first came in trying to implement a different agenda. But those differences did not play out strictly along party lines. This is more partisan, more ideological.”

Max Baucus, the Montana Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, pointed to the senators’ private dining room as a graphic example of the partisan divide, the political chill that keeps senators even from breaking bread together. “
Nobody goes there anymore,” said Baucus. “When I was here 10, 15, 30 years ago, that was the place you would go to talk to senators, let your hair down, just kind of compare notes, no spouses allowed, no staff, nobody. It is now empty.”

Polarized parties and the missing middle spell policy stalemates. Gridlock has risen almost exponentially since the early 1990s, according to Professor Sarah Binder of George Washington University. “
Partisan polarization and ideological diversity both contribute to policy stalemate,” she found. When voters split control of Congress and the White House between the two parties, it’s worse: The odds of gridlock escalate.

The Senate has become particularly paralyzed by the explosive use of the filibuster. Even the mere threat of filibuster by one or two senators, as Evan Bayh reported, can stop the action. The stepchild of the filibuster, “the personal hold”—a filibuster threat by a single senator—has become the parliamentary weapon of choice for the Senate minority party. There is no easier way for a minority, or even
a few senators, to kill a bill than to threaten to shut down the Senate with a filibuster—or even the threat of a filibuster.

In the 1950s and 1960s, filibusters were used rarely, and then mostly on social issues such as civil rights legislation, but not on economic issues. Today, filibuster tactics are used frequently on economic issues. “
Republicans began using filibusters on almost every issue, because it would bollix up the majority,” observed Norman Ornstein. “It was like throwing molasses on the tracks.”