Carter and Congress: The No Deal Coalition

...in 1964 it broke down over an issue dear to southern Democrats when the Republicans deserted them to support the civil-rights bill...

...But as the number of Democrats in Congress increased, the proportion of southern Democrats declined, since there were so few Republican southern seats to win...

...Seats in Congress are contested one at a time, one in each constituency...

...As Congress has decentralized, ideological symbols have acquired more importance as rallying points for coordination and leadership...

...It would make the nomination of a party convention less valuable, and encourage popular candidates to stay in the race even without a party endorsement, in the hope of securing enough votes on a cross-party basis to land a spot in the runoff...

...Since the consolidations of the Roosevelt-Truman years, all mainstream Democrats are, at least nominally, internationalists,welfare-statists, and proponents of civil rights...

...Here, variations in the nomination process are crucial...

...to others, that all American activity overseas is morally tainted...

...Each new entrant into the presidential race, carrying with him an unknown potential for capturing the loosely-attached votes of a front-runner, would create an invitation for the next presidential hopeful, and the next, until, in a crowded electoral field, differentiation, however marginal, and not consensus-building, would provide the best chance for victory...

...The House, the far more structured and less individualistic chamber, has always exploited the advantage of numbers to divide labor and capture decision-making prerogatives through the expertise of its many specialist members...

...The Democrats are the true weather vane of American politics: Where they point, the rest of the nation, willy-nilly, follows...

...For the last 35 years, Republicans have entertained observers of their presidential nomination politics with fights between these two wings of the party...

...Other liberal Republicans, representing mostly "silk stocking" or affluent suburban or exurban constituencies, from the Berkshires of Massachusetts and Fairfield County in Connecticut to Palo Alto, California, hang on in Congress...

...A skeptical posture vis-a-vis social and economic legislation is generally a luxury that Democratic politicians do not permit themselves, and so the success of intellectuals in persuading them to share these misgivings will likely be mixed...

...Nelson W. Polsby Carter and Congress: The No Deal Coalition Recent "reforms" of the presidential nominating process have divorced Democratic presidential nominees from the party organizations that nominate congressmen...

...There is also the institutional fact of bicameralism, a condition that runs far beyond constitutional formalities...

...In the United States, this process takes place through a series of institutions that strongly encourage coalitions to form...

...Candidates who have traded on or emphasized the gap—Dewey, Taft, Goldwater, Rockefeller—have suffered accordingly...

...Instead of dealing with a handful of kingpins, presidents must now bargain with numerous influential members, each a leader of a committee or subcommittee, each holding a little piece of discretion over policy and therefore power...

...In organizing the Democratic Party in the House, a countervailing alliance formed between southern moderates and northern party regulars, producing virtually all the leadership combinations of the last 40 years (Rayburn, Texas/ McCormack, Mass., 1940-1961...

...1978 Nelson W Polsby are the norm, owing to such consensus-forcing institutions as state party nominating conventions...

...In most of their voting behavior, northern and western Democratic congressmen have indistinguishably supported the New Deal, the labor movement, civil rights, and presidential leadership in foreign affairs...

...The grand sweep of American history has spawned a factional structure in each of the major parties that is extremely complex...

...16 The American Spectator November 1978 Flowever necessary they are for the operation of democratic government, coalitions are somewhat unnatural constructs...

...Although in recent years some groups have voted overwhelmingly for one party (e.g., Jews for the party of Franklin Roosevelt, blacks against the party of Barry Goldwater), one can still find prominent members of most groups high in the counsels of both parties...

...Such a system puts a premium on differentiation rather than coalition-building among politicians...

...So any President who means to pass laws must attend above all to the factions of the congressional Democratic Party...

...In fact, the great struggles for control of our leading national parties can be seen as attempts to write the rules so as to favor either coalition-building or factionalism...

...American coalition-forcing institutions reveal the wisdom and ingenuity of constitution-makers, and reflect a political theory that explicitly attempted to balance the just claims of the political system as a whole with those of its constituent parts...

...some have provided intellectual leadership, tilted at windmills, eschewed temporary alliances with enemies, and some have not...

...After the landslide election of 1958, the liberal House Democrats expected to move their 20-year-old agenda of social reform swiftly through Congress...

...The uniformity of northern and western Democratic congressmen likewise disappears under scrutiny...

...When the incentives are weak for politicians of divergent opinions to work together, they rarely overcome their natural antipathies...

...By the 1970s, the southern conservative voice in the Democratic caucus has diminished sharply...

...In recent Congresses, Democrats have outnumbered Republicans by sizeable majorities, sometimes by as much as two to one...

...Moreover, each such effort must be undertaken in the context of all other, similar efforts...

...Authority over diverse matters is widely allocated, and the building of consensus around any particular course of action requires enormous effort...

...By the norms of the place, party leaders are granted legitimacy to move among the members, to establish schedules and orders of priority, to ask for assistance in orchestrating a program...

...From 1938 to the 1960s, the "Conservative Coalition" was an extraordinarily successful long-term collaboration between Democrats and Republicans...

...Of course, the ability and willingness of congressional Democrats to apply simple ideological tests to their leaders work in a conciliatory direction...

...In the House the first group is frequently and incorrectly identified as big-city Democrats because Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York once provided its prototypical members...

...Fortuitously, one of the few dovish congressional party regulars, Thomas P. O'Neill of Massachusetts, found himself in line for Speaker when Carl Albert retired in 1976, thus holding out the promise of a renewed alliance between the two largest factions of the congressional Democratic Party...

...Ford's successor, John Rhodes of Arizona, like many of his constituents, was born and educated in the middle west, and moved as an adult to Phoenix...

...Chief among these is the system of winner-take-all elections...

...Instead of pressing politicians toward coalitions, factions would be encouraged...

...To some, no more Vietnams means no more land wars in Asia...

...In fact the trend went the other way, and in the 1960s Republicans began to take over southern Democratic seats...

...So long as these factions obey majoritarian rules in their mutual dealings, and so long as no faction by itself is large enough to constitute a stable majority, coalitions must be built...

...Each contestant tries to find his own special constituency, and tries, not to gather up a majority, but simply to get enough votes to end up on the list of winners...

...Only a conscious and concerted effort is likely to overcome this emerging weakness of our institutions to sustain a coalition in the nation's majority party that can govern successfully...

...His nomination campaign strategy depended, not on mobilizing pre-existing factions within the party, but rather on steering a course between them, on making a strong showing with a personally organized following in early caucuses and primaries, thereby capturing the attention of the media, and on portraying himself as an anti-Wallace southerner, thereby enlisting the aid of southern black politicians...

...The Republican Party has always had two wings, one representing Main Street, the other, Wall Street...

...This has also been true in much of southern California, from San Diego through Santa Barbara...

...And that is what coalition-building is all about...

...Now, in many areas of national policy, this very practice is required so as to provide proof that adequate proportions of previously disadvantaged classes of people are represented...

...When these are added to other districts dominated by urban working people (e.g., in Houston or New Orleans) or by northern migrants or underprivileged—especially Spanish-speaking—minorities (e.g., in South Florida or San Antonio), perhaps one-quarter of the southern Democratic districts are represented by liberal Democrats...

...Their chief recourse has been to the courts...

...One, George Wallace' s quasipopulist complaint about big government, welfare chiselers, and "pointy-headed bureaucrats," resonates rather well with the anti-Washington spirit of Jimmy Carter's campaign for the presidency...

...sphere of influence" in Western Europe are thought to be problems that have constrained the imaginations of U.S...

...and New York of late has spawned a whole raft of reform-oriented, machine-wrecking congressmen...

...In the south, those hundred-odd congressional districts that continue to elect Democrats are still mostly dominated by Wallaceite voters who are conservative on federal spending (except for 18 The American Spectator November 1978 farm subsidies and military construction) and hostile to civil rights...

...Traditionally, southerners would trade their votes on reclamation projects to pick up western support on procedural matters concerning civil-rights bills...

...Yet the number of senators and representatives who actually run on the congressional record, who stand or fall on what Congress collectively does, must be exceedingly small...

...These are evidently consequences of reapportionment and of the growth of the Republican Party in the south...

...The barons of the Senate have voted themselves armies of staff aides, whose careers depend on gaining for their principals the clout that requires interest-groups, national constituencies, and executive-branch bureaucrats to take account of them...

...troops anywhere abroad, at least for the time being...

...Which is why Jimmy Carter and Tip O'Neill never had their honeymoon...

...These can be distinguished in three ways: by region, by ideology, and by the nomination process that sent them to Congress...

...The natural elements of our political system, however, are factions...

...internationalism in the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon years—who frequently subscribe to the more severe of these positions—have been active in Democratic politics, and have found allies among established Democratic politicians of national stature...

...interests (which are regarded as having dubious legitimacy in any event) or not...

...As James Madison saw, the varying conditions of men, their differing perceptions of what is in their own interest, of what is good, what is better, what is important, provide the raw material out of which nontyrannical majorities may be created...

...and (3) the willingness of the President, whose route to power differs so much from that of his congressional allies, to devise his goals and shape his rhetoric so as to respond to the political constraints with which congressmen must grapple...

...Traditionalist Democrats with strong labor-union affiliations retain a keen interest in U.S.-Soviet rivalry and defend the welfare state against its critics, while displaying indifference or mild disapproval toward affirmative action...

...Only one, the remarkable (but not excessively liberal) John Anderson of Rockford, Illinois, has gotten very far in the leadership of his party in the House, but he is unlikely ever to move up the ladder from the third position as Chairman of the House Republican Conference...

...For this reason, the factional struggle within the Democratic Party demands our closest attention...

...But there have been exceptions within most of these cities: Abner Mikva of Chicago and Paul Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski of Baltimore are or were big-city congressmen but not big-city congressional types...

...And in order to be more than just "interest groups," factions must exist through the party system, supplying a mass base, an ideological format, an organizational structure—or all three—for the expression of interests through party policy and party effort...

...Otherwise the machinery of government could not be enlisted on behalf of the goals of any faction...

...to others it means no more commitments of U.S...

...Foremost among these are still the representatives of traditionalistic, "rock-ribbed" constituencies dominated by small and middle-sized towns and their rural hinterlands in the Midwest and, to a decreasing extent, along the margins of the east coast megalopolis...

...The Senate is no somnolent upper chamber of aged notables, but rather a working body of elected politicians, eager for publicity, many of them alive with presidential ambitions, and well supplied with personal staffs and committee assignments that focus their appetites and energies...

...as a group they are small and uninfluential...

...A little arithmetic reveals how time has worked against conservative southerners...

...Over the years, the modernist wing has shrunk dangerously, and the party has found itself more and more in the hands of its most traditionalist—and frequently its most conservative—remnant...

...The leadership of Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic landslide of 1964 provided the necessaryingredients—a friendly President and enough votes to win in committee, in caucus, and on the floor—for success...

...But the insurgents and the rest of the Democrats, led by Champ Clark of Missouri, were too numerous on that occasion...

...In Congress coalition politics is still strong, and this explains in part the sharp differences between President Carter and the congressional Democratic majority...

...Thus the poisonous political strife of such places as Texas...

...This is not, however, the way we do things...

...In 1972, on Colmer's retirement, his former administrative assistant, Trent Lott, won the seat as a Republican...

...To some it means better consultation with Congress before undertaking important actions in foreign policy...

...In foreign affairs they are ritualistically anti-Soviet...

...Those "lessons" are manifold...

...Where the nomination is secured by self-starting, candidate-oriented organizations, congressmen incline to be more ideological, more entrepreneurial and experimental in policy, and less ready to compromise...

...Until recently, keeping records of Americans according to their race or religion or national origin was discouraged or outlawed so as to prevent discrimination...

...2) the election or reelection of a sufficient number of Democrats in each group to defeat any resurgence of the "Conservative Coalition...

...The main force working in their favor is a growing perception that the national government is approaching an upper limit on the extent to which it can tax personal income, traditionally the main source of revenues...

...Even so, the piety of members toward their party responsibilities helps to ensure the passage of many bills...

...Meanwhile, in the south, mass migration and the consequent strain toward the nationalization of ideological perspectives has slowly transformed conservative Democratic congressional seats into conservative Republican ones...

...His task was not to assemble a majority, but to come out ahead of the other contestants as frequently as he could...

...The President, evidently much to his surprise, has had to learn to build coalitions in Congress...

...One of the hidden virtues of the electoral college, with its aggregation of votes state by state and the custom of casting all the electoral votes of a state for the winner within the state, is that coalition-building within each state, looking toward the assembly of a majority vote, is encouraged...

...They instead met with frustration and failure...

...Contemporary internationalism was a response to the "lessons" of World War II, and to this day one finds in the rhetoric of some Democrats the expressed desire to prevent another Munich...

...Today the Speaker and the party caucus enforce as a condition of committee leadership stricter norms of party loyalty—ideological tests—than have been institutionally possible since the advent of the seniority system around World War I. The political preconditions of this turn of events were the emergence of a numerically dominant mainstream coalition in the congressional majority party, the Democrats, and the decline of the south in the Democratic congressional caucus...

...So long as the parties were fairly evenly divided in Congress, the south made up nearly half of the Democratic caucus, and, in league with conservative (i.e., most) Republicans, could control legislation...

...To some it means no more Pax Americana...

...It is a sizeable jump from the cultural milieu of Norman Rockwell paintings that these people embody to the Museum of Modern Art —and the sophisticated, internationalist money-handlers and entrepreneurs who adopted the Republican Party because of its permissive—indeed, encouraging—view of economic development...

...In the race for the presidency, the same logic prevails...

...Each time, however, these alliances have had to be renegotiated and ideological affinity has always been constrained by the inexorable discipline of numbers...

...This branch of the party emphasizes so-called "north-south" relations, and urges that American policy dissociate itself from U.S...

...This is surely one lesson to be drawn from the difficulties Jimmy Carter has experienced in confronting a Congress overwhelmingly controlled by his own party...

...Many of the New Left critics of U.S...

...Meanwhile, small communities like New Haven, Connecticut, and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, send pragmatic, main-line Democrats to Congress with great regularity...

...The great anomaly is Jimmy Carter, who is firmly allied with none of these factions...

...This means there is no incentive for coming in second, as would be true in a multi-member electoral arrangement...

...When the House decreased the power of committee chairmen and increased the power of subcommittees and theirchairmen, it did so through the previously moribund party caucuses—especially on the Democratic side—and thus gave to their elected party leaders a set of leadership tools that had lain unused since the day of Joseph Gurney Cannon at the turn of the twentieth century...

...Historically, alliances among these factions have been subject to continuous negotiation...

...Rather, the newly-minted reforms of the nomination process compelled him to build his own organization, state by state, and primary by primary...

...A longer version of this article appears in Emerging Coalitions in American Politics, published by the Institute for Contemporary Studies...

...Congressional candidates are obliged to win elections by majorities, and all those who finish behind the first-place candidate are losers...

...American politics, as we all know, is coalition politics...

...Carter's path to the nomination did not require making peace with the congeries of political organizations that nominated those congressmen and senators...

...This was the structure of the famous "Conservative Coalition" which dominated Congress from 1938 to the 1960s...

...But not all southern Democratic constituencies are obsessed with matters of race...

...Elizabeth Drew recently remarked that Jimmy Carter had said so often that he owed his election to nobody, that nobody on Capitol Hill felt he owed anything to Jimmy Carter...

...Main Street Republicans are moralistic about politics, and disapprove of politicians as a breed...

...The tradition of southern liberalism goes back a long way, especially in the poorer, rural areas that never supported plantations...

...That these resentments find expression mostly through the Democratic Party, rather than a third party, testifies to the coalition-forcing character of our electoral politics...

...Recent reforms of the presidential nominating process will doubtless accentuate these differences by further divorcing Democratic presidential nominees from the party organizations that nominate congressmen...

...In the south these views have always coexisted with predilections for big armies, rural electrification, and farm price supports, hence the temptation to describe southern populism as an embodiment of the general resentments harbored by people on the geographic or social periphery...

...Yet some have led and others have lagged...

...Under a direct election system, incentives would run in the opposite direction...

...In general, where strong party organizations control the nomination, congressmen show a strong "practical" streak, and tend to be followers rather than innovators in policy...

...Perhaps the most startling example of this in recent years is the Mississippi Gulf Coast seat held for 40 years by a Democrat, William Colmer of Pascagoula...

...Liberal Republicans exist in Congress, but they do not flourish there...

...In an era of restricted suffrage, such a situation might barely be tenable...

...But as barriers to equal opportunity have come down, the spirit of amelioration has embraced a new The American Spectator November 1978 17 goal, sometimes described as equality of results...

...Gerald Ford represented one such constituency, Grand Rapids, Michigan, as did his two predecessors in the House Republican leadership, Charles Halleck of rural northern Indiana and Joseph W. Martin, Jr., of North Attleboro, Massachusetts...

...On the issue of welfare there have been two major dissents from the Democratic mainstream...

...By 1976, the rules of the game had made coalition-building among established politicians relatively unimportant, and Carter's strategy was enough to win the nomination...

...Overall, the three main factions of the party divide as follows: "New Left" Democrats concern themselves mainly with the lessons of Vietnam, embrace affirmative action, and ignore the issues of the welfare state...

...At the same time this group de-emphasizes "east-west" relations: Rivalry with the USSR, the capacity of the Soviet Union to inflict unacceptable damage on the U.S., and the security of the U.S...

...A consciousness of limits on the disposable income of government promotes an interest in cost-effectiveness, and so the good report of dispassionate analysts is likely to become one among many resources on which advocates of programs will come to rely...

...They view government as an intrusion upon the real business of life...

...business investment in nations where living standards are low or right-wing elites govern...

...To be embedded in a minority of a minority is painful for politicians of normal ambitions, and consequently some of the most ambitious Republican liberals—John Lindsay of New York, Donald Riegle of Michigan, Bradford Morse of Massachusetts are examples—have left the House of Representatives for greener, or at least other, pastures...

...The making and tending of coalitions thus become central tasks of democratic politics...

...Nevertheless, the two parties do contain, broadly speaking, five factions and one anomaly...

...Conflict within the Democratic Party extends even to civil rights...

...They arise not out of the bedrock interests of people, but rather from their ability to calculate advantage over a protracted period, and to discern their best interests in the complexity of the political world...

...policymakers for too long...

...Such areas produced Sam Rayburn and Wright Patman in Texas, James Trimble and William Fulbright in Arkansas, and Carl Elliott, Albert Rains, and Bob Jones in Alabama...

...in the counsels of the party their cause is, for the most part, lost...

...And here, at least three factions and one significant anomaly emerge...

...Party loyalties create a basis for common action among disparate members...

...Andrew Young, for example, represented an Atlanta district having more white than black voters...

...In some states, gubernatorial races and primary elections are designed in this fashion—with free-for-all primaries—and in these states factional warfare is frequently at fever pitch...

...Factions organize interests, the felt needs of individuals thought capable of satisfaction by government...

...It was Charles Schultze, a liberal Democrat of impeccable credentials, who torpedoed the first Humphrey-Hawkins public-employment bill, on the grounds that it would quite likely be counterproductive...

...But as more groups of citizens organize to make their demands on government, and as government deploys itself to meet these demands and compel compliance throughout the private sector, the legatees of the Republican Party are likely to become increasingly alienated from practical politics, and less able to oppose Democrats effectively...

...But it was not enough to resolve the factional conflicts within his party, or to supply him with a mandate to which a Democratic Congress felt obliged to respond...

...The far-reaching changes of the last decade in the presidential nominating process have on the whole discouraged the building of coalitions...

...The history of coalition-formation in Congress demonstrates that successful congressional coalitions are by no means confined within party lines, and that they are based on calculations of factional interest no less astute than those which inform the alignments that produce presidential nominees...

...But the long-run capacity of the Congress and President to work well together, at least under Democratic auspices, depends chiefly upon: (1) the maintenance of the coalition within Congress between the program-oriented, liberal-on-principle, independently-nominated faction of the party and the moderate, pragmatic, partyorganization-nominated faction...

...In principle, all the congressmen from a state could run in an at-large election, and the top three or eight—whatever number the state was entitled to—would be declared elected...

...Recent reforms have, if anything, accentuated these institutional differences...

...McCormack/ Albert, Okla., 19621970...

...This is partly because the earlier goals of the party's mainstream have largely been reached...

...where they are weak, factional rivalry prevails...

...Where party organizations are strong, coalitions flourish...

...The factions President Carter must contend with in Congress more or less mirror the ideological map of the national party electorate...

...Abolition of the electoral college, as is now frequently proposed, would reduce the need for coalitions even more...

...Any political system embracing a population so diverse as ours is bound to give birth to factions, each pursuing its own interests...

...The fiction is widely subscribed to in Congress that the party program it passes or fails to pass somehow determines each member's own electoral future...

...The second dissent from the welfare-statist Democratic mainstream is elitist in its origins, and is voiced by intellectuals dissatisfied with the results of New Deal-Great Society legislation...

...Conservative Republicans include at least three regional groupings...

...Two of them changed their party affiliations, a very rare event among political activists, and the third took a vow of political silence at the UN secretariat...

...to others, a vast scaling-down of all unilateral foreign activity and increased reliance on such international organizations as the UN, whether these are friendly to U.S...

...Republicans in Congress divide much as they do in the electorate...

...Affirmative action in public policy has not been unanimously favored by Democrats...

...In 1910-1911 a group of big-city Democrats sided with stand-pat Republican Speaker Joseph Cannon in his fight against the insurgent progressives of his own party...

...The first great cleavage in the party is between these Munich-oriented internationalists and those who have learned their lessons from Vietnam...

...All this suggests that coalition-building is a primary task of American political parties...

...Throughout the southwest, as Rhodes illustrates, affluent retirees, ranchers, and the white, Anglo urban and suburban middle classes have sent Republicans to Congress...

...The decentralizing reforms of the House have spread to larger numbers of members the opportunity to make their mark on one or another policy arena...

...Even under rules that reduce the pressure for coalitions, the habits of American politicians die hard, and all but the youngest of them have seen enough turns of the wheel to know how senseless it is to write off potential allies arbitrarily...

...In recent years, Congress has decentralized its authority structure, giving more power to party caucuses, subcommittee chairmen, and rank-and-file committee members...

...It is the variations on these themes that cause the great conflicts within the party...

...But owing to the different institutional constraints on each set of factions, presidential and congressional coalitions, even when dominated by the same party, are bound to differ in composition and thus in their priorities...

...Coalition-forcing rules in t,ongress include the need to build successive majorities, first in subcommittees and committees, and then on the floor of each House, for every law passed...

...In particular, Jewish groups, for whom the memory of Nuremburg laws is still fresh, have broken from the mainstream movement toward "benign" quotas...

...These two groups—the urban, frequently ethnic, products of political machines, and the ideologically-liberal self-starters—do not always see eye to eye...

...Today virtually all economists, including ardent Democrats, embrace the heresy that minimum wages contribute to unemployment...

...The American Spectator November 1978 19...

...Vermont farmers and Ohio hardware-store owners are prototypical Main Street Republicans, thought to embody homely American virtues of self-reliance and frugality and therefore to oppose big government at home and entanglements abroad...

...Albert/O'Neill, 1972-1977...

...The Vietnam war drove a wedge through the mainstream Democratic coalition: Organization congressmen remained loyal to Johnson while reformers and those without strong local party organizations grew disenchanted...

...As a result, the task of a President (or any lobbyist) has become far more complex...

...Meanwhile, in such unlikely places as Connecticut, where ethnic rivalry is the engine of politics, "balanced" tickets and mutual accommodations Nelson Polsby is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley...

...There are now something like 25 Republican representatives who come from formerly Confederate states, three or four times the number of southern Republicans as late as a decade ago, and a sizeable component in the Republican caucus...

...O'Neill/ Wright, Texas, 1977- ). The only exception was the short majority leadership of Hale Boggs, Louisiana, 1970-1972, in combination with Albert...

...Wallaceites, a shrinking proportion of the party, never favored civil rights in any form, and regard affirmative action as merely another manifestation of the welfare state...

...Usually, the moderns have beaten the traditionalists, and their strongest candidates—Willkie, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford—have invariably sought to neutralize conflict by somehow bridging the cultural gap...

...The institution of party eases the considerable friction of this process in Congress as well...

...Out of this experience came an organization of liberal Democrats, the Democratic Study Group, which over the next 15 years helped to shift the Democratic congressional leadership away from a posture of acquiescence to the "Conservative Coalition" and toward a focus on New Deal-Fair Deal-New Frontier-Great Society programs...