Endowing democracy:
Hackett, Clifford P
Washington report ENDOWING DEMOCRACY AN IDEA THAT CAME & WENT Embarrassment HANGS heavily these days over the National Endowment for Democracy, one of the president's few new foreign policy...
...Admittedly, speed was easy when all involved (including Fascell) were both creators of the plan and to be involved in administering its $31 million the first year...
...Was a good idea rediscovered by Reagan or would American political party foundations always tend to get in trouble overseas...
...but the Washington politicians saw an opportunity, an opportunity for federally-funded travel, patronage, and rewards for contributors...
...Did the president himself understand what the London speech would produce...
...Enthusiasm in the State Department for those London ideas has also cooled...
...Labor and business were invited to add their staff representatives, which slowed the work but added political protection...
...No outside witnesses appeared nor did the administration testify, which seemed strange in a hearing on a new federal program...
...Reagan cited the APF in London as the author of the needed study on what U.S...
...Ominously, his support was broadly bipartisan...
...This is not a quality you Americans always display in world affairs...
...The Office of Management and Budget also resisted a new program to expand the deficit...
...George Agree, a friend of Fraser and involved in liberal fund raising for congressmen, founded the American Political Foundation (APF) in 1979 as a bipartisan version of the party-related German foundations...
...Today the president's plan awaits an uncertain fate in Congress, transformed into quite a different thing from what he proposed...
...The APF staff study responded immediately by assembling on a Sunday, and by the next morning a draft was ready...
...What seemed like a clever way to please a conservative president by clothing his urges with European precedents turned instead into a program to help conventional party politicians do some unspecified things abroad...
...colleagues will stumble into a hasty overseas adventure, and that this fiasco will bring the superficially similar German foundations into disrepute...
...By a marvel of foresight, Clark had written the letter one month before the interim report was drafted...
...He told the Democracy Program to produce its report right away...
...Some said Fascell lost by moving too fast, too soon...
...Furthermore, some Republicans oppose funds for a Democratic foundation...
...His staff thinks House members did not understand the issue...
...According to one congressional staff member, no one in the administration had a clear idea what Reagan's words meant, least of all the president...
...The German party foundations have serious doubts themselves about the American plan...
...The president might not have moved so fast if he had known more about the German political foundations he praised...
...Within the APF study group itself, a major dispute had arisen earlier which was not made public: should each party have its own foundation or should a bipartisan mechanism, like APF itself, do political work overseas...
...His views are shared by a high official in the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the Christian Democrats' foundation, who said, "Great patience is needed in political work overseas...
...The German foundations should be flattered by our attention but they have two fears: that their U.S...
...Washington report ENDOWING DEMOCRACY AN IDEA THAT CAME & WENT Embarrassment HANGS heavily these days over the National Endowment for Democracy, one of the president's few new foreign policy ideas...
...Both State and the NSC saw the world differently from the national party committees and from the Congressional committees involved...
...When the party leaders decided instead on separate party foundations to keep control of the money, Agree was on his way out...
...To enforce the order Fascell scheduled a hearing early in April and legislative markup one week later...
...At that point Charles Manatt, Democratic National Chairman, and Frank Fahrenkopf, his GOP counterpart, worked with a key House subcommittee chairman to create a strictly party device, not one committead to either ideological warfare or to doing good in the developing countries...
...Endowment supporters still count the president with them...
...Heading both the APF board and the Democracy Program study was William E. Brock, former Republican National Committee Chairman and now the President's Special Trade Representative...
...Don Fraser, now mayor of Minneapolis, is also dismayed at the outcome of the AFP study...
...Even if the authorization passes, appropriations will be hard to find with a $200 billion deficit...
...The Germans emphasize political training at home, using visiting foreign students, for example, to show both young Germans and their third-world counterparts how domestic and foreign policies are tied together...
...The other was the "Democracy Program," the study Reagan mentioned on how private groups like the political parties could aid democracy abroad...
...Brown then successfully eliminated specific funds for the two party foundations by a two-to-one margin...
...These are some of the questions a careful study might have examined...
...It was not a bad idea, the conservative legislator said, but the government should not do it...
...They hope to regain party funding in the Senate, but a group of conservative senators has blocked the bill...
...It will not work, Stobbe believes...
...Others saw him lulled by the business-labor-party support within the Democracy Program study...
...his aides may have tried to channel his instincts with some European models...
...The consequences of the president's speech were as mixed as its antecedents...
...Along with Agree, who was fired in June as AFP president by Democratic Chairman Man-att, Fraser still hopes for a bipartisan foundation which starts slowly with careful overseas programs...
...An ambitious State Department office passed some ideas to a friend on the National Security Council staff...
...The president may have thought of a new weapon against Communism...
...George Agree,who founded and maintained APF with bipartisan support, urged a continued bipartisan approach...
...The National Endowment for Democracy was born...
...Since Fascell's subcommittee was working on the USIA budget for 1984, financing the plan was feasible...
...Congressman Dante Fascell (D-Florida) became the leader...
...Headed by conservative Georgetown historian Allen Wein-stein, the staff of the study was basically named by the two national party committees...
...Between Project Democracy and the Democracy Program, it was not surprising that skeptics and even participants got the names mixed...
...Both men apparently overestimated the ability of party officials to rise above immediate concerns over funds and patronage...
...CLIFFORD P. HACKETT (Clifford P. Hackett has served in the Foreign Service and on the staffs of congressional committees involved with foreign affairs...
...Unless the Congress acted early in 1983, however, to finance aid for the parties, the idea of party funding close to the 1984 election year could hinder the president and frighten the Congress...
...they know the GOP can find private funds for its foundation more easily than can the Democrats...
...A close look at who opposed Fascell, however, shows that liberals, moderates, and conservatives all seemed to know exactly the high risk an unsupported and hurried vote for party funds imposed...
...It was probably the fastest subcommittee action in history as well...
...But the greatest threat which nearly derailed the bill in its first floor vote,was the idea of a conservative president, committed to reducing government's role, asking federal funds for the political parties for the first time...
...Fascell was both a Democracy Program board member and chairman-designate of the fifteen "incorporators" of the National Endowment for Democracy, which would distribute funds to the two party foundations...
...NSC director William Clark got excited about combating Communist penetration of the third world...
...He lost only by nineteen votes...
...Instead, the president and some others in Washington lost their way...
...Dietrich Stobbe, former Berlin mayor and recently head of the Ebert Stiftung's New York office, thinks the president wants to create instant "soldiers of democracy...
...The power-wise politicians moved with a single-mindedness which the six-month long APF study did not possess...
...A new study, he said, would show how America could do the same...
...By late March, the conclusions were still months away...
...Are the German experiences with their foundations relevant to other democracies...
...In a highly publicized speech a year ago in London, Reagan praised the Europeans for aiding foreign political parties...
...Last fall the president found $300,000 in the foreign aid budget for Agree's American Political Foundation to conduct the study...
...Former Congressman Don Fraser, a liberal Democrat, tried for years to get his colleagues interested in the German foundations' work in training young voters and party leaders...
...parties could do abroad...
...The president may not have the means, or the will, to fight for what he preached so eloquently in London...
...The crooked course of the president's plan is a vivid example of what happens to new ideas in Washington if you do not keep close watch over them...
...One of Fraser's colleagues commented: "I only hope they haven't ruined a good idea forever...
...One manifestation was "Project Democracy," a multi-agency effort, funded in the U.S...
...The State Department officers involved soon found differences with the National Security Council interpretation...
...Overseas, the four German foundations stress low-key and long-term help for indigenous projects...
...The president's speech before the British Parliament had curious antecedents...
...Do our political parties, lacking both firm principles and continuity of leadership, have anything to teach, or learn, abroad...
...Information Agency budget, to expand exchanges, conferences, and other training programs to stress democratic development in the third world...
...The legislative outcome of the London speech is quite different, in turn, from what either the State Department or the NSC staff foresaw as they assembled the president's words in June 1982...
...Modest successes could encourage the two major parties to run some separate activities eventually...
...Later, an angry Fascell heard of doubts in the State and Justice Departments...
...And the parties controlled the study that would establish the rules...
...This was the "interim" report, which was as promptly presented to Fascell by Brock, Manatt, Fahrenkopf, Weinstein, and labor's Lane Kirkland in a public hearing...
...In early June, Rep...
...As the chairman said, it was an historic occasion with both parties, labor, and business supporting the same proposal for the first time...
...Hank Brown (R.-Colorado) led the floor fight against Fascell's endowment...
...But Brock produced a letter from NSC director Clark who wrote that the president gives his "strong and constant" support to a bipartisan Endowment for Democracy...
...The result was three paragraphs in the president's London text, enough to set the government process working...
Vol. 110 • October 1983 • No. 17
