The Great Urban Hope
GLASS, ANDREW J.
washington-USA THE GREAT URBAN HOPE BY ANDREW J. GLASS WASHINGTON SOME TWO DOZEN prominent Democrats, in and out of Congress, have been meeting regularly here. These men wield considerable...
...Yet there was a hard edge to the courtship: O'Brien warned Mills that unless the squabble over revenue sharing was patched up, the mayoral defections could undermine what promised to be the Great Get-Nixon Campaign of 1972...
...The White House will happily allow strings to be put on its package, so long as they aren't tied too tightly...
...But he is the kind of politician who can come a long way—that is, one with the rare ability to turn around on an issue and not look foolish...
...We'll get you the money...
...Maryland's Governor Marvin Mandel implored: "Let's see if we can put something together before we bleed all over the carpet to the press...
...Mills reminds people of Lyndon Johnson, at least of the Johnson who served in the Senate, in the way he husbands his power, never moving too far in front of the House, his committee colleagues or his Arkansas constituency...
...Angry and frustrated, White House strategists boasted that they would go around Mills, and tooled up a "spontaneous" letter-writing campaign...
...Mills thereupon girded himself to negotiate some kind of lump-sum handout to the cities...
...Very much unlike Lyndon Johnson, however, he doesn't care a whit what people or the press say about him...
...While they were Democrats, the mayors continued, they were also 100 per cent behind the Administration until something better happened along...
...Tying aid to a community's "tax effort" gives an advantage to wealthier areas, where citizens are usually taxed at a higher rate and (surprise...
...Leaving the luncheon House Speaker Carl Albert had laid out in his private dining room, they reflected before the cameras that there was absolutely nothing on the legislative agenda for them besides the Nixon revenue-sharing plan...
...If, as a result, the cities are pitched some badly needed cash, who's to complain...
...Mills is currently seeking additional leverage over Democratic party matters...
...He merely noted that city property taxes were supporting programs they were hardly designed to support, thus driving people out of the city and dangerously eroding its middle-class tax base...
...The sanctioned Mills-for-President boom and the private-jet tours around the country have not altered his personality...
...But the more sophisticated ones can readily understand why urban mayors are desperate to prevent a large chunk of the assistance from going to state legislatures...
...As much as any other "name" in the party, and perhaps a bit more so...
...Last April, pressure for revenue sharing shifted from an ineptly run White House lobby to the urban mayors, who were drowning beneath waves of unfillable demands...
...I'll see you around, boys...
...James H. J. Tate of Philadelphia complained: "This is the one thing in all this garbage that we are interested in, and they walk out...
...For the Administration's plan offers incentives for something called local "tax effort" ?a cloudy term related to the amount of tax revenue raised on a per capita basis...
...But I simply have no faith any more in the word of the President of the United States...
...After all the death notices, it was somewhat of a jolt to find as summer approached that revenue sharing (though Mills refuses to call it that) was alive and kicking on the big, square, felt-covered table of the Ways and Means Committee...
...What will be far harder to accept is Mills' insistence on annual appropriations, on a test for recipient communities that is based on need, and on dealing the state governments out of the largesse...
...He was referring to Mills' effort to limit Japanese textile imports through personal negotiations, a move that Nixon promptly repudiated...
...Nonetheless, they make an effort to resolve their differences and develop common positions...
...We can agree, can we not, gentlemen, that we all detest Richard Nixon...
...So while the spring tulips sprouted in Washington, the columnists busied themselves with burying revenue sharing...
...Wouldn't it be better, he argues, if the states were to turn over their tax-collection problems to Washington, which would be pleased?at no extra charge—to rake off and remit any surtax the states chose to impose on the basic Federal levies...
...Don't you worry," Mills told five governors and five big-city mayors at a get-together arranged by Larry O'Brien, chairman of the Democratic National Committee...
...I'm beginning to think in terms of some sort of block-grant approach...
...For one thing, Mills believes that to automatically earmark a percentage of Federal personal income taxes for the states, counties and cities is to hack away at Congress as an institution...
...I can tell you one thing right now," Mills told me...
...The Democratic mayors and governors who remained behind, realizing that reporters could easily pry out what had happened, were eager to minimize the damage Mills' cavalier exit caused...
...Well," he said, "what I need is an approach that gives you some flexibility but that gives Congress the assurance that the money is being spent in the right areas...
...Mills is convinced it was no good then and is no good now...
...As John Lindsay can tell you, that's where big cities get rolled...
...Quite predictably, the mayors rebelled...
...The states, he felt, had already been taken care of in a $1.6 billion Federal contribution toward minimum welfare standards...
...Mills wants his counsel to be heeded when the Democrats gather in Miami Beach in 1972...
...Obviously Mills had to come a long way for this to be the case...
...At the very least, he will work to make sure that the party platform does not seem extremist to central Arkansas...
...Whatever we finally come up with, it won't be revenue sharing, although they will try to call it that downtown...
...the revenue-sharing idea was, after all, spawned in Democratic waters before Nixon fished it out...
...Beyond that, Mills, once a loner in national politics, is getting quite a kick out of playing big-league Presidential ball with all those other fellas...
...Coached by O'Brien, Mayor Henry W. Maier of Milwaukee neither praised the Nixon plan nor chided Mills for his previously patronizing attitude...
...A White House assistant whom I told what Mills had said expressed no particular concern...
...Mills, a naturally cautious man who entered Congress in 1939, eight years before Nixon arrived on the scene, does not credit the President with embarking on a bold new course in domestic affairs...
...Indeed, chances are excellent that a compromise measure will clear the House by fall...
...They noted his long-standing philosophical opposition and the fact that his small-town Arkansas constituency, which he has not entirely outgrown, has little to gain from the Nixon plan...
...At one such recent session, Wilbur Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (which initiates almost all Federal health, welfare, trade and tax legislation), declared: "I can't tell you how much grief it is for me to tell you this...
...One way to get leverage, he has found, is to become a semiserious Presidential candidate...
...tend to vote Republican...
...When they all convened again at the Capitol on June 9, a positive tone prevailed...
...But it soon became apparent, even to the most ardent Nixon loyalists, that the Administration bill had no chance of passage if Wilbur Mills persisted in saying no...
...In this climate, Ways and Means and the White House are trying to devise legislation that would pump billions of new Federal dollars directly into state and local treasuries each year...
...In the ensuing weeks, O'Brien wooed chairman Mills...
...While the emergence of Wilbur Mills as a champion of urban subsidies is regarded on the Democratic left as an incredible development, viewed in context it is quite logical...
...These men wield considerable power, yet are too diverse a lot (and too ambitious individually) to be regarded as a Democratic Shadow Cabinet...
...He and the President parted on that thing with Japan," the aide recalled...
...By tying aid to a community's specific needs, the Mills approach would shift the advantage to big urban centers and poor rural counties, the con-situencies that backed Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace last time around...
...To do this he must project the image of a national Democrat—entailing strong support for the cities, but not necessarily for "revenue sharing...
...There is that bit in the Constitution about Congress having a say-so on all appropriations...
...Mills thinks the President and his chief advisers (Treasury Secretary John Connally excepted) hold Congress in contempt, viewing it as a chaotic forum whose occupants, attuned only to public relations, must be alternately coddled and scolded...
...In February, when he consented to schedule hearings on Nixon's $5 billion no-strings-attached package (it was their last private meeting), he told the President his aim was to build a case against the whole program and, if he could, scuttle it...
...From start to finish, he is essentially a back-room operator...
...Right now, I have a committee meeting...
...The big losers, of course, aside from Beverly Hills and Co., are the governors, who are completely frozen out...
...They cited Mills' formidable power on the committee...
...But the mayors blabbed anyway...
...Mills' departure was soon followed by that of House Majority Leader Hale Boggs...
...Why not revenue sharing...
...MILLS ALSO switched gears...
...And they went to hear the chairman himself explain, between puffs on his black cigar holder, that revenue sharing would cause an unjustifiable drain on the Federal budget, whose fiscal integrity he had sworn to protect...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 15
