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Mobilizing the Public

Reagan's audience that night was basically favorably inclined toward him but not convinced about his policies. His Job approval rating, which was 68 to 21 percent favorable in early May after his dramatic recovery from the wounding, dropped to 59 to 28 percent in early June, where it remained through the summer. The most likely cause of this decline was Reagan's social security package, which the Republicans' own polling showed to be very unpopular.[72]

Reagan's approval rating, as Table 4 shows, was based more on attitudes toward his leadership than on his budget policies; the latter were as likely to produce opposition as support.[73]

A Time poll a little later in the month, however, showed 32 percent of the public supporting the three-year tax cut, while 36 percent supported a one-year cut, and 22 percent no cut at all.[74] These figures could give the Democrats some hope.

Yet the public did not share the Democrats' intense opposition to Kemp-Roth. In a July poll only 16 percent expected the big tax cut to increase inflation; far more people expected the cut to help them through increased employment.[75] The public's seeming preference for a smaller tax cut had more to do with preferring moderation on principle than with objecting to the cut itself.

When Reagan gave his speech on July 27, he therefore had a chance to define the issue in his favor. He wanted to use the speech to make


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Table 4. Reagan Approval Is Not Based on Policies—But Disapproval Is (in percentages)

Approval (58%)

 
 

Deserves credit for trying (general)

26

 

Approve economic plan and budget cuts

19

 

Leadership qualities; like him

16

 

Needed a change of leadership

11

 

Reducing government size and waste

6

Disapproval (28%)

 
 

Dislike economic plan and budget cuts

44

 

Reducing social security benefits

24

 

Helps business and rich people

22

 

Has not done anything positive

8

 

Outspoken military posture

7

Source: George A. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1981 (Wilmington, Dela.: Scholarly Resources, 1982), pp. 118–19.

Note: Also asked of those who expressed an opinion on approval or disapproval of the way Reagan was handling his job as president (87 percent of the sample): Why do you feel this way?

the case for both his tax and social security cuts. That coupling might well have been a mistake.

Howard Baker and Robert Michel were so worried by that prospect that they sent Reagan a written request that he confine his speech to taxes. "I think it would be a terrible mistake to drag the Social Security issue into the tax and budget fight," added William Armstrong, one of Reagan's strongest supporters on that issue. Republican pollsters advised that the issue had almost caused Republican Michael Oxley to lose a special election in a very Republican congressional district in Ohio.[76] The president backed down, saying in his speech only that he had been unfairly attacked on the social security issue and that his administration certainly wouldn't take away anyone's benefits—correct, though not for lack of desire.

His speech about taxes was a stunning success—"by common consent of ally and adversary," Laurence Barrett reports, "his best television performance up to that time."[77] Reagan called his plan "the first real tax cut for everyone in almost twenty years." In simple and powerful language he attacked the main Democratic objections (that is, his plan's distribution of benefits and riskiness) and suggested what the real reasons for Democratic objections might be:

The majority leadership claims their [bill] gives a greater break to the worker than ours and it does—that is, if you're only planning to live two


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more years. The plain truth is, our choice is not between two plans to reduce taxes, it is between a tax cut or a tax increase. There is built into our present system, including payroll Social Security taxes and the bracket creep I've mentioned, a 22 percent tax increase over the next three years…. If the tax cut goes to you, the American people, in the third year, that money … won't be available for Congress to spend, and that, in my view, is what this whole controversy comes down to. Are you entitled to the fruits of your own labor or does government have some presumptive right to spend and spend and spend?[78]

Reagan asked his audience to phone their congressmen to urge support. The response was overwhelming:

Until the President's Monday night speech on television, House Democrats honestly believed they had a margin of 10 or more votes. But after the speech, Mr. Rostenkowski related … he sat in his office until 11:30 p.m., listening to the phone ringing in response to Mr. Reagan. It was then that Mr. Rostenkowski began to worry. His apprehension deepened Tuesday morning, when most Democrats in the Georgia delegation informed the House leadership that they were going with the President.[79]

What the Speaker called "a telephone blitz like this nation has never seen" set switchboards ablaze on Capitol Hill.[80] Offices were flooded with calls, according to one estimate, favoring Reagan by about six to one. On Gramm-Latta 1, Carroll Hubbard had resisted the blandishments of a state dinner and the president's appeal, but on the tax bill his office received 500 calls, 480 of them siding with the White House. "It is obvious that the president's tax cut has overwhelming support in western Kentucky," said this previously loyal moderate who then voted for Hance-Conable.[81] Beverly Byron had not been convinced by the Camp David barbecue, but 1,000 phone calls won her over to the president's side. Bo Ginn of Georgia received a call from Jimmy Carter urging him to hold fast, but, though Carter was Ginn's 405th caller, he was only the fifth to back the Democrats.[82] Ginn also defected. "The constituents broke our doors down," he explained. "It wasn't very subtle."[83]

Some lobbying was orchestrated by interest groups. The Chamber of Commerce, for instance, organized a telegram blitz of forty-three Democrats whom the White House suggested might be winnable, and twenty-nine of them did defect. Most congressmen, however, concluded that many of their calls were from "real people."[84]

The lobbying after the speech was intense. Dan Glickman (D-Kan.) reported calls from the secretaries of Agriculture, Energy, and the Treasury, and two from the president. Bob Traxler (D-Mich.) reported that at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday he was called by the president and turned him down. He was called again at 1:30 p.m. by a White House aide. Beginning


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twenty minutes later, he received calls from top executives of General Motors and Dow Chemical, a Ford vice president, and then a Chrysler lobbyist. Traxler continued to resist, but Glickman, loyal to his party on spending votes, gave in. So did Dan McCurdy of Oklahoma, who explained that after Reagan called him on July 28 (McCurdy also had been at the barbecue), he finally decided to support the president for the sake of "accessibility. You like to know you have access and I feel I have it more so now. The president said he would remember…. I have three military bases in my district. I just want to know that if we come to a crunch over that, they're going to remember me."[85]

Other Democrats received more tangible considerations. Reagan gave Glenn English a handwritten note promising to veto "with pleasure" any windfall tax on natural gas. That was no concession for Reagan who already opposed such taxes. The note, however, did enable English to look especially good in his district; it sealed his vote. Some members took kind words as promises; Mario Biaggi of New York announced that Reagan had promised to back legislation to reverse the Gramm-Latta 2 repeal of the social security minimum benefit. That was a big change, if true, as the minimum benefits issue was simultaneously part of the controversy over the conference on Gramm-Latta 2.[86] In every way available to a president, Ronald Reagan sought votes for his tax plan, the centerpiece of his program to change the course of American government.

We cannot judge whether members were convinced by the indicators of Reagan's popularity or found it instead a convenient excuse for a vote shaped by other considerations. Georgia Representative Bo Ginn, for example, explained his vote by constituency pressure; yet both Stockman and one key Democratic strategist had a different explanation: peanuts. As Stockman explains, "The Georgia delegation notified Ken Duberstein [the administration's House lobbyist] it was 'for rent.' … I gagged at the prospect. They wanted us to stop our attempts to abolish the peanut subsidy program." Peanuts symbolized, for Stockman, the "corruption of state power." It was "a government-subsidized producer's cartel."[87] Still he agreed; the prize was too big. As his Democratic rival put it, "We had votes we could muscle; they had some; but when you lose eight at once…." Most likely it was peanuts and popularity. One member of the Georgia delegation told us he gave a series of speeches against the tax cut in his district, but people wouldn't hear it.

Emphasizing the attack on programs, on the federal government's social mission, inherent in the tax plan, Democratic leaders pleaded for support. "Let us cut spending, yes. Let us cut taxes, yes," Jim Wright proclaimed, "but let us leave the round table intact at Camelot. Let's not burn it for firewood to warm the wealthy."[88] Reminiscent of the New Deal language of class differences ("malefactors of great wealth"),


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Speaker O'Neill declared that passage of Hance-Conable would, when added to the Prince Charles wedding in London that day, make it "a big day for the aristocracies of the world."[89] Republican leader Robert Michel defined the stakes a little differently, tellingthe House, "Let us face it, the Speaker wants to hold onto as much federal revenue as he can."[90] The Speaker lost, 238 to 195. Forty-eight Democrats voted for Hance-Conable; one Republican opposed it. That same day, after approving eighty amendments in twelve days of debate, the Senate passed the Finance Committee's bill, 89 to 11.


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