In Praise of Parties

BOSTON — More than a year before election day, the presidential campaign drones on. Many wholly unqualified contenders crowd the campaign trail, their efforts laughable, except that they are treated as serious candidates. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, much of the people’s business remains stalled. Despite unprecedented prosperity, the House cannot pass routine spending bills. Across the Capitol, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) single-handedly strangled campaign-finance reform, though House and Senate leaders from both parties say they favor action.

Even routine judicial appointments, ones likely to win Senate approval with little controversy, remain hostage to the whims of individual members. This year, the Senate has taken up barely one-fifth of the judicial nominations that President Bill Clinton has sent up; the average time elapsed between the nomination and confirmation of a federal judge has swelled from just 38 days during the late 1970s to 201 in the last Congress. Party and congressional leaders cannot even command their own troops. The smoke-filled rooms of yore have emptied.

It was not so long ago that strong party organizations disciplined Congress and orchestrated presidential campaigns. Legendary leaders like House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson ran Congress like a finely oiled machine. In 1940, Speaker Sam exploited his parliamentary powers and literally rammed a bill to extend the draft through the House, despite considerable opposition within his party. Unlike Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty vote last week, Rayburn did not have to defer to extremists within his party bloc on when and how to hold a vote.

Johnson controlled his chamber even more expertly, speeding up votes when he knew he had a majority on the floor, delaying action when the opposition had the upper hand. In return for his colleagues’ votes on controversial measures, he doled out plum committee assignments, offices, sped their pet bills to the floor, wangled appropriations for their subcommittees or spending projects for their districts and helped senators win reelection with public appearances and party campaign funds.

Nor did Johnson neglect his colleagues across the aisle. Unlike today’s leaders, who barely confer even about such crucial issues as the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Johnson and Rayburn maintained constant, close communication with opposing leaders. They understood that essential legislation required trade-offs with the opposition and were secure enough about their colleagues that they could negotiate in good faith with their adversaries.

In 1955, Johnson steered an increase in the minimum wage through the Senate, the first in six years. Two years later, he shocked pundits and opponents by securing passage of the first civil-rights law since Reconstruction. Without the old tools, Lott and Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) have little influence over their own partisans. No wonder they have achieved no such legislative monuments.

Before the late 1960s, party organizations also controlled the presidential-nominating process, supplying volunteers, money, advertising and connections necessary for mounting a campaign. Experience mattered and untutored upstarts on the national scene, like Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and Republican Warren Harding in 1920, became candidates only when they had the backing of party leaders. In most states, party bosses simply chose the delegates to the national convention and controlled large blocs of votes for the presidential nominations; even in states that held primaries, candidates could get on the ballot only if they received the endorsement of a party caucus or state convention.

As recently as the 1970s, political parties actually selected their presidential nominees at their national conventions. Once the stuff of epic conflicts, elaborate parliamentary maneuvering and shrewd back-room deal-making, the quadrennial gatherings have become nothing but elaborately scripted coronations for previously determined tickets. Since 1976, the conventions have been foregone conclusions.

How did once-invincible party machines decay? What became of those imperious lions of Capitol Hill? What has their decline cost U.S. politics?

Television, of course, contributed to the collapse of party discipline. The tube offered charismatic candidates direct access to voters. In 1960, TV helped Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy build a following among the Democratic rank and file and wrest the nomination from the leadership’s candidate, Johnson. Kennedy’s leapfrog to the White House bewildered Johnson, who never saw “the boy” as a serious rival. “It was the goddamnedest thing,” Johnson remembered later. Kennedy “never said a word of importance in the Senate and he never did a thing.” But somehow “he managed to create the image of himself as . . . a youthful leader who would change the face of the country. Now, I will admit that he had a good sense of humor and that he looked awfully good on the goddamned television screen . . . . but his growing hold on the American people was simply a mystery to me.”

The mass media now regularly gives freewheeling young members of Congress a shortcut to celebrity and power. Consider the example of Newt Gingrich. A generation earlier, an ambitious, young congressman like Gingrich would have toiled in obscurity and followed his party leaders’ marching orders for decades before accruing real power. Had he thumbed his nose at the leadership, as the young Gingrich did on C-Span, he would have ended up a junior member on some trivial committee. Fittingly, Gingrich soon fell victim to the same forces that catapulted him to the speakership. Without party discipline, when he became speaker, he could not control the extremists he had created and nurtured.

Even more than television, the political turmoil and cultural rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s flushed out the smoke-filled rooms. Political parties changed their rules, opening the nominating process to those outside the regular party organizations. Under the old system, the insurgencies of George S. McGovern and Patrick J. Buchanan would have been all but unthinkable; eccentric millionaires like Steve Forbes and Ross Perot could not have spent their way onto the ballot.

Watergate-era reforms further eroded the party leadership’s hold on Capitol Hill and empowered a new generation of reform politicians in both parties, opponents of the machine and the corrupt, closed-room politics it supposedly created. Congress passed new rules restricting party leaders’ powers over perquisites and committee assignments and their ability to control the flow of legislation. The new consolidated budget process made it more difficult to slip spending projects into appropriation bills, depriving leadership of its choicest rewards for loyal soldiers.

Congress quickly became a collection of free agents. Largely autonomous, these representatives prided themselves on their independence and developed their own fund-raising machinery, public-relations operations and carefully crafted political identities. Meanwhile, the rise of the new right undercut the traditional leadership in the GOP just as the ‘60s new left had transformed the Democrats. The House speaker, the Senate leader, even the president now have few tools to rein in their independent, ambitious partisans.

But anemic political parties have cost Americans more than exciting nominating conventions and subservient congressional players. Weak parties have crippled the government and impoverished the electoral process. Renewed party discipline would bring order and achievement to Capitol Hill; rogue members would disrupt the people’s business at their peril. Routine appointments could proceed through the Senate, essential legislation might reach the House floor without being torpedoed by a few intransigent mavericks more interested in their next appearance on the Sunday talk shows than the legislative process.

Strong party organizations would also reinvigorate the democratic process. Well-intentioned reformers believed that the smoke-filled rooms of party leaders squelched open debate and limited political participation. But vigorous parties actually mobilized the electorate, providing opportunities for volunteers, grass-roots organizing and direct door-to-door campaigning. It is no accident that voter turnout reached its peak during the late 19th century, when the parties thoroughly dominated American politics.

That world of torchlight parades and beery political rallies has passed, along with the cigar smoke and awesome power of party kingmakers and congressional chieftains. But as national leaders realized more than a century ago, the constitutional system functioned poorly without organized political parties. Today, as prima donnas hog the limelight on the campaign trail and impede policymaking on Capitol Hill, Americans had best relearn that lesson. *