In the midterm elections of 1994, Republicans swept both houses of Congress in a victory that ended 40 years of Democratic control of the House of Representatives. The GOP touted as its charter a “Contract with America,” a 10-point plan that called for, among other things, a balanced budget, welfare reform, a pullback on military support for U.N. peacekeeping, a 50% cut in tax on capital gains, and term limits for representatives and senators.
Newt Gingrich, the GOP leader and co-author of the contract, pronounced the results a revolution. “I think I am a transformational figure,” Gingrich said before the election. “I think I am trying to effect a change so large that the people who would be hurt by the change, the liberal Democratic machine, have a natural reaction – which gets wearying.”
And yet with the exception of a reform of welfare that became law two years later, the revolution failed to achieve the reordering of society that Gingrich envisioned. For that, credit goes to an opposition led by Sen. Ted Kennedy, who countered Republicans and held Bill Clinton, who as president reacted to the GOP sweep with a strategy of accommodation, in check.
I was reminded of all of this recently while reading a review by Jeff Madrick of “Lion of the Senate: When Ted Kennedy Rallied the Democrats in a GOP Congress,” a book by former Kennedy staffers Nick Littlefield and David Nexon. I plan to read it when I return to New York (there’s a copy on the shelf in the local branch of the public library), in part because Kennedy demonstrated how to curb the excesses of a majority. That may make the book a must-read for anyone who wonders how to function in a time of Trump.
So what explained Kennedy’s effectiveness?
He was tireless, according to Madrick (citing Littlefield and Nexon), who notes the intensity of preparation that the senator brought to issues. “He gathered groups of analysts and academics to debate the issues before he presented a new bill or had a meeting with the president, an opposition leader, or his fellow Democrats,” Madrick writes.
The congressional scholar Norm Ornstein, in his own review of Littlefield’s and Nexon’s book, recalls Kennedy this way:
Kennedy was a true workhorse who left the office every day with a huge, thick briefcase filled with bills and staff memos, and returned the next morning with all of them heavily annotated. He was genuinely passionate about social justice and indefatigable in trying to achieve results. He was a liberal ideologue but a supreme pragmatist, always seeking support across party lines and always willing to take a half, quarter or tenth of a loaf if that was necessary. He mastered the rules and norms of the Senate enough to use them to advantage in achieving his goals.
The senator knew how to legislate, which as Madrick explains, required the ability to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. According to Madrick:
Kennedy worked constantly, and if he had to make an intense effort to win over a senatorial colleague he did so. Sometimes he sang a song in a meeting, or he would memorize a thousand-word poem, as he did to win approval for federal funds to renovate the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mostly, he was a purposeful presence on the Senate floor or in the cloakroom, or he was visiting the offices of senators to form voting alliances to support his programs or defeat those of Republicans or right-wing Democrats.
Compared with Clinton, whose tendency was to triangulate, Kennedy clung to his convictions. Madrick cites a speech by Kennedy on Jan. 11, 1995 at the National Press Club, as a call to arms by Kennedy to Democrats intimidated by the Republican landslide.
Though Madrick quotes form the speech, I recommend watching it. Kennedy, addressing a capital that is in the thrall of a GOP takeover, startles you by beginning seemingly in medias res:
I come here as a Democrat. I reject such qualifiers as New Democrat or Old Democrat or neo-Democrat. I am committed to the enduring principles of the Democratic Party, and I am proud of its great tradition of service to the people who are the heart and strength of this nation: working families and the middle class.
Though Republicans presented their proposals as the product of a revolution, the contract, as Madrick notes, “boiled down to major tax cuts for the wealthy, paid for by sharply cutting social programs, including Medicare benefits, and reducing federal government expenditures on education by up to 25 percent, with the announced goal of balancing the budget.”
With Kennedy in opposition, Democrats halted most of the Gingrich revolution, which would end four years later with Republicans losing seats and Gingrich resigning as speaker of the House (and his seat). In 1996, Kennedy helped pass an increase in the minimum wage. A year later, he co-sponsored legislation that expanded health insurance coverage for children.
Ornstein recalls the shift that Kennedy helped bring about. “The political process went from one where Gingrich and his troops were on their way to establishing a parallel presidency, seizing control of the initiative and the agenda immediately after the 104th Congress convened, to one where they were back on their heels after the disastrous government shutdowns and threats over the debt ceiling at the end of 1995 and the beginning of 1996, to a period of bipartisan legislating that lasted into 1997 before collapsing into the morass of impeachment politics,” Ornstein writes.