Bob and George Go to Washington or The Post-Watergate Scramble
George Bush and Bob Strauss are battling to see whether the Democrats or the Republicans will pick up the nation’s political pieces. Sounds straightforward. Well, it’s not.
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By the spring of the following year, Strauss’ special talents were increasingly needed by the national party. Still burdened with several million dollars in unpaid bills and every day sinking further into debt, with nothing to look forward to but future expenses from upcoming campaigns, the Democratic Party was awash in bad paper. “If it was a corporation,” said one party official, “it would declare bankruptcy.” In addition, National Chairman Fred Harris, an Oklahoma Senator, was becoming more concerned with his own reelection and less interested in the national committee, and the party grew moribund. The search was on for new, revitalizing, leadership. It found Larry O’Brien, the old Kennedy hand, and Bob Strauss, and elected them chairman and treasurer.
From the first, O’Brien and Strauss saw themselves as a team working to streamline the Democratic apparatus. Strauss received unprecedented budgetary authority, and set about reducing the debt. By inducing party fatcats to send in regular subsidy checks while simultaneously cutting payrolls and expenses, O’Brien and Strauss had the party operating in the black within eight months.
In spite of his fundraising success, Strauss was beginning to draw fire from the Democratic left. Ralph Yarborough, shortly after losing his primary match with Lloyd Bentsen, blasted Strauss for his Connally connections and called for his resignation. According to Yarborough, Strauss has been responsible for the defeat of a party registration resolution at the State Convention, thus allowing Republican cross-over voters to swamp Democratic primaries.
Strauss denied the accusations and counter-attacked. He laid into liberal eminence John Kenneth Galbraith for supporting George Bush over Lloyd Bentsen in the Texas general election. Strauss’ attack on Galbraith led to a long-running (and still continuing) feud with the Americans for Democratic Action, a left lobby which Galbraith had once served as chairman.
Strauss next got into a flap with liberals by opposing the adoption of reform rules proposed by the O’Hara Commission (soon to become the McGovern Commission). Still later, he got into another imbroglio back home by supporting efforts to water down reform attempts within the Texas party. As the 1972 elections approached, he got himself into yet another hassle by endorsing Johnson/Connally heir apparent Ben Barnes in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Both Preston Smith, the incumbent governor, and Dolph Briscoe, the eventual winner, fired off quick denunciations of Strauss’ gratuitous intervention.
It was this record that Bob Strauss, in December of 1972, brought to his campaign for national chairman. Almost immediately after George McGovern’s disastrous confrontation with the American electorate, disgruntled party pros and conservative office-holders called for the removal of Chairperson Jean Westwood, a McGovern appointee. In matched-set press releases, on the same day, Connally and Bentsen suggested Strauss.
He quickly gained the support of two groups which felt themselves cut off from influence within the national party: the AFL-CIO, led by George Meaney, and the Democratic Governors Conference. Aside from McGovern and an amorphous collection of disunited liberals led by the ADA, Strauss’ only real opposition came from Senator Edward Kennedy.
Almost nobody denied that Strauss had put in yeoman’s service as party treasurer. What the liberals held against him was essentially his association with Connally. Since Connally, however, had not yet formally bolted the party, the Floresville Connection was not the obstacle it might have been six months later. Strauss’ opponents were without any real issue, and without a real candidate (many of them deserting Westwood and looking for somebody else).
By the time of the National Committee meeting in Washington, Strauss had mounted the only full-blown, wide-open campaign for the post. Even at that, against divided opposition he polled only 41/2 votes more than the necessary 102 vote majority. Joked Strauss, “I wasn’t exactly drafted into this job.”
With that shaky mandate to support him, Strauss was installed as party chairman. He gave all the customary speeches about unifying the party and set about trying to make it solvent. To help him, he found a young man named John Brown, the Kentucky Fried Chicken magnate.
Strauss and Brown unveiled a mechanism never before attempted in the political arena: the telethon. With a kind of Variety Show/amateur hour/ Billy Sunday/razzle-dazzle format, the Democratic Telethons became the biggest success story in fundraising history. Together with Strauss’ negotiations with creditors, the Democratic debt was cut from $10 million to $3 million in the space of a year. Strauss now calls it “manageable.”
He also removed the party from the ostentatious and ill-starred Watergate complex, further cut salaries and allowances (including his own), and systematized office procedures. Delivering on his campaign pledges, he brought in office-holders who’d felt themselves excluded from the earlier party framework, especially Democratic governors. He began a series of workshops and strategy meetings designed to target winnable races and recruit candidates, all of it fitting into his plan to “make the national party a service organization for local Democrats, somewhere they can come when they need help and advice.”
From the 1972 National Convention he’d inherited four specific mandates—commissions on the charter, on delegate selection rules, on the procedures for vice-presidential nominations, and a mid-term “policy conference.” While there is little he can do regarding most of those mandates other than seeing that they happen, the delegate selection commission has become his biggest headache.
Like most conservative Democrats, Strauss would like to roll back many of the procedural reforms inaugurated by the McGovern commission. Liberals, on the other hand, led by the commission’s fiery chairwoman, Baltimore City Councilwoman Barbara Mikulski, are determined to preserve them. Like Jean Westwood before him, Strauss has used his appointive powers to stack the committee to his best advantage, but the net result of the Strauss/Westwood logrolling has been, surprise, a well-balanced commission. While still far apart on their wishes, both Strauss and Mikulski have been amiably trying to reach a compromise that won’t jeopardize the Democrats’ new-found spirit of fraternity.
Strauss, of course, still draws fire from the liberals and still manages enough gaffs to keep himself in at least luke-warm hot water. In a recent TV interview in Dallas, for example, he found himself discussing prospective Democratic presidential aspirants in a slightly more partisan manner than he should have been. An Associated Press wire story greatly exaggerated his unenthusiastic assessment of Senator Kennedy, and there was hell to pay when he got back to Washington. He produced a copy of the TV transcript, which sufficed to smooth over the rough edges, but the incident illustrates Strauss’ still-uneasy relationship with his party’s liberal bloc.
National party chairmen are a strange species of politician, not unlike the Visigoth warlords who collected around ritual campfires a misshapen army of the dumbstruck and greedy, allied only in pursuit of plunder. The Constitution of the United States makes no mention of political parties; they are the product of historical happenstance, and all of their symbols, trappings and infrastructure were the creation of men, not laws.
The chairman presides over a bizarre assortment of personalities: wealthy contributors, influential functionaries, transient governors, congressmen, legislators, occasional presidents, 50 state party chairmen each with variant collections of subalterns; they all function (after a fashion) under charter and bylaws of their own making, through an amorphous chain of command that alters from place to place, day to day. Their chairman, who has no real access to institutional power, is supposed to organize this prestigious rabble to achieve the one thing they are all agreed on: ever greater electoral success under their own banner.
It is to this single-minded but unguided task that George Bush and Bob Strauss have lent themselves. They share the qualities most needed for such work-energy, pragmatism, intelligence, and a kind of transcendent friendliness. Neither one is considered an ideologue by the vast majority of their party fellows, and both have earned broad respect for their labors. If Strauss has offended a few more Democrats in the course of his perambulations than Bush has Republicans, then it’s probably because the Democrats are a much more diverse (and outspoken) breed of politician.
Both of them have logged well over 100,000 miles on the rubber-chicken banquet circuit, both have held innumerable press conferences and delivered countless speeches. In the process, to a large degree, they have both subordinated their own views and ambitions to those of their party.
Says Bob Strauss: “Well, of course, I’ve got my own favorites in things, but it isn’t my job to try to make them happen. Jesus, I’m busy enough just trying to get the party together and win some elections without stepping over myself in the process.”
Says George Bush: “I’ve crossed a kind of Rubicon, I think. For ten years it was inconceivable to me that the nation could survive without me in elective office someplace. Now, at the age of 45, I’ve discovered that the Republic might just get along quite well without my services.”
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