Our Splendid Cuss: The likable Phil Gramm

National Review, Oct 1, 2001 by Jay Nordlinger

As if it weren't bad enough that Jesse Helms is leaving, Phil Gramm, too, is "moving on," to use a recently popular phrase. Thus are we right types losing our two favorite, and most stalwart, senators. Each is judged irreplaceable, indispensable, and each may be, though Gramm bristles at the suggestion: "As my grandmama used to say, 'The graveyard is full of indispensable men.'" Plus, the Founders set it up so that "it shouldn't matter who's here [in Washington]." Moreover, "Senators often say to me, 'You said, or did, exactly what I wanted to do.' But if I hadn't been here, maybe they would have."

Don't know about that one. For about 20 years, Phil Gramm has been the conservatives'-and the libertarians'-great champion and explicator. He has been almost a one-man band in defending and explaining what is sometimes called quaintly "economic freedom." He was about the only one in Washington who really gave a rip about property rights. In many ways, he has been the office-holding equivalent of the columnist and economist Thomas Sowell, a splendid cuss.

It is almost universally acknowledged that Gramm is brainy, principled, and fearless. It is also almost universally alleged that he is not a likable, certainly not a lovable, man, and that this hampered his effort to go further: to be president.

Some of us have long held that if America doesn't like Phil Gramm, America is nuts. What's not to like about . . . well, take a typical Gramm moment, one that has entered the lore about him, lovingly passed around by Gramm fans, or, as we have sometimes been tagged, "Gramm crackers." He's debating education policy with some lady who represents the education establishment. The exchange goes something like this:

Gramm: My education proposals are premised on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.

Lady Who Represents the Education Establishment: No, you don't.

Gramm: Oh? What are their names?

True, Gramm tends toward the mordant, and he doesn't mesh with an Oprah-ized, schmoozified culture of "niceness" and drippy sentiment. Many people have pointed out-and they're not entirely wrong-that Gramm is "no diplomat" and even "no politician." Yet he is certainly some kind of politician: He got elected, and reelected, and reelected, by whopping margins in Texas, a state of 20 million people. Gramm was an academic, an intellectual, and an individualist, yes, but he was also a canny pol, as evidenced not only by his victory margins but by his record in the House and Senate.

Announcing his retirement, he declared that he had achieved everything he had come to Washington to do: He (with the help of one or two others, maybe) had balanced the budget, cut taxes, moved power out of Washington, opened up trade, deregulated, rebuilt the military, and "rolled back the borders of Communism." He says that he never would have stood down if Al Gore had made it to the White House-he would've needed to stay as a blocker. But with Bush in, he felt the moment was right. The Republicans' loss of their Senate majority, he insists, had nothing to do with it. When Gramm talks, you tend to believe him, no matter what you think of him. It's part of his singularity.

The Gramm story is oft told, but worth recapping. He was born at Fort Benning, Ga., to a humble military couple. Early on, his father became an invalid, leaving the family in stricken circumstances. Young Gramm was held back from several grades, and was eventually sent to military school, to straighten up and fly right. He did. He went to the University of Georgia, earning a B.A. and then staying there for a Ph.D. in economics. He never wanted to be a politician-at least at first. The great dream of his life was to become a tenured professor (an understandable goal for the ambitious product of a family that had never enjoyed much education). He got what he wanted, at Texas A&M, at the age of 30.

Before long, he was nosing about in politics. Intent on propagating his views, he wrote, as he tells it, to "150-odd civic clubs in East Texas, saying, 'If you want someone to come speak on any one of these dozen subjects, I'm your man.'" A single invitation came in: from a Lions Club in the tiny town of Wortham, "just north of Mexia." There he met the printer Dicky Flatt, who would become his emblem of the hard- working common man, whose back guvmint needed to get and stay off. Gramm's message that day was his classic: "Freedom is a great thing, America has too little of it, the government's too big, too powerful, and too expensive." ("It still is," adds the senator.)

In time-1978-he got himself elected to Congress, as a Democrat (a natural thing for a Georgian and Texan to be). When Reagan took office, Gramm realized that here was a man "who wanted to do what I had always dreamed of doing." He worked with that president to scale back the government, leading the Democratic leadership to boot him from the Budget Committee. Gramm could have switched parties on the spot-but he didn't think it was right, opting to resign and present himself as a Republican in a special election. To the people, he uttered, over and over, his semi-famous line, "I had to choose between Tip O'Neill and y'all, and I decided to stand with y'all."