Gramm gets going - Phil Gramm

National Review, Oct 23, 1995 by Rich Lowry

Phil Gramm is a lone wolf with a history of beating the odds.

Can he do it again?

Mr. Lowry is NR's national political reporter.

IN 1968 Phil Gramm was in danger of losing his job. He had been hired the year before to teach in the Texas A&M economics department. But now the university had hired away some prestigious professors from elsewhere to build a top-flight department. Gramm, with a PhD from a weak program at the University of Georgia, was suddenly not a good fit. "I felt that he would be gone in a year or two," recounts Thomas Saving, part of the professional infusion. Gramm set about auditing courses from the new professors to make up his knowledge gap, an effort that seemed doomed. "He was a very poor reader at that time," Saving recalls. "Today they would have diagnosed him to be something."

By 1970 Gramm had his tenure. "When he discovers that the climb is going to be a lot harder . . . than before, instead of giving up he just works harder and faster," says Saving, who soon became a friend of Gramm's. The Gramm mini-drama earlier this year certainly fits that model: he descended into near-oblivion inside the Beltway only to rise again after his hard-won coup in August's Iowa straw poll. Thorough organization. Relentless fundraising. Never off message. Phil Gramm is the GOP's straight-up-the-gut running back, the candidate who can point to articles he wrote as a professor twenty years ago that read like one of his speeches today (minus the mama references). Gramm, a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, has made it clear he won't be left easily.

William Philip Gramm was born at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1942. Two years after Phil's birth, his father had a debilitating heart attack and stroke, leaving the burden of supporting the family's three boys to Phil's mother. She worked double shifts as a practical nurse. "It would have been easy for her to be bitter," says Gramm. "But my mother had a wonderful view of the world which was a little simplistic, but a very good approximation of reality. And that is she had the original labor theory of success. Her idea was the harder you work the more successful you are and nothing else is really important."

Phil spent his youth bucking the theory. He famously flunked third, seventh, and ninth grades. What was going on? "My dad as an invalid read to me," says Gramm. "I'm talking about long hours. Everything from Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe to The Once and Future King to parts of Wells's Outline of History, a lot about the Civil War. And so part of it was sort of revolting against my father. Part of it was I wasn't interested in school. . . . I didn't have much supervision since my mother worked all the time, so I'd skip school a lot. But I always knew I was going to have to do it."

His mother wouldn't have it otherwise. She packed her son off to the Georgia Military Academy, where he blossomed into an outstanding student. He struck his friends as a straight arrow with a good sense of humor, if lacking tact. He was no teenage politico. "If anything turned me off about Phil," remembers classmate Tim O'Brien, a reporter for ABC News, "it is that he had a tendency to speak his mind bluntly." The unlikely future congressman finished his undergraduate degree in three years at the University of Georgia and took just another three to polish off his PhD.

WHEN Gramm caught the political bug at A&M, he began speaking to any group that would listen, on the theme "Government Is the Enemy." Fred Meyer, a Gramm supporter, recalls a debate between Gramm, then a Democrat, and his congressman, a Republican, on public housing. "It was the only time I ever saw my congressman get whipped in a debate," Meyer says. "I thought . . . what's [Gramm] doing as a Democrat? He's way more conservative than my Republican." The issue then roiling free-marketeers was energy regulation, and Gramm gained national attention with a 1973 Wall Street Journal op-ed recounting how entrepreneurial innovation had been the solution to the looming whale-oil shortage in the nineteenth century.

When he outgrew the lecture circuit, Gramm settled on the quixotic project of unseating incumbent Senator Lloyd Bentsen in the 1976 Democratic primary. Bentsen was already a national figure. Gramm took a year and half off work and spent every penny he had to win just 28 per cent of the vote. "I learned how the process worked," says Gramm. "I also learned the power of ideas; nobody laughed." The night of the primary, Gramm apologized to Wendy, his wife, for the debacle. She said, no, it had been a wonderful opportunity, and on the spot Gramm decided to run again. Two years later, he was a congressman, determined, he says, not "to throw the contest" with the congressional leadership in Washington like other conservative Democrats.

Gramm quickly made good on his resolve. The Reagan budget in 1981 could pass the House only with support from the forty-some conservative "Boll Weevil" Democrats. Gramm had secured a Budget Committee seat with the help of Majority Leader Jim Wright. And he already had a working relationship with Reagan OMB director and former congressman David Stockman (in the 95th Congress they had both fought Henry Waxman on the health subcommittee of Commerce). So Gramm was in a perfect position to be a spy (in the Democrats' version) or coalition-builder (in the Republicans'). He joined with Republi-can Delbert Latta to craft a budget resolution enshrining Reagan's priorities; it passed the House when enough conservative Democrats bolted their leadership. Gramm, leaving the heavy lifting on tax cuts to others, then helped produce the package of spending cuts.