The real leader of the opposition - Republican Party leader Phil Gramm - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, March, 1994 by David Segal

Judging from statements on the floor of the Senate, Phil Gramm has been in a terrible mood for over a year. The source of his irritation: Bill Clinton's tax increase and vision of a more active government. "I believe that hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose their jobs because of this tax bill," Gramm said last August. "Three-and-one-half years from now my guess is that the President will be one of them." He called Clinton's deficit trust fund proposal "fraudulent," and labeled the tax increase "one of the great electoral betrayals that I have personally witnessed." In a less generous moment, he compared the administration's philosophy of governing to that of Cuba under Castro and North Korea under Kim II Sung.

Measured against Gramm's past fulminations, Clinton has gotten off easy. A veteran practitioner of the sharp-elbowed, shin-kicking politics of the Lone Star State, Gramm is unabashed about his penchant for hardball. "I didn't come to Washington to be loved," he's fond of saying, "and I haven't been disappointed." During the Bork hearings back in 1987, the Texas senator referred to Judiciary Committee members Edward Kennedy and Joe Biden as "the people who cheated in college." U.S. News & World Report reported that last year, when Senators Dave Durenberger and James Jeffords voted in favor of a campaign finance reform bill, Gramm entered the headquarters of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which he heads, looked at the portraits of the 44 Republican senators in the lobby, and ripped the photographs of Durenberger and Jeffords off the wall. "They're not Republicans anymore," he told onlookers.

As a member of the opposition these days, Gramm's snarling style is winning attention. Other Republicans have struggled to make their mark under a president skilled at usurping traditionally conservative positions on social issues and straddling the center on nearly everything else. Not Gramm. Beginning with the budget battle last March, the former economics professor has been a one man pocket of legislative resistance with a two step strategy: draft an alternative, then get nasty. Without even a committee chairmanship to his name, he has parlayed his unique mixture of smarts and venom into a profile that at times rivals Robert Dole's. Gramm's reflexive intransigence and his facility in the policy fray have made him the unofficial leader of the GOP's just-say-nopack. And in that role, he's already having an effect. By consistently outflanking Dole on the right, Gramm has become known in COP circles as the person who makes the Minority Leader think twice about accommodating overtures from the White House. "They keep their eye on one another," says Dan Cuss, of the Project for the Republican Future, a think tank. "Gramm is not one of the guys waiting for Dole to pass out the talking points before he speaks his mind."

Gramm isn't quiet about his presidential aspirations, either. His vast war chest alone---rumored to be nearly $4 million strong---assures he'll be a serious candidate. Detractors say he's not telegenic, and has a weird accent and a style that won't sell outside of Texas. Note, they say, that Gramm's first brush with the national limelight--his droning '92 Republican National Convention keynote---was a disaster. His supporters point out that the last person to bomb a big convention speech was Bill Clinton; Carter's accent was no less regional; and as for looks, remember Nixon? They also point out that judging by his poll numbers, Gramm is the most popular politician in the country's second largest state, a state composed of the very sorts of Southern, sun belt, and suburban voters that the COP will need in order to have a prayer in '96.

He is already campaigning hard. Gramm now leads his likely rivals in visits to New Hampshire, having been there six times since Clinton's election. And heading up the National Republican Senatorial Committee allows him to do favors and supply funds to Republicans around the country, all of whom will provide a ready network come campaign time. "You have to ask, concretely, who can really get 25 percent of the vote in Iowa, who can do well in New Hampshire, who can go South and do respectably," says Republican guru Bill Kristol. "Gramm will be formidable."

And in the meantime, he will be ubiquitous. An acknowledged master of the art of visibility, Gramm runs the most effective public relations office in town and has an unparalleled thirst for press. "The most dangerous place to be standing in Washington," goes the Hill adage, "is between Phil Gramm and a TV camera." More importantly, Gramm long ago learned one of the immutable laws of life on Capitol Hill: The quiet, often tedious work of legislating is rarely enough to land you on "Meet the Press." Ambitious congressmen need a knack for the soundbite and a gift for the partisan snipe. "He's good at playing the game," says a White House official. "The press know they can go to him for the biting quip."

Congressmen need, also, to know how to answer questions with a subtext that says, "I stand with normal people on this one, and I reject the perverse values of inside-the-beltway Washington which caused this problem in the first place." Gramm has that skill in spades and unlike, say, Newt Gingrich, who is quotable but usually comes off like a lightweight with a grudge, the Texas senator shows up with charts and facts to buttress his one-liners with hard evidence. He is mean enough to be entertaining and smart enough to be credible. On any number of issues--health care and crime come to mind--he pulls in more headlines and talk show spots than colleagues who' ve been toiling on the topic for years.