Dennis Hastert at the Helm

Insight on the News, April 5, 1999 by Jennifer G. Hickey

This former high-school teacher has risen from relative obscurity to one of the most vaunted positions on Capitol Hill. How will the GOP fare on his congressional agenda?

He is not Minnesota governor and former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura, but he is a former wrestler. He is not the fire-fighting Smokey Bear, but this ursine political ranger will have many a fire to put out during the next two years. If you don't recognize him, you are not alone. According to a January NBC News poll, 74 percent of respondents did not even recognize his name. And when he was tapped to be the speaker of the House, many in politically obsessed Washington reached for their Political Almanac. Yet Illinois Republican Dennis Hastert holds both the congressional agenda and the future of a GOP majority in his hands.

So who is Dennis Hastert, and where will he lead the Republicans in the 106th Congress?

After a career teaching and coaching at Yorkville High School, Hastert, 57, served in the Illinois House before being elected to Congress in 1986. Upon arriving in Washington, he aligned himself with the moderate faction of the Republican Party, led by Illinois' Bob Michel, then minority leader, rather than with the conservatives whose views he shared.

In 1991, Michel tapped Hastert to work on the GOP's Health Care Task Force. Several years later, Michel selected Hastert as the GOP point man for health care, this time as the House Republican member to serve as liaison to Hillary Rodham Clinton's Health Care Task Force, which otherwise was heavily stacked to favor socialized medicine. Conservatives were impressed.

After the Republicans took control of the Congress in 1994, Hastert ran Texan Tom DeLay's successful campaign for majority whip and DeLay named him deputy whip. The two then teamed up to count votes and meet daily with any members vacillating on the Republican agenda.

"He's just about everything to me politically," the conservative DeLay said in a 1995 interview. "He is a great sounding board because he is so levelheaded and understands not just the policy but the politics. He can talk to some people I can't even talk to."

One of those is Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri. Hastert has urged the GOP caucus to pull in Democrats on any issue they can, and unlike Gingrich he has opened his door even to the highly partisan Gephardt. Hastert has maintained Gingrich's three-day workweek but may increase it to four and has reformed the House gift ban to match that of the Senate. Concerned that Democrats rhetorically had dominated the education issues, he encouraged GOP introduction of the bipartisan Education Flexibility Partnership Act.

Some conservatives were unnerved when they thought Hastert had backed away from a proposed 10 percent across-the-board tax cut. But the uncompromisingly conservative Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, or ATR, doesn't see it that way. "The challenge for Hastert and everybody else is to try and get through the smog of the establishment press that is trying to suggest that the Republican debate shows a problem. It is a good debate to be having."

"In fact," says John Feehery, Hastert's press secretary, "of the top 10 bills [the speaker controls], five of them are tax-cut bills. He wants the free market to work its will."

Will the presidential ambitions of House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich of Ohio be a problem? Although Feehery assures Insight the speaker's good relationship with Kasich will avoid conflict, some in the speaker's inner circle are concerned. "When you have people in positions in the House who are looking at the White House, it has to be a factor. Presidential politics are going to have an impact on everything," contended Illinois Republican Ray LaHood in a January interview with the National Journal.

And any adversarial impact within the GOP ranks could spell trouble. "The dilemma for the speaker is very simple. He does not have any margin of error. If he loses six votes, he has no room to maneuver. It is just his legislative reality," remarks Marshall Wittmann, director of congressional relations at the Heritage Foundation.

Already the possible deployment of up to 4,000 American troops to Kosovo has caused trouble. A source close to the Armed Services Committee tells Insight that there was a heated discussion between committee staff and Hastert's people over a sense of the House resolution supporting the deployment. "The speaker has not said whether he is going to support or whether he is not going to support it. He is offering it without prejudice and he wants to listen to both sides," Feehery tells Insight just before the floor debate. The speaker's style also is indicated by Hastert's intention to give the chairmen more say on legislative issues and to include Democrats in the discussions. "When you stake out positions, it's very tough to compromise. We've tried to not stake out positions so we can go to the table and talk about things," he declared recently.

With a combined strategy of allowing the committee chairmen more latitude in setting the legislative agenda from the bottom up and opening up a dialogue with Gephardt, many on Capitol Hill see Hastert taking a page from the Michel playbook. And one need not look any further than his corps of key advisers and staffers. In fact, say close observers, Hastert appears to have modeled himself after New York Jets coach Bill Parcells, who likes to keep key players with him as he changes jobs and to use them as the foundation upon which to build his next team.