He nodded. “We do this right, we win and I become Speaker. This isn’t public knowledge yet, but Michel is leaving after this term. He won’t be back in two years.”
“Damn!” I heard around the room. That made sense, though. I knew that Gingrich would become Speaker in the next Congress, but that he was only Number Two in the pecking order now. If Michel left, he moved up, and he wanted to be Speaker so bad he could sit on it and taste it.
“There’s ten points to the Contract, whatever they end up as. We each take a point and start working on the legislation; we get some help on the other two. It has to be absolutely secret. The Democrats and Bill Clinton get a sniff of this, they’ll figure out a way to push back. This year is totally quiet prep,” I added in.
Gingrich shook his head. “No, we can’t leave it in your offices. We move it out, to one of the think tanks around town. We work on it through them. I’ll talk to a few people, get them over here for an evening or two. It’s a good start, though. Carl, I really like this! John, what do you say?”
John looked around the room and at the easels for a moment. “It’s brilliant. We’re going to have to do a lot of ads on this next year,” he cautioned.
Jim Nussle said, “We get the RNC and some soft money to do that. They can push the program without mentioning us. It’s legal.” A few others nodded and agreed with that.
“By God, this could work!” exclaimed John Doolittle.
I nodded. “This has to be secret, though, really secret. I mean, cross your heart, hope to die, pinkie shake secret. You can’t tell your wives, you can’t tell your girlfriends, you can’t talk in your sleep! The Democrats learn about this, they’ll come up with some bullshit of their own,” I said. There were some grins at this. While some of the group were real straight arrows (Santorum), I knew some weren’t (Gingrich), and the comment about wives and girlfriends would hit home for some of the guys. Hey, they were grownups; they could face the heat if they got caught.
We broke apart after some more discussion. Newt promised to get back to me the following week. We were in business.
Was this how the first Contract With America began? That was on my first go around, and I had no idea when it actually got started. I did remember that by the ’94 elections it had totally galvanized the Party and thrown the Democrats into complete disarray, and the elections were a watershed event. It was Newt’s baby then, and the Gang of Eight were his helpers. I was happy enough to let him lead the charge this time. If we won, I would rack up some serious Brownie points and favors I could call in at a later date.
Plus, a lot of it was stuff that the public thought we needed. Entitlement reform for instance, was desperately needed. In the case of welfare, we had created a perverse incentive to have welfare babies. As originally planned, women on welfare received payments based on the number of children they had. The more children they had, obviously the more assistance they needed. Enter the Law of Unintended Consequences. If by living in some dump and not feeding your kids properly, it costs less to raise a child than the extra payment, then you actually make money with another child! Talk about your bad policy ideas! That was just one example. The entire system needed to be overhauled, to get people off the dole and onto their own feet.
What I wanted to do was to oversee the entire thing. By ‘creating’ the idea, it put me in the driver’s seat, even if I let Newt take the credit. I could soften things, make them more palatable to the Democrats, cut down on the nasty rhetoric. I could push back against the lobbyists who would try to take over everything. It was going to take a lot of work, and I was going to need some help.
The first thing I did was to break my own rule about talking to anybody. I told Marilyn I was staying another night, and had Marty come over to the house Wednesday night. He had spent several years as a lobbyist before coming back from the dark side. I would frequently joke with him about just that thing, telling him that I knew there was good still inside him. He could help me keep things honest!
Marty and I had a quick dinner at a seafood place down on the Potomac before heading over to the house. Once there, I made a couple of drinks and took him into the den, where I gave him pretty much the same spiel as I had given the others. With Marty, however, I was able to focus a little more, and cut out some of the extraneous stuff, and got it done in half the time. At the end I asked, “Well, what do you think?”
“Well, it’s audacious as hell, that’s for sure. What did Gingrich and the others think? He can kill it if he wanted to, but he’s looking for a game changer and this could be it.”
I nodded. “The others all liked it. Newt liked it more when I said we’d put it under his name. If it works, he becomes Speaker of the House.”
“He probably gets hard just dreaming about that.”
I gave a theatrical shudder. “Now that’s an image I don’t want to think about!” Marty snorted in laughter. “What about his idea of shopping it out to one of the think tanks in town? Why should we do that?”
“Deniability, for one thing. If anything leaks, it’s just a proposal from the think tank, not pending legislation from your office. You just sit there and go ‘Huh?’ as necessary,” he commented.
“Huh?”
“Very good, keep practicing that. Just as important, they have a lot more lawyers and statisticians and thinkers on tap than you do. Some of this stuff will be really, really big and involved.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” I told him. “Every conservative lobbyist in the city is going to want to weigh in on this, and some of them are just going to be whack jobs. If I can keep it in house, we can control it.”
Marty simply shook his head. “It’s too big for any one man to control, which means it’s going to be pissed on by others. Forget about control, settle for influence. You can have some major influence in this, but it will never be entirely what you want. The soup tastes better when everyone has a chance to pee in it.”
I grimaced. I understood what my old friend was saying, but I didn’t have to like it. “Who do you think Newt will give this to?”
Marty shrugged. “Probably the Heritage Foundation, but maybe the Cato Institute. They might be a little too libertarian for Newt’s tastes, though. Maybe the American Enterprise Institute. Those three come to mind anyway. My bet, you’ll find out when Gingrich decides, and has you do another dog-and-pony show for them. He’ll bring over a few people here for you to do your stump speech. Kiss some ass and get in with them, keep your fingers in the pie. Don’t get on your high horse and try to order them around. They won’t be impressed. They will be here long after Carl Buckman is voted out of office.”
“True enough!”
“You said you wanted everyone to pick a specific piece of legislation and ride herd on it. It’s your baby. Which one do you want?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. They’re all really critical, but some are going to be so big I doubt I’ll be able to get my hands around them enough. I was thinking to handle the gun bill and the Second Amendment.” It still galled me what Marilyn and I went through ten years ago with Hamilton and trying for a carry permit.
“The NRA is going to want to weigh in on that.”
“Yeah, but the good point to that is they’re really the only big lobbying group that will care. The hard left nut jobs will want to ban the manufacture and sale of all guns in the country, and send storm troopers to go through every house and seize all the guns they find. The NRA wants every child to be issued a government supplied automatic grenade launcher at birth, with unlimited ammo for life. There has got to be a middle ground.”