Clift: What the GOP Can Learn from Reagan Dems

Popularity is the currency of power in Washington, and the boost in the polls for President Obama following his boffo trip abroad will translate into votes on Capitol Hill—not from Republicans, but from Democrats, who will be less inclined to bolt from a president who's got the country, indeed the world, rooting for him. Obama's programs and policies are less popular than he is, and that gap means that he must rely on his personality and leadership skills to mobilize support. With significant majorities in both houses of Congress, Democratic unity is key to Obama's success. Rank and file Democrats love Obama, giving him 88 percent approval in a recent Pew Research Center Poll. Republicans offer up a grudging 27 percent favorable rating, numbers that gibe with another Pew survey that finds voters concluding that partisanship is back, not that it ever went away.

Republicans are not rolling over for Obama the way Democrats did for President Reagan. "I know, I was one of them," says former Texas congressman Charlie Stenholm. A conservative Democrat, he had only been elected to his second term when he received a coveted invitation to the White House to meet with the president. It was early in Reagan's first term, and he was asking Congress to raise the federal debt ceiling to a trillion dollars, chump change by today's standards, but tough politically for a Republican president who had run on balancing the budget. (Reagan would later disarm critics who attacked him for not keeping his promise by breezily declaring the deficit is "big enough to take care of itself.") Stenholm was ushered into the Oval Office where Reagan greeted him along with chief of staff James Baker, a fellow Texan known as a tough negotiator with a velvet smooth style. They made their case that the legislation was important, the government couldn't run without it, and the president needed Democratic votes to make it happen.

Stenholm understood the need for the legislation. It was like the country just had a big steak dinner, and now it was time to pay for it, he recalled telling the president. But he reminded Reagan that Republicans always run against Democrats who support an increase in the debt ceiling, and since Democrats controlled the House, they were the ones casting the difficult vote. As a leader of the "boll weevils," Southern conservative Democrats, Stenholm said he would bring along Democratic votes only if the Republicans put one hundred of their votes on the board first. "That's a tall order," Reagan replied. "Not for you Mister President," Stenholm responded, flattering the Great Communicator. On the day of the vote, all the Republican big dogs, and they included Dick Cheney and Trent Lott, both House members at the time, voted to raise the debt limit, risking their political lives or so they thought. Stenholm and the boll weevils voted present, laying back and enjoying the obvious consternation among the Republican leadership until the requisite hundred GOP votes were cast. Then they switched their votes to support the president.

For Stenholm, supporting Reagan was both practical and philosophical. "If I had refused to take the hand President Reagan extended to us, I wouldn't have gotten reelected," he told NEWSWEEK. "And there were a lot of things he wanted us to do, I agreed with." What's different today? For one thing, Republicans had a taste of power in the 1990s. They want it back and they can't do it on the strength of ideas that are mostly retreads. They're betting on Obama failing, and if he succeeds, the GOP will be even more diminished as a national party than it is today. The Pew poll measuring attitudes about the return of partisanship finds no improvement in the GOP's standing with the voters; it remains at 40 percent, which is where it was in January, while 66 percent are optimistic that Obama's policies will improve economic conditions.

Stenholm says people often ask him if there was one thing he could change in Congress to improve the environment, what would it be? "Pass the Tanner bill," he says. The Fairness and Independence in Redistricting Act, brainchild of Tennessee Democrat John Tanner, would require states to turn over the highly political act of drawing congressional districts to an independent commission, which would create more competitive districts instead of the gerrymandered sinecures many incumbents enjoy today. Stenholm has a personal interest in its passage. He was defeated in 2004 after what amounted to a redistricting coup led by GOP House Whip Tom DeLay. His farm was put in one district, his home in another, and he faced 465,000 new voters who were 70 percent Republican. He lost to an incumbent Republican by 10 points. "They redrew the lines and they got me," he says. His offense? He didn't roll over for Bush. But mostly he was from the wrong party. Republicans were riding high, and they wanted it all, an attitude born in arrogance that continues to shape the party today, to its detriment.