The broad-shouldered man of bulldog mien wrote a memo, he recalled, to then-President-elect Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, “never expecting he’d name her to be the madame to run” the campaign for health-reform legislation.
He wrote that they had better devote almost exclusive attention to health care. “Your adversaries will be the best on Capitol Hill; the Cadillacs of the industry-the best lobbyists, the best trade associations,” he recalls writing.
He also passed on the hope that “you don’t have an international crisis at the time you try to get this passed, because that’s how much of your time this (health reform) will take.”
The concerns of U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) proved to be on the mark, as health-care reform went down the tubes.
That’s no real consolation in this, a fall of professional and personal discontent for a complicated legislative titan who stands indicted, somewhat less feared, and a bit out of step with a more self-obsessed younger generation of colleagues.
“There’s no steel in the stomach of members. People want to be followers, not leaders,” Rostenkowski said last week during a chat in his office.
Rostenkowski, 66, can at times seem like a graying, chagrined curmudgeon. But he remains an acute, if degreeless, political scientist whose specialty is the Congress.
Asked about health care, he pursed his lips, moved his head in a slow backward tilt and, with thinly veiled condescension, noted that many of his colleagues have invoked the anguish of the 37 million uninsured Americans.
To him, it all came a bit cheaply because most of those colleagues, who, like him, have very nice insurance plans, “couldn’t give a tinker’s damn about the uninsured.”
As he would later that evening tell a gathering of the (are you ready?) Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Association in Rosemont, Ill., that health-care problems will only get worse. The group of uninsured will only get bigger and more frustrated, while the moderation in premium increases now playing out will disappear as the threat of legislation vanishes and employers “quickly make up for lost time.”
Clinton, whom he basically likes, erred in not focusing totally on the subject and not realizing the enormous costs of his own plan. Rostenkowski swears that in a private meeting with the president, he characterized Clinton’s refusal to believe the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office’s hefty cost estimates of the president’s proposal as “a lot of (b.s.).”
Still, the Chicagoan places more blame on his colleagues than on Clinton.
Some of the systemic factors at play in the demise of health-care reform that he cited were decaying party discipline and waning presidential influence. Those factors make it easier for the House to evolve into “435 independent contractors” who seem given to reflecting constituents’ views that aren’t much more sophisticated than “We don’t like change.”
It’s here that one really discerns the disdain that the pragmatist congressman feels for “good government” types.
These days, he said, government is symbolized by a congressman’s asking a constituent, “What do you need?” Twenty-five years ago, he said with rueful sentimentality, it was symbolized by a president telling a congressman: “Remember that bridge you thought you had? You don’t have it anymore.” Unless, of course, the congressman voted the president’s way.
He admiringly associates Lyndon Johnson with that dynamic. It brought us Medicare, among other pieces of legislation, Rostenkowski noted.
But all that was easier to pull off because Johnson didn’t need “85 percent of the Democrats. He’d get Republican votes.”
Citing a Democrat now on the House Ways and Means Committee (he wouldn’t give the name), Rostenkowski noted derisively that the fellow won with nearly 75 percent of the vote in his last election (“he’s got no political troubles back home”) but still wouldn’t go along with the Rostenkowski-pushed Clinton health plan.
Further, Rostenkowski got letters from some Republicans saying they would support him. But they reversed course, he said, under pressure from Minority Whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who threatened them with loss of favored committee assignments. It left Rostenkowski to “lock the room and just write the bill among Democrats.”
But isn’t the discipline Gingrich exerted exactly the sort he complains the Democrats are lacking?
No, he said. It’s always easier for a minority to exhibit discipline, especially when the goal is to obstruct.
If any line of questioning gave him pause, it was when he was asked why so many people hate Bill Clinton.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I wonder about that.”
He proceded to praise him for his political guts and his aplomb on the stump (“he’s better than Jack Kennedy”) and to note an array of perceived flaws.
They included Clinton’s being a Southerner and “not part of the Eastern Establishment” (some critics, of course, see Yale-educated Clinton as too tight with that establishment). Then there’s his mistakenly going after influential adversaries such as Rush Limbaugh; his not being feared by a soul on Capitol Hill; his being naive and dogmatic in pushing certain proposals (“He thought that by being president, he’d just lay out his health plan and get it done”); his often appearing more responsive to his enemies than to his friends, and his being an inefficient lobbyist.
“I’ve seen him do things with the Illinois delegation that I thought beneath the dignity of a president of the United States,” said Rostenkowski.
The congressman argued that Clinton wastes time on the phone arm-twisting House members who are politically safe in their districts and thus may have no fear of bucking him, citing Chicago’s Luis Gutierrez and southern Illinois’ Glenn Poshard as prime examples of politicians who don’t need Clinton’s help in getting re-elected.
“You don’t have to be calling those sorts of guys individually,” said the renowned dealmaker with a jowly, professorial lament.
Cokie Watch
Current and prospective clients of Chicago’s Northern Trust Bank are opening their mailboxes to find this:
“You are cordially invited to attend the Northern Trust Forum featuring Cokie and Steve Roberts, award-winning journalists and political analysts. Tuesday, October 18, 1994. 12 Noon. Lunch will be served.”
It’s quite interesting, this affair. Or, one must say, these affairs, since three sets of invitations have been dispatched to three sets of current and prospective clients, depending on where they live in the Chicago area, for three different events.
On Oct. 17 there’s a cocktail party at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe. The next morning there’s a breakfast in Oak Brook. Finally, there’s the luncheon at bank headquarters, 50 S. La Salle St.
Two common demoninators are the bank’s quest to drum up business and the presence of the Robertses.
A source at the bank said the genesis of all this is the friendship of Steve, a reporter at U.S. News & World Report, and a Northern Trust employee. The Robertses should fly the friend to Paris for dinner: Their take for this trek to Chicago is said to be $45,000.
Steve was the family’s Big Media Heat when he worked at The New York Times and his wife suffered a pre-ABC News low profile as a political commentator for National Public Radio. But now she’s the Big Tuna, with an ABC salary in the area of $500,000, and her official asking price at individual events is $35,000. So for Northern Trust, they’re throwing in Steve for a bargain-basement $45,000 rate to cover three, count ’em, three appearances.
Clearly, such appearances are forbidden under new ABC guidelines for outside gigs, which bar taking money from for-profit and trade-association groups. But appearances arranged prior to the network’s revising its ethics rules were grandfathered in, no matter how egregious the conflict-even if it means serving as a marketing arm of a bank.
A final note: A Northern Trust source indicates the Robertses see this trek as potential help in boosting a new syndicated newspaper column they’re turning out. The source indicates they hope to get attention and to get picked up by a Chicago newspaper.
Well, I can’t influence that, but I do have an idea:
I’ll rent them this space for 45 grand.
