It has been a punishing apprenticeship for the class of 1992. Voters elected 110 new members to the House last year, the largest group of freshmen in more than 40 years. Many of the newcomers ran as crusading outsiders vowing to reform an institution that seemed to capture under one roof everything that Americans hated about politics–partisan gridlock, pork-barrel spending, a commitment to careerism over principle and allegiance to moneyed special interests.
The freshmen have had their moments as agents of change. A bipartisan coalition of deficit-conscious first termers helped kill off a series of big spending programs this fall, including the Superconducting Super Collider and NASA’s Advanced Solid Rocket Motor. They are a major force behind a new package of cuts–expected to come to the floor early next week–that would trim an additional $100 billion from the deficit over the next five years.
But more often, politics as usual prevailed over reform. Many of those who preached change ended up adopting the traditional hypocrisies of the House. Some have decried runaway spending while hustling for their own questionable projects close to home. Some have denounced Washington’s money culture while raking in PAC contributions. These freshmen may have been outsiders to Washington, but they were not new to politics. Nearly half served in state legislatures before coming to Congress; more than 70 percent held some elective office before 1992. While some were genuine in their pursuit of reform, others cynically borrowed the rhetoric to win office.
After last fall’s election, NEWSWEEK selected three freshmen of the 103d Congress to follow through their first turbulent year in office. Margolies-Mezvinsky, a diminutive former television reporter, campaigned as a fiscally responsible “new” Democrat to win an upset victory in her suburban Philadelphia district. Republican Terry Everett, a millionaire newspaper publisher and realestate developer from southeastern Alabama, garnered comparisons to Ross Perot for his conservative populism. Cynthia McKinney, a fiery liberal Democrat and the first African-American woman to represent Georgia in Congress, promised to bring government closer to the poor and disenfranchised in a newly created minority district. AN three came to Washington talking about change. Before 1993 was over, Washington would change them instead.
BEFORE 1992, TERRY EVERETT WAS AN unknown in Alabama Republican politics. But the bumper-sticker battle cry of his campaign, SEND A MESSAGE, NOT A POLITICIAN, captured the restive mood of Second Congressional District voters. What made Everett’s anti-Washington populism especially unconventional was his refusal to accept PAC contributions. He was well positioned to turn his back on the cash. The son of a railroad section foreman, he’d made a fortune in newspapers and real estate. Everett spent more than $800,000 of his own money on the campaign, a sum that bought extraordinary exposure in a district where the most expensive media markets are Montgomery (population: 190,500) and Dothan (54,500). He upset a widely favored Republican state legislator in the primary, and last November he narrowly beat Democratic state Treasurer George Wallace Jr., son of the former governor and presidential candidate.
Everett’s up-by-the-bootstraps life story, unvarnished personal style and pledge to bring a businessman’s approach to cutting the budget deficit spurred frequent comparisons to Ross Perot. As the 56-year-old Baptist Sunday-school teacher told a group of Alabama newspaper publishers in Washington last March, “I don’t plan to be a willing convert to the way they do business in Washington.”
One morning three months later, just after 8, Everett and his wife, Barbara, greeted each of their guests as they arrived at the Capitol Hill Club. They included representatives of General Dynamics, Hughes Aircraft, Lockheed, Florida Sugar, National Pork Producers and more than two dozen other PACs. The tribal rite of exchanging money for access is played out virtually every morning or evening in places like the club, a dining retreat for Republican lawmakers just across the street from Everett’s office in the Cannon building. For their $500, PAC representatives got scrambled eggs, grits and a few minutes with a new member of the Armed Services and Agriculture committees, panels whose good will can mean millions in profits for defense contractors and agribusiness companies. For two hours of handshakes and small talk, the freshman Republican from Alabama netted nearly $30,000 for his 1994 re-election campaign.
Beneath Everett’s reform fervor lurks the soul of a career politician. He insists he was clear during his campaign about the no-PACs pledge–that it was a one-time offer, good only for 1992. But Everett’s caveat was tantamount to the fine print on the side of a cereal box. It was nowhere to be found in his radio or television advertising–there was only a brief mention in the 15th paragraph of an August wire-story that ran in some of the state’s papers. “He left the impression he wasn’t going to take any PAC money, period,” says Bob Ingram, political columnist for The Montgomery Advertiser. “It looked like he was back-pedaling on his promise. He was saying, ‘PAC money was evil, it was sinful. You take it and you go to hell.’ Suddenly, it’s not so bad.”
Everett says that as an unknown name in Alabama politics, he needed a dramatic gesture to attract attention. His idea was to give voters the chance to elect someone “who in their minds was not bought and paid for.” But in 1994, he says, “they can make their own judgment from my voting record and the money I take from PACs.” As proof of his independence, Everett pointed to his “no” vote on NAFTA despite $19,500 in donations from pro-NAFTA PACs (anti-NAFTA PACs kicked in $4,500). Until Congress passes new limits on PAC contributions–which he supports–Everett intends to play the game by the same rules as his opponents. He also wasn’t keen on continuing to deplete his personal fortune (estimated at $8 million) to stay in office.
Everett did follow through on other parts of his reform message. He cosponsored measures calling for constitutional amendments that would limit terms, balance the budget and establish a presidential line-item veto. He was one of only 19 House members nearly half of them freshmen–to sign Ralph Nader’s “humility pledge” for term limits and reduced congressional pay. On his first day in office last January, he introduced a resolution barring Congress from voting itself salary increases if it passed a deficit budget the preceding year (it went nowhere). Everett also earmarked $40,000–his annual portion of the raise Congress voted itself in 1989–to establish a scholarship fund in his district.
But reform was on Everett’s agenda only when it caused pain in someone else’s district. Everett’s predecessor, Bill Dickinson, was ranking Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee before his retirement last year and a zealous guardian of the district’s military assets (Maxwell Air Force Base, its Gunter Annex and the army’s Fort Rucker). Everett stepped effortlessly into his shoes. His fall newsletter to constituents is full of indignant references to wasteful government spending. In a column published by district s, he railed against “outlandish special-interest projects.” Yet this spring he worked hard to secure $14.4 million for a new “personnel-services facility” at Fort Rucker, the Second District’s huge army base. He says the structure will replace preWorld War II-era buildings whose poor condition make them prohibitively expensive to maintain. “If it’s cost-effective it’s not pork,” he insists. Says Auburn University political scientist Brad Moody, “He’s so far successfully maneuvered to convince people he is against additional spending in general, but that he supports additional spending in the Second District. Not an atypical congressman.”
Everett also positioned himself to safeguard one of Washington’s most venerable pieces of pork: the peanut subsidy. Southeast Alabams’s loose soil is ideal for goobers. In 1992 only two other congressional districts (both in Georgia) grew more of them than Everett’s. The subsidy was a legacy of the New Deal, created to help farmers survive in the face of disastrously low Depression-era prices. But the price-support program, which bars nearly all foreign peanuts from the domestic market, has become a $34 million entitlement for a small group of U.S. growers. According to the General Accounting Office (GAO), the subsidized price of U.S. peanuts allows producers to make an average return of 51 percent after costs. As a result, American consumers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year more for peanuts–as much as an extra 40 cents on a $1.79 jar of peanut butter. (Growers say the GAO’s figures are way off.) Everett himself even benefits–if modestly–from the price program. Tenants grow peanuts on part of his 400-acre farm near Enterprise, earning him about $8,000 a year.
Everett disputes the suggestion that there’s a contradiction between his reform rhetoric and his fealty to the price supports. “The perception of pork is an individual one,” he says. “What would you accomplish by cutting [the subsidy]? It doesn’t cost that much money to start with, and it puts people to work…What are we going to do? Put these people on welfare? You can’t take a peanut farmer or laborer and teach them to run a computer. No disrespect. They’re just not that inclined.”
When Everett arrived in Washington, he immediately began searching for a strategic platform from which to safeguard the subsidy. His first idea was a peanut caucus, bringing together members from Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and other growing states. But abetter opportunity soon opened up–a vacancy on the House Agriculture Committee.
Everett was already stretched thin with two committee assignments (Armed Services and Veterans Affairs), which included seats on four subcommittees. He and other freshmen frequently complained about the bloated committee system. Plagued by redundant jurisdictions and pointless hearings, they said, it often diverted them from more substantive work. Everett once said he learned more from The Washington Post than from some of the classified Armed Services briefings he’s received. “See how asinine this is?” he said one morning in May, leaving a VA Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee hearing to prepare for another meeting. “The combination of all this stuff makes it impossible to do a credible job on any one thing.”
But even congressional freshmen understand that policymaking is only one function of the committee system–and often the least important. Committees are also about delivering largesse to the folks at home–and bulking up the official letterhead with as many credentials as possible. While Everett carped about the committee system, he lobbied strenuously for the Agriculture seat and won it.
The effort required him to overcome a natural reticence. Despite the comparisons to Perot, Everett’s political act is low voltage. His knees shook when he delivered the speech announcing his congressional candidacy in the spring of 1992. His soft, listless voice and tongue-tied delivery often underwhelmed audiences. Where other lawmakers sweep into a crowded room and “work” it with backslaps and bonhomie, Everett’s first impulse was to stand off to the side and watch. “He’s very shy. People mistake it for humility,” says an aide. He didn’t especially enjoy the social rituals of Washington, and during his early weeks there, aides had to coax him into attending afterhours events. (At least once, he was glad he did. Last February he reluctantly attended a dinner at the German ambassador’s residence and found himself seated at a table with Gen. Colin Powell, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Everett happily took the opportunity to lobby Powell on a new program for Fort Rucker.)
But the vanilla earnestness that fell flat in groups came across well in private with House colleagues. Everett persuaded members of the Agriculture panel and the House Republican Committee on Committees to waive rules barring members from sitting on more than one major committee. In a small plastic file box on his desk, he kept alphabetized index cards that tracked his contacts. Each card contained a small picture (he has trouble remembering the names and faces of his new colleagues), the member’s phone extension, the date of their conversation and a notation: “Jennifer Dunn, 5/8, says she’ll consider it.” He also secured high-level help from Republican Whip Newt Gingrich, who often shared the same weekend flight to Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport, where Everett caught a commuter plane to Alabama. “He’s a natural networker,” says Gingrich.
The Agriculture seat gave him a rare trifecta–three committees with powerful constituencies in his district. It also meant a total of 10 committee and subcommittee assignments, far above the average House workload that experts say is already swollen beyond reason. But Everett thought it was pretty good work, “especially for a freshman who was told he would spend his first term just trying to find his way around. I got news for you. This place ain’t brain surgery. It’s more endurance.”
Everett believes he’s done a good job this year, although he can’t say the same for many of his fellow freshmen–especially the Democrats. In a series of interviews with local newspapers’ he expressed disappointment with their lack of commitment to reform. “I don’t see a lot of people living up to what they told the voters,” he told The Birmingham News. Next year, when Second District voters ask him what he’s done to promote change, Everett says he’ll tell them that real reform won’t be possible until more like-minded conservatives are elected to Congress. “I’d say, ‘Send more people to Congress like Terry Everett’.”
7:00: Meeting of GOP freshman class officers (Everett is secretary)
8:00: Conservative Opportunity Society (group of GOP House members committed to pushing a conservative agenda)
9:00: House Republican Conference meets to discuss crime bill and welfare reform
9:30: Veterans’ Affairs subcommittee on hospitals and health care
10:00: NAFTA debate between political economist Pat Choate and GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter of California
10:00: Joint press conference of Republican and Democratic freshmen to announce task force on implementing Vice President Al Gore’s proposals on “Reinventing Government”
12:00: Floor vote on NASA Advanced Solid Rocket Motor. (Everett votes to continue funding.)
12:30: Floor votes
3:45: Office meeting with National Propane Gas Assn. to discuss energy issues
5:30: Fund-raiser for Rep. Dan Schaefer, Republican from Colorado
6:30: Floor votes
7:30: Office work
8:30: Home
CYNTHIA MCKINNEY GOT TO THE HOUSE floor early on the evening of Feb. 17. She wanted a seat on the aisle so she could shake hands–and be seen shaking hands–with Bill Clinton as he arrived to deliver his economic address to a joint session of Congress. The Georgia freshman passed some time chatting with an older member she didn’t recognize. The Appropriations Committee was an anachronism, she said, with “staffers coming out of their ears.” Listening to her critique was Appropriations chairman William Natcher, the 84-year-old Kentuckian who entered the House in 1953, nearly two years before McKinney was born. “I don’t think he ever forgave me,” she says.
McKinney had more than the usual freshman naivete to overcome when she arrived in Washington. In a kingdom ruled by an aging white patriarchy of Brooks Brothers pinstripes, she stood in bold relief: a divorced, black, single mother with gold canvas tennis shoes, flowing, brightly patterned skirts and hair braided in elaborate cornrows. She felt more at home than she did during her four years in the Georgia Legislature–Congressional Black Caucus mentors like Maxine Waters offered significant support. But the clubbiness of white, male Washington was omnipresent. There was always, as her chief of staff Andrea Young describes it, “the sense of disequilibrium when you walk into the steel-industry luncheon and there’s nothing but middle-aged white men…in gray suits.”
Months after most freshmen were recognizable figures on Capitol Hill, McKinney still found herself treated like a wayward tourist. In February, a House elevator operator tried to order her off a members-only car. In April, a Capitol garage attendant confronted her and two staff members and asked edgily: “Who you folks supposed to be with?” She had assumed that over time such institutional slights would cease. But in early August, after a Capitol Hill police officer grabbed her by the arm at a metal detector that members are allowed to bypass, McKinney complained to House Sergeant-at-Arms Werner Brandt. “There’s not that many people here who look like me,” she told him.
It’s not just the hallways that can be cold and inhospitable. In an institution run on windy rituals of deference and testimonial, the simplest kinds of recognition are sometimes elusive. A few minutes after she took a seat at her first meeting of a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Western Hemisphere affairs, she realized that no one on the panel was going to offer a welcome. “I was the only woman present, and the men were just having a backslapping good time. Never acknowledged that I walked in,” said McKinney, a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. “Then they got up and took a picture together. I finally figured maybe I was supposed to be in the picture. Then the chairman [Rep. Robert Torricelli of N.J.] gavels the meeting to order, goes through the agenda and gavels the meeting adjourned…I felt like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man.”
Her sense of alienation escalated into anger several weeks later. During a closed committee session, Torricelli delivered what McKinney described as an insulting lecture to exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. “He wagged his finger in Aristide’s face and said Americans were not going to send money down there,” McKinney said, describing his demeanor as “pompous, arrogant and grandstanding.”
Rep. Albert Wynn, a freshman Democrat from Maryland and the panel’s other black member, recalls no rancor on Torricelli’s part. Through a spokesman, Torricelli says only that the Haitian issue will be resolved through “a frank exchange of views, not an exchange of pleasantries.” One subcommittee aide said that McKinney’s spotty attendance (she missed nine of 14 open sessions between February and October) made it difficult to take her complaints seriously. “She would have more credibility if she were an active player,” he said. (She says the committee sessions conflict with weekly Black Caucus luncheons.)
McKinney made her name in Georgia politics as a rhetorical bomb-thrower. Colleagues in the statehouse dubbed her “Hanoi Cynthia” after a 1991 speech denouncing the Persian Gulf War. At a hearing that same year on reapportionment, she frustrated a white legislator with persistent questions about how a particular plan would aid black representation. “I’m just a dumb ole country boy,” said state Rep. Henry Reaves. “It shows,” McKinney retorted. Her tenacious pursuit of a plan to create two new majority-black congressional districts paid off. Under pressure from the Justice Department, Georgia created two new “safe” black seats. She ran for Congress in the district she helped draw, winning and using her reapportionment victory to convey a message of black political and economic advancement.
Although healing is a consistent theme in her rhetoric, she hasn’t hesitated to deal the race card. In her 1992 Democratic primary, she characterized two favored black opponents as tools of the party’s white establishment. “She’s a demagogue,” says one of them, former state senator Gene Walker. When she learned this summer that a group of white constituents was considering a legal challenge to the 11th Congressional District’s boundaries, she counted its opposition as a tactical asset. “This assures my reelection,” she boasted while jogging one morning at Fort McNair in southwest Washington. “It shows that the redneck factor is alive and well.”
But McKinney soon learned that scorched earth and victimization politics aren’t enough on Capitol Hill. Some observers say she needs to exhibit the same relish for the complexities of legislating that she shows for incendiary quotes. “She needs to show that she can pull her share of the wagon,” says one lobbyist who follows the Georgia delegation closely.
Last June’s racially charged House debate over ending the ban on most federal funding for abortions for lowincome women was a bitter lesson. She took on Rep. Henry Hyde, the amendment’s sponsor, calling his measure “nothing but a discriminatory policy against poor women who happen to be disproportionately black.” Hyde countered that abortion supporters were telling the poor, “We will give you a free abortion because there are too many of you people and we want to refine…the breed.”
Hyde also won in part by employing an obscure parliamentary precedent that allowed him to outmaneuver the less experienced pro-choice women. “What we learned out of that is that we need to learn how to become legislators,” she acknowledges.
McKinney faced a steep learning curve off the House floor as well. One major challenge was integrating single motherhood with the grinding congressional lifestyle–three days on the Hill and four working at home. Since a 1990 divorce McKinney has been raising a son, Coy, 9, by herself. Her workweeks usually begin before dawn on Tuesdays, when she leaves her suburban Atlanta home to fly to Washington. Until she returns late Thursday, child care falls primarily to her parents, Billy McKinney, a longtime state representative and civil-rights activist, and Leola McKinney, a retired nurse. Cynthia McKinney keeps Fridays clear to take Coy to Atlanta’s Galloway School (her official schedule usually reads, “Reserved Coy Time”), but holdover House business can interfere. In his room one evening, she saw an entry in a journal he’d been keeping: “Mom is in D.C. again. Rats.” “There’s no way you can look at this and say, this is what it means to be a mom,” she says.
Coy comes to Washington on vacations, where he follows her to the floor or roams the office, commandeering computer keyboards and leaving trails of baseball cards in his wake. When he’s gone, so is most of McKinney’s personal life. Her fiance, Atlanta businessman Mohammad Jamal, visits when he can. But her few nonofficial hours are spent preparing her doctoral dissertation on former Soviet client states and reading briefing papers in a spartan southwest Washington condominium furnished with three Oriental rugs, two beds, a television and a chair, some of it donated by an aide.
McKinney spends weekends in Georgia on the road, trying to remain visible in a gerrymandered district devoid of any natural political identity. The 11th begins in the southern Atlanta suburbs, ribboning east across the impoverished rural counties of the old cotton belt to Augusta, then dips south along the South Carolina border into coastal Savannah. To keep in touch, McKinney puts herself back on a campaign footing. She rolled up 12,000 miles barnstorming in her aqua-green Mercury van during the first four months of 1993, maintaining a punishing schedule of town meetings, chamber of commerce luncheons, talk radio and community-center tours.
By mid-May, she was exhausted. Her voice was in shreds from over-use, her eyes bloodshot. jamal would see the fatigue etched across her face as he picked her up at Hartsfield Airport on Thursday evenings. After an evening speech to the Optimists Club in Monticello, she threw up for 20 minutes. The next day Leola McKinney scheduled four appointments with medical specialists. The diagnosis was exhaustion. “Beach vacation,” was the notation on one physician’s prescription form.
When McKinney returned to Washington, aides tried to help, padding her daily schedule with more uncommitted time. Lunch, which had often been an orange-flavored diet powder, became a bona fide meal. But routine days ran deep into the evening, sometimes because of poor work by an inexperienced staff. Late one evening after a 12-hour day, McKinney was at her desk typing out a list of radio stations in her district. The Democratic National Committee wanted suggestions on where to air spots in support of Clinton’s economic plan. “If all the radio stations aren’t on the media list, then the media list doesn’t do us much good, does it?” she scolded an aide over the phone. “We should never be in a position of having stuff offered to us and not being able to take advantage of it because we don’t have our stuff together. Never, ever!”
Toward midsummer, McKinney seemed to turn a comer. She began to develop the kinds of personal connections that are at the heart of the legislative process. She lobbied–with some trepidation–Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski to make childless workers eligible for the earnedincome tax credit. The beefy Chicago pol’s lack of patience with freshmen was legendary. “I just got it all out, as quickly as I could…‘You know, Mr. Chairman, we’ve got to save childless workers’,” she recalls. “He winked at me, and he smiled. Then I knew I didn’t have to be scared anymore.”
McKinney’s district agenda began to gain momentum as well. After months of prodding the Environmental Protection Agency, she was close to getting help for an Augusta neighborhood damaged by industrial pollution. As autumn began, she was pressing for a Justice Department investigation into charges that mining companies in central Georgia had defrauded landowners. And despite her problems with the pork-friendly Appropriations Committee, she quietly lobbied the panel to secure a $200,000 research grant for Savannah State College.
A White House in desperate search of congressional support on big votes also helped her learn to play the system. In August McKinney flatly told a United Auto Workers lobbyist that she opposed NAFTA. But in the weeks leading up to the vote, as the administration handed out incentives to soften up resistant members, her official position slid to “leaning no.” She basked in VIP attention, including phone calls from Vice President Gore, former president Jimmy Carter, Vernon Jordan and Housing and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary even sent a single long-stemmed red rose and a card that read, “Thanks for listening.”
Finally, last Tuesday, the day before the vote, McKinney met with Clinton in the Oval Office. In the end, she voted “no” on NAFTA. Was she holding out for a deal? She just smiled and said, “You never want to be so definitive that you can’t take advantage of a changing situation.”
Cynthia McKinney may find a home in the House after all.
9:50: Arrives Cannon House Office Building
10:00: Finishes draft of speech she will deliver at noon rally for Clinton economic plan
10:50: Slips out of an Agriculture subcommittee meeting for brief talk on NAFTA with UAW lobbyist
11:45: Meeting at EPA with residents of an Augusta, Ga., neighborhood threatened by industrial pollution
12:55: Addresses “Pass the Plan” rally sponsored by the DNC
1:45: Shows up at Congressional Black Caucus weekly luncheon more than an hour late. Lunch is over.
2:40: Joins members of the Black Caucus at a press conference asking the state of Texas for a stay of execution for Gary Graham
3:00: Floor votes
4:15: Meets with House sergeant at arms about Capitol Hill police who stop her at security checkpoints
6:00: Reception for Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California
7:10: Staff meeting about Democratic Party-sponsored radio ads supporting Clinton budget to run in her district
8:00: Home.
THE FIRST FEW MINUTES AFTER THE VOTE ON Aug. 5 were a blur. The hugs from fellow Democrats, the Republican men waving and chanting “Goodbye, Marjorie” were all details she would reassemble later, like an investigator at a crash site.
Dazed and ashen, Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky retreated to the office of Vic Fazio, a senior Democrat from California, a mentor and a friend. At the moment, she needed both. After months of opposition to President Clinton’s budget, she had become one of the two last-minute votes that pushed it over the top in the House, 218-216. The price for her conversion, which she’d named in a phone conversation with Clinton minutes earlier, seemed patently lopsided–the president’s attendance at a one-day conference on entitlement spending to be held in her district. it had all the earmarks of a career killer.
Margolies-Mezvinsky’s budget vote is the story of an ambitious newcomer who played and lost one of the oldest legislative games: trying to have it both ways on a tough issue. It also illustrates the perils of transforming bold campaign promises into reality. Like Clinton, she sold herself to voters in the Republican-dominated 13th Congressional District as a new kind of deficit-conscious Democrat–committed to reform without the expansive spending of welfare-state liberalism. “This is no time for politics as usual,” she warned in campaign position papers. The tax increases and shallow deficit cuts of Clintonomics, she contended, were part of the party’s past, not its future.
But in the end, the candidate who promised a new way of doing business operated with the same aggressive cynicism as the careerists she campaigned to replace. Despite her public opposition to Clintonomics, her private posture on the budget was far more elastic than most constituents ever realized. Ten weeks prior to her Aug. 5 switch, she assured the president of her support should he absolutely need it. She made the promise on May 27–two hours before the House voted on a measure called “reconciliation,” which brings tax and appropriations bills into line with congressional spending guidelines.
It was an interim step in the budget process but a crucial test of the president’s ability to govern. And the outcome was in doubt: conservative Democrats were in revolt against his proposed tax on the energy content of fuel. Republicans, smelling an opportunity to cripple a new Democratic president, were united in opposition. At 7:40 p.m. Clinton, hoarse from a day on the phone scrambling for votes, called to plead for Margolies-Mezvinsky’s support. “We’re so close, we’re so close,” he said, according to Margolies-Mezvinsky. A “yes” vote was extremely difficult, she explained.
BUT MARGOLIES-MEZVINSKY WAS also an innately cautious politician, with an almost compulsive desire to ingratiate. (“It’s a hard habit to lose,” she admits.) She found the prospect of voting “no” just as bleak: should reconciliation lose by a narrow margin, she and other fiscally conservative Democrats could be held responsible for sending Clinton into political free fall. Before the conversation was over, she’d left him a huge opening. “She told him that she would not be the one to sink his administration,” said political adviser Ken Smukler. As it happened, her help wasn’t necessary. The measure slipped through by six votes, with a much-relieved Margolies-Mezvinsky able to keep her opposition intact,
In the next morning’s newspapers she retailed herself as the gritty freshman maverick who bucked the White House. “There was an overriding principle which was more important than calls from the president and the vice president,” she told the Philadelphia Daily News. “That was to keep my promise to the voters.”
Everything about Margolies-Mezvinsky seemed calibrated for success in 1992. She was a celebrated working mother in the year of the woman; a first-time candidate in the year of the outsider, an indignant voice at a time when career politicians appeared especially arrogant and out of touch. She positioned herself on the issues with smart-bomb precision. For Republicans, there was her hard line on new middle-class taxes. Abortion rights and improved access to health care played well with women. Unions were drawn to her anti-NAFTA message.
Even in her early days on the Hill, Margolies-Mezvinsky moved with an insider’s skill. She avoided a big role in the early reform initiatives pushed by Democratic freshmen–some of which irritated powerful senior members. To learn the three-card-monte pitfalls of House floor procedure, she sat for regular tutorials with a parliamentary expert. She also won a seat on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. Her gender and tenuous political situation at home helped. So did signals to chairman John Dingell of Michigan, zealous guardian of the automotive industry, that she would cooperate on votes he considered crucial. “There are two or three issues of importance to Dingell, all of which travel on four wheels,” says one veteran Hill staffer.
The Energy and Commerce slot also helped her with another priority–money. Its broad jurisdiction (including health care, telecommunications and finance) makes it a magnet for PAC contributions. Several days each month, Margolies-Mezvinsky journeys to a small office in the Eastern Market section of Washington and settles into an unadorned “call room” set up by Tom Erickson, her fund-raising consultant. (Federal law bars members from soliciting contributions in their offices.) There she works the phone to build a 1994 war chest that will require anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million for re-election. Margolies-Mezvinsky, who supports legislation to limit the influence of PACs, collected $105,000 in special-interest money in the first six months of 1993, the second highest total among House freshmen, according to the Public advocacy group Common Cause.
Her background gave her a significant edge over other freshmen. Before running she’d spent 15 years as a reporter for WRC, Washington’s NBC affiliate. Her husband is attorney Ed Mezvinsky, a former Iowa congressman and ex-chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. An appealing personal story also made her stand out: she is the mother, stepmother or legal guardian to it children and the sponsor for several refugee families. Her sprawling English Sussex house in Narberth, Pa., from which she commutes to Washington two nights each week, has evolved into a sort of multicultural Brady Bunch commune. Her ability to juggle home and work is legendary among friends. “She craves sleeping late,” says Bethesda, Md., attorney Nancy Chasen.
Margolies-Mezvinsky practices her politics with a disarming and occasionally earthy personal style that melds Hillary Rod Clinton with Joan Rivers. Most freshmen fall back on forgettable stock answers to questions about their expectations for life in Congress. She uses her own distinctive metaphor. “A doctor asked his medical-school class, ‘What organ grows to eight times its normal size when properly stimulated?’” she told a not-all-that-comfortable Lower Merion Civic Association one evening last April. After a female student flushed with embarrassment, Margolies-Mezvinsky said, another answered that it’s the iris of the eve as it adjusts from light to dark. The doctor turned back to the woman. “‘I’d like to tell you three things. First of all, you have a dirty mind; second, you didn’t do your homework, and third, you have to seriously realign your expectations’.”
As August approached, Margolies-Mezvinsky’s greatest expectation was that she could avoid saying “yes” to the White House. On the afternoon of the final budget vote on Aug. 5, she huddled with her staff to draft a statement explaining her “no” vote. They agreed that Clinton’s budget only chipped away at discretionary spending and timidly avoided the real source of the deficit-entitlements. They decided to call for a “summit” on entitlement spending. It was a safe nonstarter, carrying the veneer of reform without the dangerous details. No one would take it seriously. Or would they?
“You’re saying nobody has courage here,” Smukler said. “OK, where would you cut?”
“Well, first I’d resign,” she joked.
“Attack entitlements and you won’t need to,” quipped one aide.
Several hours later the White House called to collect the chit Margolies-Mezvinsky put on the table in May. The administration was still six votes down, said Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman. She could expect to hear from the president. “We didn’t want to do it, but we had to,” said a senior White House official. She now faced a crucial question: what did she ask of Clinton in exchange for her vote? No conventional piece of pork was rich enough to rationalize this kind of switch. It had to be something that seemed to transcend politics as usual.
Minutes before the vote, she spoke to Clinton in an anteroom just off the House floor. She told him that if she was needed, she had two conditions: one was an entitlement summit, the other was that she be the 218th vote–the White House’s sole margin of victory. The more dramatic the flip-flop, she reasoned, the more political cover she would have.
IT WAS NEVER CERTAIN WHO WAS 218, AND IT hardly mattered. The story line was clear: valiant freshman saves Clinton. Shortly before 10:30 p.m. she was at the well of the House, encircled by House Speaker Tom Foley and other anxious senior members. At 5 feet 4, she seemed lost in an old-growth forest of pols. She made the leap with Pat Williams, a Montana Democrat, filling out green-colored cards to record “yes” after the official 15-minute voting period had expired. In Fazio’s office a few minutes later a friend, Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington, cursed the cowardice of senior members from safer districts who took a walk on Clinton. He hugged Margolies-Mezvinsky and said, “You made your mark.”
She didn’t get to sleep until after 3 a.m. When the…Today" show called at 5:30, she knew she’d woken up to a nightmare. An aide in one of her district offices argued with a profane caller. “She’s not a prostitute! She’s not a whore!” For hours Margolies-Mezvinsky’s Washington and district staffs were virtually cut off as calls kept every line lit. Liberal voices like The Philadelphia inquirer praised her courage, but weeklies in the district lambasted the switch. “Just another run-of-the-mill, cheap, soiled, ward-heeling politician whose word was not worth a spit stain in the street,” wrote The Independent & Montgomery Transcript.
She launched a frantic attempt to contain the damage. She justified her flip-flop as a historic opportunity for an honest national debate on spending. A poll of district voters suggested that she faced a hard sell. Asked whether they supported cuts in entitlements, 64 percent said yes. But questioned about specific decreases in programs like social security or Medicare, 71 percent said no. Nearly 9 in 10 voters believed the deficit could be cut by eliminating waste.
“It cannot be done!” she said at one of two scalding town meetings in her district on Aug. 28. Even if all discretionary money disappeared from the budget, she explained, a new deficit would begin accumulating by 2003 because of entitlements. But residents were in no mood for statesmanship. “Here comes the bar,” said one woman as Margolies-Mezvinsky arrived at one of the sessions.
Her reversal arguably was the right thing, even the courageous thing. A budget defeat would have instigated the kind of legislative gridlock congressional candidates in 1992 swore to eliminate. But Margolies-Mezvinsky’s path to the vote was also an exercise in calculated contempt for her constituents. “No” was “no” as long as it was meaningless. When the White House was unable to maintain a congressional coalition for its budget without her support, the strategy collapsed and forced her reversal. In many voters’ eyes, it left her looking craven and manipulative. “I have to tell you, I don’t know if you can be trusted,” Joseph Simone, a district businessman, told her on Aug. 28. “I don’t hear a set of basic beliefs on which you can base a program.”
But Margolies-Mezvinsky’s cynicism also reflected the voters’ own confusion. Their anger over her switch was real enough. But they also sent mixed messages about what they truly wanted. Focus groups of district residents, convened by Margolies-Mezvinsky’s polltakers, vented their disgust (“They all thought she’d bought herself an ambassadorship,” says media consultant Joe Trippi). Yet they were also sympathetic to her dilemma–fulfilling a critical campaign promise or saving a new president from a devastating defeat. As troubled as group participants were by the changes offered by Clintonomics, there was a larger fear: no change at all. “Every single one said they feared a failed presidency,” Trippi said.
If there’s any good political news for Margolies-Mezvinsky, it’s that her 1994 re-election prospects are only marginally worse than they were before Aug. 5. Her narrow victory put her at the top of the GOP’s national hit list long before the vote. “The option was a very difficult re-election, or a very, very difficult re-election,” says Smukler. She hopes that the entitlement conference–set for Dec. 13 at Bryn Mawr–will boost her chances. To re-establish her deficit-cutting credentials, she is also cosponsoring a package of $100 billion in new reductions put together by Reps. Tim Penny and John Kasich.
Sitting in her office early one evening in late September, she insisted that she had been honest with voters despite the gulf between her public rhetoric and her private political strategy. “Absolutely,” she said. But she also acknowledged that the vicious reaction to her switch had diminished her enthusiasm for the job somewhat. “Part of the beauty of being a freshman in Congress is that you don’t know what you can’t do,” she said. “And it becomes more apparent with each day that there are lots of things that are very, very difficult to do.”
8:30: Meeting with health insurers from her district
9:30: Arrives Longworth House Office Building
10:00: Attends Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on radio-band space. Leaves early and gives written queries to staff to be inserted into the record.
10:45: Cab to dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
1:15: Meets with Defense Secretary Les Aspin and members of Pennsylvania congressional delegation to discuss military-base closures
1:45: Meets with vice president of a pharmaceutical company in her district to discuss investment tax credits
2:00: Talks with two constituents representing a gay lobbying group
2:15: Congressional Women’s Caucus
4:15: Photo shoot for Jewish Times, a Philadelphia newspaper
4:35: Cab to Union Station
6:50: Arrives Philadelphia. Drives to evening meeting.
7:30: Speech to Lower Merion Civic Association
10:00: Home
