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 enator
Phil Gramm of Texas, who just announced his retirement, personifies
how the Republican party has changed since the middle of the 20th
century.
Once upon a
time, the Northeast and Midwest supplied the GOP with most of its
national leaders. In the early years of the century, voters saw
the party's face in such bluebloods as Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge of
Massachusetts, scourge of Woodrow Wilson. Bearing the same name
and building a liberal reputation, his grandson also served in the
Senate but lost reelection to JFK.
No one would
mistake Phil Gramm for either Lodge. He was born in Georgia, the
son of an Army master sergeant and a textile worker. After earning
a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Georgia, he took a teaching
post at Texas A&M. As a scion of working people and a mentor
to Aggies, Gramm was already part of what would become the Reagan
Coalition.
But he was
not yet a Republican. Even though he had taken inspiration from
Goldwater's Conscience
of a Conservative, he followed southern tradition and remained
a Democrat. In 1978, he won a U.S. House seat. He soon learned that
his party was moving leftward and that he had to play the "outside
game" with like-minded Republican House members such as David
Stockman of Michigan. With Reagan in the White House, Stockman became
budget director and Gramm became the administration's key link to
"Boll Weevil" Democrats. The crucial budget legislation
of 1981 bore Gramm's name.
When Democrats
struck back by ousting him from the Budget Committee, he switched
parties. Reasoning that his constituents should have a chance to
judge his new affiliation, he resigned and ran in a special election
as a Republican. (I shall forgo any invidious comparison to Jim
Jeffords.) He won. Two years later, he became only the second Republican
since Reconstruction to win a Senate seat from Texas.
Gramm quickly
emerged as a major Republican figure. He not only represented the
party's rising presence in the South, but as a trained economist,
he also helped solidify its position as a party of ideas. "Gramm
knew the entire supply-side catechism backwards and forwards,"
Stockman recalled in memoirs, adding that he was "steeped in
detailed knowledge of basic federal programs."
Gramm's intellectual
heft marked a change in GOP leadership. During the 1950s, the world
of conservative Republicanism had had little contact with academia.
William F. Buckley Jr. once explained to Sidney Blumenthal: "It
was implicitly denied that one could be conservative and rational,
with the single exception of Senator Taft, who was concededly brainy
but thought of as an ideological automaton . . . Nobody thought
there was a body of learning there or that there lay ahead of the
liberals a period in which empirical data would do a lot to demoralize
their basic convictions." Along with other intellectuals such
as fellow Texan Dick Armey, Gramm showed how conservatives could
use that body of learning to great effect.
Gramm learned
much from the "public choice" school of economics, which
teaches that government has political incentives to overspend. His
remedy was the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation, which triggered
automatic cuts in case the government failed to meet deficit targets.
Though it lasted only a few years, it had an impact. "It showed
some stability around here," House Speaker Tip O'Neill acknowledged
to the New York Times in 1986. "There's no question
the budget would have been higher" without it.
Gramm did important
work on the Banking Committee, which he chaired from 1999 until
the Jeffords switch. But perhaps his most lasting contribution is
"The Dicky Flatt Test." A hardworking printer in Mexia,
Texas, Mr. Flatt symbolizes the average American taxpayer. Every
time he looks at a program, Gramm has often said, he asks a basic
question: "Will the benefits to be derived by spending money
on this program be worth taking the money away from Dicky Flatt
to pay for it?" And he always adds: "There are not a lot
of programs that will stand up to that test."
Republicans
too often stray from fiscal conservatism. But thanks to leaders
such as Phil Gramm, the GOP is closer to Dicky Flatt than to Henry
Cabot Lodge. That's progress.
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