Grand Gramm
Phil Gramm retires.

By John J. Pitney Jr., professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and author of The Art of Political Warfare.
September 5, 2001 8:15 a.m.

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.