In the Ashes of the Revolution

It was like winning the Super Bowl. No, better. It was like winning the Super Bowl by beating the Dallas Cowboys, crushing the guys that everyone loves to hate, crushing them so badly no one could believe they’d ever recover. What an endorphin high it was for the Republicans, who snatched the U.S. House of Representatives from the Democrats on Nov. 8, 1994, issued a 100-day manifesto, passed new laws and convinced the media to call the whole business a “revolution.” Funny thing was (and who could have guessed?), the entire episode, the pure joy of power, the thrill of hearing once-arrogant Democrats squeal as they lost prestige and pork, didn’t last much longer than the NFL off-season.

But in those impassioned first months of Republican control, the future for three Southern California legislators--David Dreier, Chris Cox and Dana Rohrabacher--looked as exhilarating as a long-legged jaunt up the U.S. Capitol steps. After 14 years of toiling in back-bench obscurity, Dreier practically became a Washington celebrity. It was his job to recast the House’s all-important committee system, killing some panels and renaming others in the image of Gingrich Republicanism. (Who wants a committee on “government operations” when you can have a committee on “government reform”?) Cox was right in the center of action, too. He was elected chair of the Republican Policy Committee, charged with drawing up that vision thing for GOP House members. And his pal Dana Rohrabacher, a friend from their Reagan White House days, stood on the front lines of his party’s war on the Democrats, giddily throwing grenades at all that “liberal claptrap,” such as environmental rules to prevent global warming.

All three were emblematic of the new generation of conservatives taking over Washington--unabashedly ideological and far more intent on shaking things up than their more senior colleagues. All three hailed from safe Republican districts. Dreier’s spanned the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, taking in Claremont, Azusa and Arcadia; Cox’s Orange County district was anchored by such conservative bases as Irvine and Newport Beach; Rohrabacher’s chunk of voters stretched from Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa inland to Westminster and Fountain Valley. These were places where the Contract With America sang to voters. All each man had to do was carry the tune, which they effortlessly did during those first spirited months of Republican control.

Then the game got harder--a prolonged and costly budget war with the White House in the winter of 1995, followed by the loss of eight Republican seats in the 1996 election. Six months later, in the spring of 1997, House Republican leaders had shifted course again; suddenly they were cutting deals with the newly reelected president they once thought crushed. This outburst of bipartisanship culminated last August in a budget deal with Clinton that handed the GOP some tax cuts, but at the price of spending increases so generous they were hailed by the dreaded Washington liberal establishment--hardly a revolutionary moment for House Republicans. Last fall, House conservatives failed in bids to repeal affirmative action and enact a school-voucher program.

Now, as the 1998 election season opens and visions of White House 2000 dance in their heads, Republican conservatives are eager to jump-start their once promising revolution. Even if scandal consumes their Democratic opponents, the onetime revolutionaries--like the ranks of the party as a whole--are divided over what the Gop’s future should be. The leadership style

of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose fitful dances with the Democrats helped inspire a conspiracy to oust him last summer, remains a lightning rod for the debate.

Our three lawmakers represent the divisions among GOP conservatives. The gregarious Dreier, now an intimate of Gingrich, gushing with bipartisan grace and goodwill; the cool and cerebral Cox, supporting the budget deal but more skeptical about giveaways to Democrats, more resistant to the speaker’s newfound spirit of conciliation; and Dana Rohrabacher, like a leftover found tucked in the refrigerator after the revolutionaries had feasted and gone home, his lonely voice decrying this new love fest between Republicans and Democrats.

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Not all of this struggle is about ideology. For all the talk about the power of ideas in 1994, the Republicans’ 36-month roller-coaster ride showed that influence in Washington still derives from political instincts, personality and style--in knowing when to call your opponent your enemy and when to shake his hand, in calculating how to look weighty even as you’re being carried by the winds of change, in walking that fine line between being loyal and being a dupe. The aborted coup against Gingrich, in which he caught his own top lieutenants plotting with disgruntled members, may have started as a battle over ideology (fueled by hard-core conservatives frustrated that the speaker had lost his way), but it ended as an awkward power grab by ambitious men too clumsy to hide their motives.

Dedicated public servants that they are, Cox, Rohrabacher and Dreier want to talk issues, not personality and style, let alone the intrigue of ego battles within the House Republican leadership. Fair enough. We should point out that Dreier, 45, is an avid free-trader and free-marketer who led the charge in support of NAFTA, GATT and “fast-track.” He has been a leading proponent of granting most-favored-nation status to China and has persuaded the Democrats to come on board to support the capital gains tax cut that passed last summer.

Cox, 45, built his legislative reputation on his mastery of the complexities of cutting government spending. He wrote the Contract With America legislation that makes it more difficult for shareholders to sue companies--the only bill to survive a veto during President Clinton’s tenure. Last November, Cox led the floor debate on his series of bills to improve China’s human rights and economic practices.

Rohrabacher, 50, is an Oliver North protege who comes from the hyperpatriotic “freedom fighter” faction of the GOP. He has fought illegal immigration and human rights violations by leftist regimes overseas. Another pet Rohrabacher issue is space, particularly the development of reusable rockets.

Arch-conservatives, all three fall under the broad category of anti-abortion, though none dwells heavily on the social concerns that drive the GOP’s pro-family wing. “Truth is,” says Cox, “David and I are more like California. And California is a very polyglot, diverse place.” Even Rohrabacher, saying he didn’t want to be remembered as the “guy who killed the NEA,” long ago gave up his fight against the National Endowment for the Arts, a tiny agency that enrages family groups because of its funding for work considered obscene or religiously offensive. And early on, Rohrabacher supported Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gays in the military.

But listing legislative achievements and political positions only gets us so far. With welfare reform and tax cuts done, much of the House GOP’s energy has turned inward, and futures will hinge on who will be in a position to articulate and sell a winning image for the party. To understand the roles of Dreier, Cox and Rohrabacher, we must turn, once again, to personality and style, to their instincts for the game.

Dreier and Cox have played the Capitol game artfully enough to be included on the insiders’ short list for top positions in the House leadership (including speaker) should Gingrich be toppled, reshuffle his lieutenants, or--as many are predicting--make a run for president in 2000. Both men even command respect among some of the dissidents who believe that the impulsive Gingrich has muddled the vision of the Republican Party. Last spring, Dreier and Cox were approached separately by rebels hoping to draft them to fill key leadership positions should Gingrich’s team be overthrown. Flattered, both men nevertheless told the plotters (though in gentler terms) to stuff it.

By contrast, Rohrabacher remains the determined outsider, described by one Republican observer as the “talisman for the Right, the guy conservatives go to see to make sure they haven’t lost their souls.” His take-no-prisoners style sidelined him once Republican leaders decided to play ball with the White House. Moreover, his attention over the past year was consumed by personal matters--charges that his new bride and surfing partner Rhonda Carmony falsified election documents in a 1995 state Assembly race.

If Congress were a high school (a fitting metaphor since more than a few observers have complained that the place is lousy with ex-student body presidents), Dreier, Cox and Rohrabacher would fit neatly into well-defined cliques. And so, before we recount that pivotal moment when each man took a distinctive stand in the ashes of the revolution that led to their prominence, we will start their stories where they begin, with tags from our own high school yearbook.

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MOST POPULAR -- Picture this: David Dreier, lone Republican congressman among a horde of Democrats, is seated inside the VIP section of Air Force One, which is ferrying President Clinton, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and an assortment of administration bigwigs across South America to promote expanded free trade with the U.S. It has been an exhausting journey and now, as they begin their last leg, from Brazil to Argentina, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asks New York Democratic Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez how Argentines unwind. “You do the tango,” Velazquez replies, and offers a lesson.

Certain he can do better, Dreier cuts in, wrapping one arm around the secretary of state and slipping his free hand into hers. As the 747 cruises at high altitude, the leader of the free world and his guests are treated to the sight of this dimpled, 6-foot, 2-inch bachelor GOP congressman guiding the diminutive 60-year-old Democratic diplomat up and down the tan carpets of the presidential jet.

What style! What pizazz! How delightfully bipartisan of the gentleman from San Dimas. No wonder he was chief negotiator with the Clinton White House on GATT. No wonder, during this South American trip in October, he could gently scold President Clinton for not working hard enough to recruit Democrats to support broadening presidential trade-negotiating authority, known as “fast-track.” (Just how much influence Dreier’s advice had on Clinton is difficult to gauge. But as Air Force One headed back to Andrews Air Force Base, Clinton was on the phone, soliciting House Democrats to support fast-track legislation, a cause that fizzled a month later.)

Dreier actually is a former high school student body president, and it shows. His ambition is masked by an easygoing style, an infectious grin, a charming spontaneity. Dreier spent his college and early career years at Claremont before being swept into the House on the Reagan tide in 1980, garnering early praise for what The Almanac of American Politics called his “intellectually rigorous and gutsy stands.” But in the years since 1994, it has been his loyalty to people, as much as to ideas, that has paved his path to influence.

Dreier maneuvered not only the twists and turns and near-wreckage of the revolution but also last summer’s aborted coup against Gingrich, to come out on top--at least for now. In the aftermath, he reaffirmed his position as one of Gingrich’s most trusted advisors, “sitting at the right hand of the father,” as San Diego’s Rep. Brian Bilbray puts it. Already first in line to assume chairmanship of the House’s most powerful committee, Rules, he is touted as a leading candidate for House leadership and continues to confound his many supporters by passing up a run for a U.S. Senate seat, despite the $2.7 million left in his campaign war chest at the end of the last campaign season.

He is well-liked, no doubt. But don’t let those dimples fool you. Ambition can be dangerous even in the nicest of guys. One member asserts that Dreier “has a tendency to zap people, so people try to stay away” from his line of fire. Some say he might have tied his fortunes too closely to those of the capricious speaker and could suffer if the tide again turns against Gingrich.

Among colleagues, those kinds of feelings were intensified in the aftermath of last July’s coup attempt against Gingrich, when Dreier took on the role of--if not henchman, at least fierce loyalist. When Gingrich learned that his top lieutenants--including House Majority Leader Dick Armey, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay and Rep. Bill Paxon of New York--might join with less-senior dissidents to vote the speaker out of office, Dreier raced to Gingrich’s side to help him strategize. Dreier was one of the few close advisors the speaker could still trust.

After the speaker forced Paxon’s resignation from the House GOP leadership, there was speculation that Gingrich was considering purging other leaders implicated in the scheme, and rumors spread that Dreier was counting votes to see if the betrayers could be ousted. Dreier staunchly denied the political gossip. Later, it was Dreier who pushed for a full meeting of House Republicans to clear the air. “Most everyone opposed me,” Dreier recalls. “I was one of the very few saying that we need to bring this to the forefront as quickly as possible so that we can focus on [the budget agreement].”

The closed-door meeting of GOP lawmakers turned into an emotional group-therapy session in which Gingrich’s betrayers apologized and the speaker emerged victorious, quoting from Romans: “Bless those who persecute you; Bless and do not curse them.”

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MOST STUDIOUS -- Picture this: Chris Cox is sitting down to lunch with a dozen Washington reporters from the Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau. He’s looser than usual, the toothy, white smile comes more readily; the laugh is a hearty one. There are a few joking exchanges with those seated next to him, filler chatter really, an attempt to give the congressman a chance to wolf down his sandwich and Nantucket Nectar before the questioning starts.

But small talk is not Cox’s forte. His wife, Rebecca, once recalled that, before asking her out on a date, he called up and “interviewed” her about her life since their Reagan White House years together. (She also confessed that he sometimes reads math texts for fun.) So less than five minutes into this noontime chitchat, Cox sinks into policy wonk mode.

The formal questions haven’t even begun and there he is, talking about the accounting “pretense” that the federal budget is moving into balance. He knows the numbers; he knows the process. He has just written an article on budget reform for the American Enterprise magazine. He’s prolific, that’s for sure--always filling conservative publications with his views on China, trade, the budget process. In Congress, he’s known as a factory of ideas for the surprisingly complex business of slashing Big Government. That muscular face--it’s the pug nose and small eyes--lights up and the candid talk flows when the subject is, say, the 1974 Budget Act’s role in camouflaging “the uncontrolled growth of government.”

When he’s talking about people, the internal politics of the House or even attempting to discuss his party’s future, he’s serious and painfully cautious. He circles his subject without diving in, choosing his words with a plodding precision that can send a news reporter into sound-bite hell. “Too often, congresspeople stand up in front of a microphone and say whatever comes to mind,” he explained in an interview. “That’s very, very damaging, because you’re not going to get quoted on that most-sensible thing that you ever utter.”

Cox is intensely ambitious--his friend George Will promoted him in 1996 as a vice presidential candidate--but it is an ambition leadened by caution. Caution, friends say, kept him out of the ’94 Senate race dominated by Michael Huffington’s money and is probably a key factor in his continued reluctance to run statewide. He controls his office tightly, delegating little substantive authority and editing any correspondence that leaves his office, and is known to reporters as a politician hypersensitive to the nuances of his press coverage.

Tango-dancing spontaneity is not in this man’s genetic makeup. Cox is the kind of straight-laced guy you’d put in charge of supervising the rowdies. That’s precisely his role as the No. 2 Republican on the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, command central for the House investigation of Clinton’s fund-raising apparatus. House leaders weren’t ready to dump Chairman Dan Burton, who is himself under investigation for allegations of shaking down a lobbyist and is famous for such antics as shooting a pumpkin or some-such object in his backyard to demonstrate his widely dismissed theory that the late White House counsel Vince Foster was a victim of murder rather than suicide. Instead, Cox has emerged as the responsible legal mind (Harvard Law School grad, senior associate counsel in the Reagan White House) on the committee.

He’s a sharpshooter when accusing the Clintonites of playing cute with releasing documents. But he’s also quick to put aside his partisanship long enough to disagree with fellow Republicans by dispassionately distinguishing between legal activity (such as Clinton soliciting contributions from within his White House residence quarters) and more questionable acts (solicitations inside the Oval Office).

A graduate of USC, with law and business degrees from Harvard, he speaks Russian (he and his father once published an English translation of Pravda to demonstrate its dangerous propaganda) and has a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Cox does not walk the Capitol’s corridors. He glides with an intellectual superiority that is sometimes interpreted as arrogance.

During last year’s fuss over Gingrich and the direction of the party, Cox attempted to stake out a position as a man loyal to ideas, not people. But that led him into murky waters. Privately, he was said to be a Gingrich critic, and one of his key votes early this year, in opposition to the leadership’s disaster-relief bill, suggested some real frustration with the direction of the House. But he emerged without his fingerprints showing up on either side of the fight.

To Cox, the House’s problems were a question of “competence, not ideology”--a line borrowed, interestingly enough, from Michael S. Dukakis to describe the need to build clear lines of authority and make the leadership’s decision-making more accountable to all members. “Congress is a big machine in some ways,” Cox says. “It is operating, if not on autopilot, then certainly within fixed parameters that make it impossible for us sometimes to address the policy questions and make the choices that ought to be made.” For Cox, the obvious solution is for the leadership to pay more attention to the policy recommendations issued by his own Republican Policy Committee.

It may help Cox’s future in the House that, during the Gingrich wars, he stayed carefully inside the demilitarized zone. But to really take off, careers in the U.S. House also need a dash of popularity and an ability to build personal alliances. Cox doesn’t make friends with the ease and assurance of Dreier; a lot of people just plain don’t like the guy. Oddly enough, the assiduously cautious Cox still yearns to take up one of his father’s passions--to climb inside the cockpit of a race car and take a few reckless spins. Maybe he should give it a try--and take a couple House buddies along while he’s at it.

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MOST REBELLIOUS --Picture this: An August wedding in the south of France. It’s noon on a Wednesday at the Church of St.-Etienne-de-Bigorre, about 30 kilometers east of Biarritz in the Basque region. As a priest conducts the ceremonial nuptial Mass, Dana Rohrabacher takes as his wife Rhonda Carmony, the same young woman whose bikini caught the eye of politicos at the 1996 Republican Convention, when she stood outside a hotel helping her congressman strap surfboards atop their four-wheel drive. The first time he got married, the libertarian-thinking Rohrabacher refused to obtain a marriage license. This time, he will cede a bit of his personal liberty to the oppressive power of the state and agree to get a license.

Some 60 friends and family members have flown in for the event, and they’re ecstatic. “He’s growing up, thank God,” jokes William “Buck” Johns, an Orange County political player who later, at his Orange County spread, throws the couple a 300-person reception that includes such luminaries as former Steely Dan and Doobie Bros. guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. “And it’s none too soon, either. We are delighted to see a little more maturity in the crazy guy.”

It’s all wedding-cake bliss, and the traumas of “Rhonda-gate” can be put aside for the happy couple, at least for now.

Four months later, in December, Carmony pleads guilty to two felony charges (later reduced to mis-demeanors) in connection with her efforts to recruit a decoy candidate to split the Democratic vote and aid the Republicans in a 1995 state Assembly race. She is fined $2,800 and sentenced to three years’ probation and 300 hours of community service. (Angered at the nature of The Times’ coverage of the case, Rohrabacher declines to talk to reporters from the paper and did not grant an interview for this story.)

At last these personal troubles, which consumed much of Rohrabacher’s attention for the past year, are behind him, and voters will likely see this cocky, tenacious, passionate and tireless lawmaker back in full swing during the ’98 campaign. Rohrabacher’s personal motto is “fighting for freedom and having fun.” He’s a natural-born rebel who used a high school football injury to get out of the draft during the Vietnam War but also attacked “pro-Communist” antiwar demonstrators.

Rohrabacher seemed perfectly suited for the Gingrich rebellion of ’95. He gleefully led novice conservative lawmakers in their vociferous attacks on the Democrats and Big Government in the early days of the Republican revolution. But as the revolutionaries marched on, Rohrabacher fell out of step. To have attempted strong legislative leadership would have been too conventional for a politician who either does not like, or does not want, to play as an insider. But neither was he part of last summer’s coup against Gingrich. Even that kind of plotting is still too much organization for this lone wolf. He prefers to lob his own grenades.

Rohrabacher’s abrasive rhetoric makes it difficult to build majority support, particularly when the GOP can lose no more than 10 of its members on partisan votes. During the first three years of Republican control, while Cox and Dreier played out their respective roles in the center of the action, Rohrabacher honed in like a cruise missile on a propaganda campaign for a real yawner of a bill--patent protection. No one will deny that tenacity is this man’s most effective trait, but it’s also one that drives his colleagues mad.

To build support for his patent bill, he searched out every conservative radio talk show in the country and bluntly criticized congressional opponents in both parties, firing up voters to contact their representatives. Angry colleagues were caught off guard. When the legislation reached the House floor last spring, Rohrabacher lost the vote. A few days later, Rohrabacher took his name off a scaled-down version and watched Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio win approval, with 37 Democrats switching their votes. The Rohrabacher name was poison to many would-be supporters.

As the patents bill saga wound down, Henry Hyde, the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, felt compelled to take the podium to deny a news report that he had called Rohrabacher “a son of a bitch.” “I would like the public record to show that I hold him in the highest regard,” Hyde insisted. “The gentleman is persistent and tenacious and a very worthy adversary.”

No need for apologies, Rohrabacher said. “I certainly never believed that my colleague . . . would have personalized it the way the newspaper said it was. After all, it was a comment not about me but about my mother, I seem to think.”

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The GOP Revolution came to its official denouement last summer when the Congress it controlled made a less-than-revolutionary tax and budget agreement with the Clinton White House. The tax cuts were less than one-third the size envisioned by House GOP leaders when they took over the chamber in 1994. The deal’s spending increases were even embraced by Washington liberal interest groups. Two and a half years after the Republicans took over the House, no one was talking--as Republicans did three years ago--about shutting down the departments of Education or Commerce, or ending the federal entitlement to health care for the poor. To the contrary, the budget deal created a new $24-billion health program for poor children.

When we caught up with Dreier just before the House vote on the agreement, he was aglow in bipartisanship, stopping mid-gait to stress the historic importance of the tax deal, the first he had supported since the 1981 Reagan tax cut. Earlier, fellow lawmakers had lauded Dreier for his skill at crossing the political aisle to build Democratic support for the capital gains tax cuts in the agreement. Dreier emphasized the kind of bipartisan accommodation that produced the deal, adding that he planned to “do more to enhance a modicum of civility [in the House], the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time.”

Later that same day, Dreier did just that--first taking the microphone on the House floor to respond to one Democrat’s charge that the terms of debate on the deal were akin to “martial law,” then suavely rescuing Gingrich from a group of Democrats venting other frust rations. Later still, Dreier tried to broker peace within his own party, see king a detente between the speaker and Republican rebels who fear that Gingrich will seek political retribution by cutting off future campaign dollars.

Cox was a more reluctant supporter, but he, too, was talking bipartisanship as the bill came to a vote. Earlier, he had charged that the “Clinton-Congress budget . . . is a continuation of a pattern of unabated government growth established during uninterrupted decades of Democratic Congresses.” But the tax cuts contained within were irresistible (this is a man who left his hospital bed last spring after appendix surgery so he could cast his vote for lower taxes). So when he reached the clerk’s desk on the House floor that August afternoon, he, like Dreier, inserted his voting card to light up the bright green button next to his name on the chamber’s giant scoreboard.

That night, in contrast, Dana Rohrabacher stood up on the House floor and, arms flailing, passionately condemned American foreign aid contained in the budget deal that would prop up “bloody dictatorships” and “gangster regimes.” The show was vintage Rohrabacher. Nearly a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this freedom troubadour is still fighting the Cold War, only now he takes to the floor to condemn the “Red Chinese” and various leftist “thug regimes.” The night of the House vote on the budget deal, Rohrabacher offered an amendment to the foreign relations bill that would prevent U.S. dollars from flowing into the coffers of the Cambodian government. This time the House listened, and his proposal passed.

But the uncompromising Rohrabacher refused to support the budget package, voting against his own party leadership. On that summer night, he was only one of 31 House Republicans to turn a thumbs down on the bipartisan compromise that effectively marked a cease-fire in the budget wars between congressional Republicans and the Democratic White House they once thought they’d trumped.

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POST-MORTEM -- On election night, 1994, Dreier’s father, an outgoing, mustachioed real estate developer who loved a good tennis match, warned his son that he and fellow Republicans were overestimating their ability to radically change Washington. “Remember,” the elder Dreier admonished, “it’s taken three decades to generate this government as we now know it. You’re not going to be able to completely change the course in 100 days. It’s going to take literally years.”

H. Edward Dreier Jr. died last March at age 69, but those words ring in his son’s ears. “Of course, I thought he was wrong at the time. Totally wrong,” the lawmaker recalls. “I said, ‘We’re going in and we’re going to do this--all this.”’

The House Republicans did much in those first 100 days, including curtailing costly new mandates on states; subjecting the Congress to health, safety, labor and civil rights laws that apply to the private sector, and passing a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget--an item that was rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate. But they didn’t succeed in dramatically altering the course of that massive freighter known as the U.S. government. Dreier recalls that he first tried to abolish the departments of Energy and Education 17 years ago, and that still hasn’t happened.

Still, as these lawmakers cruise into another election year, they are claiming a philosophical victory with the American public. Dreier argues that America has settled into a conservative skepticism about Big Government. “If you go through and look at what it is that we’re doing, clearly America is in sync,” he says.

“The Contract With America was a unique moment,” Cox insists. “For all of the wonderful things that have been said about it, it was in some ways a very mechanistic approach. There were a lot of procedural things in there, like term limits and the balanced-budget amendment. To go to principle, you have to go well beyond the Contract With America. More than anything, it was a reform mantle for people to run on: Instead of calling your opponent names, you could say, ‘I’m for all these things.’ But you can’t sustain a political party on what was written in the Contract With America.”

Cox may have shared those sentiments during a private all-day meeting with six other Republican House leaders in December as they tried to hammer out a vision for the future. When Gingrich emerged from the session inside the ornate Library of Congress, he boasted that the legislators had been working on an agenda for 2001, “an even more ambitious, an even more exciting sense of what we can do to give Americans a better future.” The speaker added: “You have here a group of friends who look back four years at December of ’93 and think how amazing it is, how far we have come.”

He neglected to add how far they thought they would go.