The Cheney Might Have Been?

Every reliable survey reveals a bell curve distribution of American political opinion. A solid majority of Americans, usually some 70 to 80 percent of the electorate, holds basically moderate views, center-left on social issues and center-right on economic issues. And yet, oddly, the overwhelming majority of elected officials represent the most extreme 10 percent on either side of the spectrum. Some of the reasons for this fundamental imbalance in the American political system can be seen in the career of William Frenzel, a Republican Congressman who represented suburban Minneapolis from 1971 to 1991.

A Dartmouth graduate, Korean War veteran, and successful businessman, Bill Frenzel fit the once-familiar profile of the Harold Stassen or Dwight Eisenhower variety of moderate Republican. He arrived in Congress as an opponent of the Vietnam War and a reformer willing to tilt with old Democratic dragons of the status quo such as the tyrannical House Administration Committee chairman Wayne Hays, who sometimes retaliated against his critics by shutting off the air conditioning in their offices during the broiling Washington summers. He joined the House Wednesday Group, a generally moderate association of non-ideological Republican pragmatists, and was willing to reach compromise agreements with his Democratic counterparts on the Ways and Means and Budget committees. But he was also an ardent fiscal conservative, described as “the only real free-trader in Congress,” who lived by Cicero’s 55 BC injunction that “The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt.”

The result was that Frenzel often found himself in political no-man’s land, strafed by both sides. Liberals disliked him for his tight-fisted approach to social spending, his skepticism towards welfare, and his unwillingness to bail out unsound financial entities such as New York City circa 1975 and the Chrysler Corporation circa 1979. Electoral reformers objected to his opposition to campaign spending limits and same-day voter registration schemes, and his defense of political action committees. Labor and consumer interest groups awarded him failing grades year after year. At the same time, his moderately pro-choice position earned him the enmity of evangelical Christian groups, who seized the Republican Party machinery in his district and crushed his allies on the state central committee.

The hostility toward Frenzel also revealed that the New Right was not, in fact, conservative – at least so far as fiscal conservativism was concerned. His opposition to agricultural subsidies and import quotas on textiles was anathema to Southerners like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, while his criticism of cheap, federally-subsidized electric power put him on the opposite side of Westerners like Dick Cheney. His votes against bloated defense appropriations annoyed conservatives who considered it unpatriotic to apply economic rationality to military spending.

Frenzel did not share the New Right’s fetishization of tax-cutting. Realism compelled him to admit that some level of government spending was necessary and would have to be paid for. But he was impolite enough to observe that some of the most avid tax-cutting conservatives outdid even liberal Democrats as earmarkers and free-spenders, and curmudgeonly enough to dwell on the deficits that supply-siders dismissed as irrelevant.

Ultimately, Frenzel was punished for refusing to go along with his colleague’s appropriations requests, and his fiscal conservatism likely cost him a leadership role in the House. He took a resigned view of the devolution of Republican conservatives into big spenders, knowing that they worried about reelection just like the Democrats. And, he observed, “Once you become an appropriator, you get used to spreading the goodies around. You’ve been in Santa’s workshop for a long time, and you know how to send out the electric trains and the sleds and the dolls. And you learn how to go along to get along.” The back-scratching struck him as one of the worst aspects of Congress, and he noted that “If you’re a moderate Republican, you get the worst of both worlds, because you get punished both for being socially liberal and for being fiscally conservative. You’re doubly handicapped.”

The Republican Party has succeeded in purging itself of irritating moderates like Frenzel, but at what cost? Christian conservatives in Minnesota have been able to dominate the Republican Party but have proved incapable of attracting what Frenzel called “potential Republican voters who would vote in a primary but who wouldn’t come to a caucus and sit through hours of talk about killing babies.” Ideological enforcers like the Club for Growth have knocked off Frenzel-type Republicans in parts of the country including the Northeast, West, and upper Midwest where only a socially moderate and fiscally conservative Republican would have a chance of winning. And the Republicans’ swinish spending during their years in power has bankrupted their claim to be an alternative to Democratic budget-busting; so far as the public is concerned, the GOP is merely awaiting its turn back at the trough. The Republicans may enjoy greater internal cohesion without the likes of Bill Frenzel in their ranks, but making room for moderates once again may bring both majority power and a return to true fiscal responsibility.