Free Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked by Chris Matthews

himself every single working day, when Congress was in session, and yet it was an ongoing series of missed opportunities. Sure, he’d been doing it in exactly the same way ever since he’d first become Speaker four years earlier, and so had every Speaker before him. But why not think outside the box? Why not use those press conferences to get out the party’s message, to fight back , to make news ?
    My role in this scheme, if Franks managed to talk me into it, was to sign on as communications director for the DCCC. There my chief mission would be to help Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill in his new role as party spokesman. What Marty was asking of me now was to meet with Congressman Tony Coelho, the young Californian who’d been elected to chair the campaign committee. He would be the House Democrat most responsible for getting Democrats to hold and strengthen the House majority in the 1982 elections.
    I was skeptical. It’s not that I doubted the potential of Marty and his boss Tony’s Big Idea—but I wasn’t sure I could manage to make it work. It seemed to me a man like Tip O’Neill would have a well-established operation that wouldn’t readily admit strangers. Quite honestly, I also couldn’t imagine him willingly taking assistance, let alone direction from someone not belonging to his handpicked inner circle. I’d grown up in Philadelphia and knew big-city pols; I knew they liked hiring people with deep-rooted connections and never wanted outsiders getting into their business. I’d assumedthat Tip O’Neill was a proud captain who ran his ship the way he wanted to and wasn’t willing to have an outsider, picked by Tony Coelho or anyone else, serving in his crew.
    But what a challenge! It’s always the challenge that gets me. And, of course, I saw the problem: it was Tip’s image, clearly. He was the fellow—the symbol, really—whom the Reagan people had chosen to attack for the very reason that he didn’t represent the new breed of post-Watergate Democrat. There was no confusing him with the party’s Young Turks, those chosen in the elections of 1974 and 1976 who wanted to cut back on deficit spending, who wanted to skim down the size and bureaucracy of government, who wanted to modernize. In other words, he was hardly someone of my political generation. Nor was I of his.
    Tip O’Neill was an old-school, street-corner figure, and a big spender to boot. How would I fit in with him? How would he fit with someone like me who hadn’t inherited a New Deal attitude about government? Having grown up in a Republican family, I’d been drawn to the Democratic side by Eugene McCarthy and his anti–Vietnam War crusade in 1968. Then, as a Peace Corps trainee down in Louisiana, I’d cast my first presidential vote for Hubert Humphrey because of his civil rights leadership and, equally, because I liked his running mate, Edmund Muskie. The senator from Maine reminded me of McCarthy, and I saw him as a true reformer. This belief had been reinforced when, working on the Senate Budget Committee, I’d watched him working steadfastly to control the federal budget, controlling and bringing reason to government spending.
    Yet even feeling strongly those concerns, I agreed to meet with Coelho. After the Californian and I had talked—I can’t pinpoint the exact moment—I decided to go for it.
    One thing I figured was that I’d be in for a dose of culture shock. I’d spent four years back in the 1960s at Holy Cross, and so hadexperienced New Englanders up close. But now it was 1981 and I’d just finished four years working alongside the Georgians who’d come up north with Jimmy Carter.
    Once I’d signed on with Marty and Tony, my plan of action was to get myself well briefed by a couple of savvy guys about both the Speaker and his men. I needed to have a good idea beforehand of what sort of operation I was heading into. What was especially important was to get a snapshot of who my new colleagues were, how they