Our Splendid Cuss: The likable Phil Gramm

NOTE: This piece ran in the October 1, 2001, issue of National Review, shortly after Sen. Gramm announced his retirement. The senator’s final term ended this month.

As if it weren't bad enough that Jesse Helms is leaving, Phil Gramm, too, is "moving on," to use a recently popular phrase. Thus are we right types losing our two favorite, and most stalwart, senators. Each is judged irreplaceable, indispensable, and each may be, though Gramm bristles at the suggestion: "As my grandmama used to say, 'The graveyard is full of indispensable men.'" Plus, the Founders set it up so that "it shouldn't matter who's here [in Washington]." Moreover, "Senators often say to me, 'You said, or did, exactly what I wanted to do.' But if I hadn't been here, maybe they would have."

Don't know about that one. For about 20 years, Phil Gramm has been the conservatives' — and the libertarians' — great champion and explicator. He has been almost a one-man band in defending and explaining what is sometimes called quaintly "economic freedom." He was about the only one in Washington who really gave a rip about property rights. In many ways, he has been the office-holding equivalent of the columnist and economist Thomas Sowell, a splendid cuss.

It is almost universally acknowledged that Gramm is brainy, principled, and fearless. It is also almost universally alleged that he is not a likable, certainly not a lovable, man, and that this hampered his effort to go further: to be president. Some of us have long held that if America doesn't like Phil Gramm, America is nuts. What's not to like about . . . well, take a typical Gramm moment, one that has entered the lore about him, lovingly passed around by Gramm fans, or, as we have sometimes been tagged, "Gramm crackers." He's debating education policy with some lady who represents the education establishment. The exchange goes something like this:

True, Gramm tends toward the mordant, and he doesn't mesh with an Oprah-ized, schmoozified culture of "niceness" and drippy sentiment. Many people have pointed out — and they're not entirely wrong — that Gramm is "no diplomat" and even "no politician." Yet he is certainly some kind of politician: He got elected, and reelected, and reelected, by whopping margins in Texas, a state of 20 million people. Gramm was an academic, an intellectual, and an individualist, yes, but he was also a canny pol, as evidenced not only by his victory margins but by his record in the House and Senate.

Announcing his retirement, he declared that he had achieved everything he had come to Washington to do: He (with the help of one or two others, maybe) had balanced the budget, cut taxes, moved power out of Washington, opened up trade, deregulated, rebuilt the military, and "rolled back the borders of Communism." He says that he never would have stood down if Al Gore had made it to the White House — he would've needed to stay as a blocker. But with Bush in, he felt the moment was right. The Republicans' loss of their Senate majority, he insists, had nothing to do with it. When Gramm talks, you tend to believe him, no matter what you think of him. It's part of his singularity.

The Gramm story is oft told, but worth recapping. He was born at Fort Benning, Ga., to a humble military couple. Early on, his father became an invalid, leaving the family in stricken circumstances. Young Gramm was held back from several grades, and was eventually sent to military school, to straighten up and fly right. He did. He went to the University of Georgia, earning a B.A. and then staying there for a Ph.D. in economics. He never wanted to be a politician — at least at first. The great dream of his life was to become a tenured professor (an understandable goal for the ambitious product of a family that had never enjoyed much education). He got what he wanted, at Texas A&M, at the age of 30.

Before long, he was nosing about in politics. Intent on propagating his views, he wrote, as he tells it, to "150-odd civic clubs in East Texas, saying, 'If you want someone to come speak on any one of these dozen subjects, I'm your man.'" A single invitation came in: from a Lions Club in the tiny town of Wortham, "just north of Mexia." There he met the printer Dicky Flatt, who would become his emblem of the hard-working common man, whose back guvmint needed to get and stay off. Gramm's message that day was his classic: "Freedom is a great thing, America has too little of it, the government's too big, too powerful, and too expensive." ("It still is," adds the senator.)

In time — 1978 — he got himself elected to Congress, as a Democrat (a natural thing for a Georgian and Texan to be). When Reagan took office, Gramm realized that here was a man "who wanted to do what I had always dreamed of doing." He worked with that president to scale back the government, leading the Democratic leadership to boot him from the Budget Committee. Gramm could have switched parties on the spot — but he didn't think it was right, opting to resign and present himself as a Republican in a special election. To the people, he uttered, over and over, his semi-famous line, "I had to choose between Tip O'Neill and y'all, and I decided to stand with y'all."

Gramm says today that the Democratic party is, in fact, socialist, "if by 'socialist' you mean the redistribution of wealth, more decisions made by the central government — no question about it. My grandmother thought of the Democrats as the party of the people. What they are is the party of government." They benefit from economic ignorance, too, because the subject "is very hard to understand." Trade, in particular, is "the toughest issue I've ever dealt with, and it is also the one I feel most passionate about." The problem is, "Free trade is counterintuitive. It's like skiing. Everyone benefits from trade, but a few people benefit from protectionism, and they know who they are." They also tend to be well organized and entrenched — while the vast, trade-blessed majority remain pretty much clueless.

During Clinton's two terms, Gramm was unyielding. That president probably had no stronger foe in the Senate. Of Clinton, Gramm says, "He had an ability to communicate, like Reagan," but, unlike Reagan, "he was willing to say anything. He could do a 180 on a dime, because he was unencumbered by principles or values, as far as I could tell." Clinton could have done "real harm" if he had "tended to his business, if he had focused all his energies on his political agenda, instead of constantly throwing up roadblocks for himself. The good news is that, in eight years, Bill Clinton did America relatively little harm." His domestic program was thwarted, in large measure because a Republican House was elected in 1994. Newt Gingrich, for Gramm, is something of a tragic figure: "He was the reason the Republicans won control of the House, and, in the end, he had to leave so they could keep control of it."

As for Clinton's foreign policy, it was "weak," but "without Ivan at the gate, it didn't make any difference."

If that Clinton domestic agenda was indeed thwarted, one of the reasons was that Gramm stood — early and immovable — against nationalized health care. He said, famously, that it would pass "over my cold, dead political body." It was his adamancy that stiffened Republican spines, that kept the temporizers and defeatists from trying to split the difference. Gramm remarked that only two people in Washington had read the entire health-care bill, himself and Hillary Clinton: "She loved it, I hated it."

As a presidential candidate, Gramm seemed a good thing: a self-made man, an articulate one, certainly a driven one. He didn't go in for what was later called "compassionate conservatism," because conservatism — just plain conservatism, freedom — was compassionate, dammit, and why didn't more people understand that? And he was tired of being lectured to about poverty and hardship by people who had never known any.

Gramm, though, went nowhere. He raised a lot of money, but not a lot of supporters. What went wrong? "I was a poor candidate. I did a bad job. There's no one to blame but myself." What's more, "America was never going to elect me unless there was a crisis. And people didn't see a crisis in 1996. I was the wrong person at the wrong time. And there may never have been a right time for me."

Turning to the future, Gramm believes, among other things, that Social Security reform will eventually happen, because the Democrats can't demagogue it forever: "At some point, the lights go out. They run out of money," and that will be reform's hour. Gramm would like to see no income tax at all, favoring instead a consumption tax, "because the government doesn't have to know what your income is. It's a simpler system, and everybody pays." Even a flat tax won't "lead you home," because it would be strangled by exemptions. "If you get the tax away from income, you have a much better chance."

And then there's the miserable problem of race in America. Racial politics, says Gramm, is actually "dangerous" (a typically direct Gramm word). "Some people try to benefit by pitting people against one another based on race. Quotas and set-asides are dangerous. In America, we should judge people one at a time. When you start thinking of yourself as a group, that in itself is alien to America. Merit is the only fair way to do things. If we have a system based on merit and I don't get a promotion and someone else does, I can accept that. But if I believe the other person got it based on race, gender, or something else, it's harder to accept." The "incredible inequalities" we impose carry a steep price.

For all these years, Gramm has never quite been a Washington insider, though he's been an excellent player inside Washington. He never tried to be popular, and as a result he was intensely popular among those who understood and appreciated what he was doing. People like Clinton's Paul Begala used to knock him for being anti-government, and if he hated government so much, why did he spend so much time in government? Why didn't he get the hell out? Gramm is that rare, invaluable politician: a free-marketeer and anti-statist who's willing to work and succeed in politics in order to frustrate the centralizers. Someone has to. Not every Friedmanite can afford to shun government.

Can anyone replace him? Among the colleagues Gramm has been most impressed with is Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, "a great senator, who has principles and is willing to stand up for them, and to be unpopular." McConnell is, indeed, probably the most Gramm-like senator in Washington, apart from the original. Gramm also says that "if I could pick just one senator to be my own senator, it would be Don Nickles" of Oklahoma, because "he's got a good heart, and he's right on virtually everything." Finally, he suggests keeping an eye on two less familiar senators: Idaho's Mike Crapo and Alabama's Jeff Sessions.

If there's one thing Gramm is proud of, or wishes to emphasize, it's that "I've changed this town more than it has changed me. And I'm no less idealistic than I ever was." He says, "The one thing I've been committed to is freedom. Not just the freedom to say, 'I disagree with the government'" — everyone loves the First Amendment. No, "economic freedoms, which are the most important ones," and also the ones most easily encroached on. "My whole career, no matter what I've done, has been about trying to promote freedom. That's all there is."

Phil Gramm

Announcement of Candidacy
February 24, 1995
College Station, Texas

Before I begin today, I want to thank Dale Laine, a student and dear friend of mine, class of 1978, who set up this event and whose dear, sweet, wonderful, loving mama Pat died last night at our event in Dallas. I want to ask each of you to remember him in your thoughts and prayers.

Twenty-seven years ago, I drove to College Station, Texas in a used Mercury with a back seat full of books to start what would be a 13-year teaching career and a lifelong love affair with Texas A&M University.

It was here that I met and courted and married my wife, Wendy Lee Gramm. It was here that my two sons were born. It was here that I came and asked you to send me to Congress. It was here that I came back and asked you to let me trade in that little shovel that I was working with in the House for a bigger shovel in the United States Senate.

And I have come back today to ask you for a final promotion, and I've come to ask you for that promotion based on the work that I have done in the House, the work I have done in the Senate, and my commitment to see the job through until it's done.

On November the 8th, in the most decisive election since 1932, the American people said to their government, "Stop the taxing. Stop the spending. Stop the regulating." And they will be stopped. But our job is not finished. We are one victory away from changing the course of American history.

We're one victory away from getting our money back and our freedom back and our country back, and that victory is a victory over Bill Clinton in 1996. With a love for America and a resolve to make her right again, I today declare myself a candidate for President of the United States.

I'm running for President because I believe that if we don't change the policy of our government, if we don't change it soon, if we don't change it dramatically, in 20 years, we're not going to be living in the same country that we grew up in. In 1950, the average American family with two little children sent one out of every 50 dollars it earned to Washington D.C. Today, that family is sending one out of every four dollars it earns to Washington D.C. And if nothing changes soon, it's going to be one in three.

The odds that a boy born in America in 1974 will be murdered are higher than the odds were that a serviceman serving in World War II would be killed in combat. Last year over half of the children born in our big cities were born out of wedlock, and if this trend continues as it is, illegitimacy will be the norm and not the exception in America. I think the frightening but inescapable conclusion of any honest look at where we are as a nation has got to lead us to believe that we're either going to change the way we do our business or else we're going to lose the American dream.

There comes a time in the lives of families and businesses and even in the lives of great nations where you have to either face up to your problems or you're overwhelmed by them. I believe now is such a time for America. As a nation, we face tough choices, but those choices are no tougher than the choices that are faced up to and dealt with by working families and by businesses every day in America.

We have watched politicians for 30 years wring their hands about the budget deficit, but yet all we have to do to balance the federal budget is to freeze government spending at its current level and keep it there for three years. Now, I ask you, how many businesses represented here today have had to go through a tougher restructuring than that just to keep your doors open? How many families here today or families in your hometown have had to make tougher decisions than that when a job was lost or when a parent died? The difference is that families and businesses in America live in the real world. Our government has not lived in the real world for 40 years. And if I become President, that's going to change.

We need a leader that has the courage to tell our people the truth. We need a leader who has the vision to define solutions to our problems, solutions that people can understand and can believe in. And we need a leader who is tough enough to get the job done. In the next 20 months, I hope to convince the American people that I am that leader.

I want your vote, and I mean to earn it. But I know you're tired of promises, and I'm not asking you to accept me on faith. I want you to hear me out. But before you decide, read my record. As a Democrat member of the House, I authored the Reagan program. That program cut government spending, cut taxes and ignited the longest peacetime expansion in American history, an expansion that created 20 million new jobs. That budget rebuilt defense and set in place the cornerstone of a policy of peace through strength that won the Cold War and tore down the Berlin Wall and liberated Eastern Europe and changed the world.

Now, America and the people of my district were happy about that leadership, but Tip O'Neill and the Democrat bosses in the House hated it. So they took me off the Budget Committee. I felt the people of my district were being disenfranchised. But I'd been elected as a Democrat, and I felt if I simply changed parties and stayed in the Congress, something I had every right to do, that there might be some people who would feel betrayed. So against the best political advice, including the urging of my dear friend Lee Atwater, I resigned from the Congress, came back home and ran again as a Republican. No Republican had ever gotten more than a third of the vote in my district. But on Lincoln's birthday, February the 12th, 1983, I defeated 10 Democrats and I went back to Washington to finish the job.

As a freshman senator, when nobody else wanted to face up to the deficit, Warren Rudman and I wrote the Gramm-Rudman law, which was the only effort in a generation to do something about the deficit. And until Congress repealed it in 1990, it did bring the deficit down and it did slow down the rate of growth in government spending. And last year, in the darkest hour of the health care debate, when it looked like Bill Clinton was about to convince America that it made sense to tear down the greatest health care system the world had ever known to rebuild it in the image of the post office -- when pollsters were saying it was political suicide to take on the Clinton health care bill head-on, when 20 Republican senators had signed on to a big-government compromise that raised taxes, I stood up and said, "The Clinton health care bill is going to pass over my cold, dead political body."

I am happy today to say that my political body is alive, the President's health care bill is deader than Elvis -- and Elvis may be back, but the President's health care bill will not be back. To paraphrase an old country and western song, I was conservative before conservative was cool. As President, I will balance the federal budget the way you balance your family budget and the way you balance your business's budget, and I will do it by setting priorities. And where no is the right answer, I will say no.

I will look at every program of the federal government and I will submit it to one simple test. It is a test that by the end of this campaign every person in every city and town in America will know and understand, and I call it the Dicky Flatt test. I call it the Dicky Flatt test in honor of a printer from Mexia that you know because he introduced me here today. Many of you have met him and know him. Many of you have heard me speak about him. He works hard for a living. His print shop is open till 6:00 or 7:00 every weeknight, open till 5:00 on Saturday. And whether you see him at the PTA or the Boy Scouts or the Presbyterian Church, try as he may, he never quite gets that blue ink off the end of his fingers.

As I said, the test is simple. Is this government program worth taking money away from Dicky Flatt's kitchen table? Let me tell you, there aren't many government programs that pass that test.

It's time for America to choose. Are we going to stay on this 30-year spending spree and squander the future of our country, or are we going to change policy and save the American dream? If I am elected President, I will make balancing the federal budget my number one priority and I will not run for re-election unless I get the job done. I want to cut government spending, I want to cut taxes, and I want to let families spend more of their own money on their own children, on their own businesses, on their own future.

The debate is not about how much money is going to be spent on education or housing or nutrition. The debate is about who ought to do the spending. Bill Clinton and the Democrats want the government to do the spending. I want the family to do the spending. I know the government and I know the family and I know the difference, and so do you.

The family is the most powerful engine for progress and human happiness in the history of mankind, and if I become President, we will put the family first. Our welfare system robs poor families of self-respect. It displaces fathers. It makes mothers dependent. And I mean to change it. I want to ask the people -- I want to ask the able-bodied men and women riding in the wagon on welfare to get out of the wagon and help the rest of us pull. We've got to stop giving people more and more money to have more and more children on welfare. And we will change the welfare system because it hurts the very people that it's supposed to help, because it denies our fellow citizens access to the American dream. And because we love them, we're going to help them get it back.

You know, Bill Clinton still takes the old "blame society first" for crime. But if social spending prevented crime, Washington D.C. would be the safest spot on the planet. I want to stop building prisons like Holiday Inns. I want to make prisoners work. I want 10 years in prison without parole for possessing a firearm during the commission of a violent crime or a drug felony. I want 20 years for discharging it, and I want the death penalty for killing somebody.

We don't have to live in a country where we open up the newspaper every morning and read that a robber, or a rapist, or a murderer who has been convicted five or six times is back out on the street and they killed another child. I know how to fix that. And if I have to string barbed wire on every closed military base in America, I'm going to put these people in jail and keep them there.

In taking the oath of office, I will swear to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution. Our Constitution guarantees equal justice under law. And, as President, by executive order I will end quotas, preferences, and set asides. I will fight for equal and unlimited opportunities for every American, but there will be special privilege for no one.

The American dream -- the American dream has always been the deeply held conviction that in America we have a land of opportunity, that in America hard work pays off, that in America you can do better than your parents did, and your children will have an opportunity to do better than you have done. My wife's grandfather came to this country as an indentured laborer to work in the sugarcane fields in Hawaii. My wife's father was the first Asian-American ever to be an officer of a sugar company in the history of Hawaii. And under President Reagan and President Bush, my wife served as chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where she oversaw the trading of all commodities and commodity futures in America, including the same cane sugar that her grandfather came to this country to harvest long ago. That is what the American dream is all about. That's America in action. And it's not the story of an extraordinary family; it's the story of an ordinary family in an extraordinary country.

The United States of America cannot be a passive observer in world affairs. But we can't be the world's policeman either. For our children's sake, and for the sake of humanity, we must be the leader of the world. And to be the leader of the world we must be strong. And that's why I am committed to the principle that even in a world where the lion and the lamb are about to lie down together, I want America to always be the lion.

As President, I will stop the defense cuts. I will provide the pay and benefits necessary to continue to recruit the finest young men and women who have ever worn the uniform of this country. And we will provide them with the finest training and the best equipment that Americans can build. As President, I will never send Americans into harm's way, unless our vital national interests are at stake, and unless our intervention can be decisive. And I will never send American troops into combat under U.N. command.

As a Texas senator, I have been called upon to console families of young men who have given their lives in the service of our country in Somalia and the Persian Gulf. And I want to promise you here today that I, as President, will never send your son or daughter anywhere in the world that I would not be willing to send my own sons.

In the postwar period we have been like a little rich kid in the middle of a slum with a cake. And everybody's looked at this cake and they wanted a piece of it, and we've gone around cutting off pieces, handing it out. And people have hated us for it, because they wanted a bigger piece than we gave them. But what we have to share with a hungry world is not our cake, but the recipe that we use to bake that cake. That recipe is private property, free enterprise, and individual freedom. And in a Gramm administration we will keep the cake and share the recipe.

In just two years -- in just two years -- the Clinton administration has squandered the prestige that Ronald Reagan and George Bush had elevated America to the status of the most powerful and respected country in the world. As President, I pledge to you that I will restore the full measure of respect that our unequal sacrifice in blood and treasury have forever earned for us in the world in which we live.

Unlike the current occupant of the White House, I know who I am. And I know what I believe. And in this campaign I will speak in simple words that everyone will understand, because I want you to know how I feel in my heart.

Neither of my parents graduated from high school, but my mother had a dream before I was born that I was going to college. I resisted. They kept trying to inoculate me with learning. I failed the third, seventh and ninth grade. But my mamma prodded me every step of the way through college, to a Ph.D. in economics, because in the America that we grew up in, mothers' dreams did not die easily.

Too many mothers' dreams are dying too easily in America today, and I want our America back. I want it back for those of us who have known it, and I want the American dream back for those who missed it the first time around. Almost 3,000 years ago, a prophet in Judea named Joel told his people, Your old men shall dream dreams; your young men shall see visions. America is not through dreaming. I want an America where families are limited only by the size of their dreams. I believe that America is worth fighting for, and with God's help I believe that we can and will win this fight.

Thank you, and God bless you, and God bless America.

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