All Too Human: A Political Education Read Online Free PDF Page A

months after the election, I left politics to become the assistant to Father Tim Healy, the new president of the New York Public Library. Father Healy, a brilliant Jesuit with the bearing of Jackie Gleason, wanted to rebuild the branch libraries that had meant so much to him when he was a kid growing up in the Bronx. I wanted to learn how to manage a major institution and to be part of that educational effort — and, with the Republicans still controlling Washington, Manhattan seemed like a good place to be.
    But just after I found an apartment, Newt Gingrich's campaign to topple Speaker Jim Wright succeeded, and the shake-up in the Democratic congressional leadership that ensued ended with Tom Foley as Speaker, Richard Gephardt as majority leader — and my getting a call from Kirk O'Donnell. A veteran of former Speaker Tip O'Neill's operation, Kirk had been my boss in the Dukakis campaign and was now a Washington lawyer scouting talent on the side for Dick Gephardt.
    Kirk called my office overlooking the library lions on Fifth Avenue and got right to the point: “I know you just started with Father Healy, George, but would you consider coming back to Washington to be Dick Gephardt's floor man?”
    Consider? Are you kidding? Kirk was offering me a starting job in the Democratic Party's major league — the House leadership. The majority leader was one step away from the Speaker, who was two steps away from the president. As executive floor assistant to Gephardt, I would be his shadow, his surrogate, his eyes and ears. In my old job with Feighan, our successes had been satisfying but small, like successfully petitioning for the release of a political prisoner or sneaking an amendment onto the foreign-aid bill to create microloans for third-world farmers. With Gephardt, I would get the chance to help set a national agenda for the Democratic Party, to figure out how to blunt Bush initiatives and force Bush vetoes. With Feighan, I couldn't get my phone call returned by the majority leader's floor man. With Gephardt, I would be that guy. Although I had never met the man, I knew Gephardt was a good Democrat, and there was a bonus: In 1992, he was planning to run again for president. So much for getting out of politics.
    My new job was as exciting as I expected, even though I couldn't explain exactly what it was. Someone once compared it to being an air traffic controller at a busy airport on a foggy night; and as I stood near the Speaker's chair on late nights at the end of session and tried to explain to frustrated legislators why they had to stay for the last vote even though they had nonrefundable tickets for Florida with their families, I knew exactly what he meant. But most of the time, being the floor guy was a more substantive mix of policy and politics. It boiled down to two central tasks: knowing what was going on and getting things done.
    I spent my days in perpetual motion, walking the marble halls from meeting to meeting, member to member, getting information and giving it out. Members would grab me by the tricep if they had a message for the leadership or wanted to know what was going on. Reporters slipped around the columns in search of news. Everything you needed to know had to be in your head, in your pocket, or no more than a phone call away.
    But it wasn't enough to know the rules, or the fine points of policy. In the House, the personal is political and the political is personal. To know the House you have to know the members — their home districts, their pet projects, their big contributors. You have to know what votes they'll throw away and which lines they'll never cross. You have to listen for the message in a throwaway line and laugh at the joke you've heard a thousand times. A personal feud might persist for decades, or an alliance could shift in a moment. The most fascinating part of the job was following those patterns, figuring out who held the key votes or which amendment would lock in a majority,