Why the party of the people has a grassroots problem.

• Author: Meacham, Jon
• Position: Apathy in Democratic Party citizen action - Cover Story

"A telephone blitz like this nation has never seen," Tip O'Neill grumbled. He wasn't a happy man. In the last week of July, 1981, as the House inched toward a vote on President Reagan's first budget - the one with tax cuts and a huge defense increase - the Speaker thought he had the votes to head Reagan off. But the damnedest thing kept happening: The phones were ringing in the offices of wavering Democrats - and ringing, and ringing. People were demanding that their congressmen pass the Reagan package.

"We had matched Reagan maneuver for maneuver until the phones started ringing off the wall," another House Democratic leader told the old Washington Star. "The deals we could withstand, but not that damn Alexander Graham Bell."

Twelve years later, in the spring and summer of 1993, the same phones were ringing about Bill Clinton's economic plan. But this time, the calls were demanding that Congress reject a new president's package. Conventional wisdom explains the Clinton problem these ways: It's of course more popular to cut taxes than to raise them; Clinton was elected with just 43 percent of the vote; Reagan was better at television; Clinton got sidetracked by Sharon Stone, the attorney general follies, and gays in the military; Reagan was more popular because he had been shot; and so forth.

All of these explanations have merit. But the enduring problem is that Clinton has no network approaching what Reagan could call on. The conservative grassroots booms in the eighties were products of Reagan's speeches, years of conservative direct mail, and networking meetings with activists in the White House. "Calls and letters don't just happen," says Lyn Nofziger, Reagan's first director of political affairs. "You've got to generate them, and anybody who doesn't know that now is out of it." The callers in '93 were calling for the same thing they called for in '81: less government and lower taxes. Then, it was a call for Reagan; now, it's a call to cream Clinton.

Grassroots lobbying has exploded in recent years because lawmakers watch their fax machines, mail bags, and telephone logs more than they worry about the White House. On most bills you can think of - the sale of AWACs planes to Saudi Arabia, aid to the contras, tax reform, Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas - there were tight votes whose outcome seemed anything but inevitable at the time and which had lawmakers nervously taking the public pulse. In 1974, only 17 percent of Americans said they had recently contacted their representatives in Congress; today, 39 percent have. This year's Western Union Opiniongram message traffic to the Hill is up 66 percent over 1992. And the Capitol Hill switchboard logged 22.5 million calls in all of 1992 - a mark passed this year on August 6, when the total hit 22.8 million. Add congressional hypersensitivity to grassroots sentiment to the humming grassroots machines - with models ranging from Citizen Action to United We Stand to the Christian Coalition - and the real political fight is convincing enough people on your side to get on the horn to Washington.

How are the Democrats faring at this? Badly, and that's puzzling given the party's old image as the party of the people. Take Clinton's chief initiative so far: his original economic plan. "Well, a budget is not necessarily the kind of thing that everybody goes to the barricades on," offers David Wilhelm, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who might want to call Nofziger about whether that's the case. Clinton's original package raised taxes on the top 1 percent, invested in road, job training, and child immunization, and expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit. Given the public's deep skepticism toward government, the budget also hung on the promise of Al Gore's reinvention. Not very concrete, of course, but Reagan was never Mr. Specific, either. Yet the people who had to balance out the conservative callers - environmentalists on the Btu tax, for example - stayed out the fray, and Congress ate the young president's lunch. The plan's overall public approval rating fell from 71 percent in February to 43 percent in July.

Supposedly, the explanation for Reagan's success and Clinton's failure is all money (Republicans have more of it). Although it's true that the right uses expensive mail to keep its base intact, Democrats and progressives aren't poor - there are 12 million liberal donors in the country, giving $1 billion a year on 600,000,000 pieces of mail. Corporate philanthropy alone is worth about $25 million a year, and groups like the ACLU, the Children's Defense Fund, the Urban League, and the NAACP got 16.5 million, or 65 percent, of corporate grants in 1990, according to the conservative Capital Research Center.

Yet as a rule, liberals are reluctant to acknowledge that phone calls and letters - as opposed to grassroots work in the March on Washington tradition - are much more than the work of hysterical right wingers. "Liberals are more interested in principle than in victory," says Roger Craver, whose direct-mail company represents the 40 largest progressive groups, including Common Cause and Planned Parenthoold. "On our side, people don't want a left wing Rush Limbaugh. It seems to offend their sense of decorum." But there are ways to rally public opinion short of conservative-baiting. By...