FROM CHAPTER 3

"Rosty's Wild Ride"

Think balancing the budget--or just cutting the deficit--is easy? To understand why veteran Washington politicians believe otherwise, it helps to go back to a sunny day in August 1989. George Bush had just been elected president the previous fall. The infamous budget summit that would engulf Washington and help end Bush's presidency was still almost a year away. Congress was in the midst of its traditional summer recess, and members were back home, taking the pulse of their constituents. The House and Senate were both still in Democratic hands, and the Democratic chairman of the mighty House Ways and Means Committee--source of all Congress' tax bills and much of its health legislation--had gone back to his Chicago district to try to put down a growing rebellion by an unlikely guerrilla group. What happened to Chairman Dan Rostenkowski that afternoon quickly became a minor legend and a harrowing lesson in the volatility and danger of deficit politics.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The meeting at the Copernicus Senior Citizens Center on Chicago's North Side had gone badly, and all Rostenkowski wanted now was to get out. The broad-shouldered, 15-term congressman had been locked in a closed room for nearly an hour with six senior citizen activists who had nothing for him but complaints, and the building's cooling system was no longer enough to dispel the combined effects of the warm August day outside and the relentless criticism inside. Rostenkowski chafed in his blue suit and ran his finger impatiently around the inside of his starched shirt collar.

The seniors, all of them leaders of Chicago elderly-rights groups, had been handpicked to meet with the Illinois Democrat as part of an arrangement to spare Rostenkowski a shouting match with the scores of elderly protesters waiting for him outside. The seniors were in a simmering rage over the new catastrophic coverage program Congress had added to Medicare in 1988, a little over a year earlier. The new plan insured elderly citizens against the prolonged, wasting illnesses that commonly bankrupted them and their spouses before killing them. But to pay for it, Congress had added a new Medicare surtax that got bigger the more income a beneficiary had. And there was the problem.

Rostenkowski talked about increased benefits and dignity and old-age security, but all most of the seniors could see was the tax. Admittedly, this was a new wrinkle in the relationship between elderly citizens and the federal government, the notion that the wealthiest elderly should pay the full cost of additional Medicare benefits. Seniors across the country had rebelled. Did farmers alone bear the cost of agriculture subsidies? No, they didn't, so why should retirees have to pay for their subsidies by themselves? Social-insurance benefits should be paid for by everybody, the activists at the Copernicus Center told the congressman sharply.

For anyone familiar with the near-regal obeisance with which Rostenkowski was treated in Washington, this was an odd scene. As the immensely influential chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, Rostenkowski customarily operated at the highest levels of Washington's power elite, a man who made deals with presidents and senators (this was five years before Rostenkowski was indicted for misusing his office and lost his reelection bid). Colleagues sought his favor, lobbyists courted him, and staff jumped to his commands, all with a deference that frequently veered into obsequiousness.

But not here, not today. Today, Rostenkowski was smack in the middle of his gritty home turf, in the heart of the heavily Polish-American 8th congressional district he had represented for 31 years. To these people, he was no king, no committee chairman. He was just Danny, their longtime congressman, the guy who ran interference for them if the federal bureaucracy screwed up their benefits and the reliable pol they could count on to show up at the Pulaski Day parade.

For Rostenkowski, this was a critical test. If he couldn't talk sense to people who had known him as their congressman for three decades, where could he make headway? At first, he tried gentle humor. As a sixty-one-year-old himself, he reminded them, he would soon be covered by Medicare, and he wanted as generous a program as possible. Then, as the meeting wore on, he tried to level with them. They were overreacting, he told them bluntly. The new law was a good thing, something that would provide them with far more insulation than they had now against the catastrophic financial costs of the chronic, wasting illnesses that so often were the fate of the elderly. Typically, the astronomical expense of care and treatment would ravage the elderly's savings and resources, forcing them to empty their bank accounts, sell their furniture, their cars, their homes and the rest of a lifetime's accumulated possessions until they were sufficiently impoverished to qualify for Medicaid, the medical welfare program that would pay their hospital and nursing home bills until they died. Is that what they wanted?

What seniors wanted, they had been telling Rostenkowski and other members of Congress for months, was what they had paid for with a lifetime of contributions to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. They wanted their benefits, and they didn't want to have to pay more for them. Wasn't that the deal? Wasn't that what they had worked all their lives for? Rostenkowski and other backers of the new law had a more fundamental concern, one that seniors usually shut their minds to. These were troubled times for the country, Rostenkowski believed. Year after year, the federal government was running dangerously high deficits, as much as $300 billion a year, and programs like Medicare and Medicaid, those giant, self-perpetuating engines of deficit spending, had to be restrained or the crisis would only get worse. It was time for better-off beneficiaries to stop treating the program like welfare for the rich. Medicare was a terrific deal for senior citizens. The elderly got hospital care in exchange for having paid a small payroll tax when they were working; for doctor visits they paid a modest monthly premium equal to about one-quarter of the actual cost of the insurance, with the balance picked up by working Americans. Even with the new surtax it was still a great deal. The wealthiest beneficiaries who would pay the highest tax rate still stood to get far more in benefits than they ever paid into the program in payroll taxes, just as they did with Social Security.

But just as with their Social Security benefits, few of the elderly understood the math. Though both programs were in fact huge transfers of money from working Americans to retirees, and from the better-off to the less well-off, politicians almost never dared explain the issue that way. The elderly had long ago come to the unshakable belief that everything they got came from the contributions they made during their working lives, and the idea that they should be forced to pay again for what they had already bought with their contributions struck them as pure theft. No wonder they were mad. Lobbying groups had fanned that anger with a shrill direct mail campaign that played on the seniors' fears that their tenuous fixed incomes would be shrunk. In some cases, the letters deliberately misled low-income beneficiaries who would actually pay no tax into believing they would pay the same high tax expected of coupon-clipping Medicare recipients. Not true, but dislodging that idea once it had become fixed in the seniors' minds was proving impossible.

Rostenkowski, who had helped write the law himself, tried to explain to the activists that no one at the Copernicus Center made enough money to require him or her to pay anything approaching the maximum $800 a year the richest elderly person would have to pay in additional taxes. But Jerry Prete, sixty-nine, a retired Catholic Charities social worker, insisted that was not true. "It wasn't the richest people--people making $10,000 a year would pay the $800," he said later. "Retired union workers, retired shopkeepers, retired clerks would be paying for that program." Prete and the others had brought along their own CPA to back their claims with numbers. Rostenkowski could not convince them they were wrong. Around and around they went, making no progress.

When the meeting at last broke up, nothing had been resolved. Rostenkowski and the two aides who had accompanied him walked out of the stuffy room and into the Copernicus Center's large dining hall, working their way through a thickening crowd toward the front door. The first TV cameras caught Rostenkowski here, and on the news that evening they showed a man clearly uncomfortable and anxious to be gone. The congressman was hoping somehow to avoid getting stuck amidst the 150 seniors, some carrying signs that said "Rottenkowski," who had been waiting impatiently for him throughout the private meeting.

But what had begun as a bad day was about to get much worse. Just as Rostenkowski was trying to get out, another group of 100 or so retirees was pushing into the center for a free lunch of hot dogs and baked beans provided by the city. The dining area was now taking on a confused, unsettled air. Some of the old-timers recognized Rostenkowski and began to applaud him. "That's Danny," one said. "He's one of us." But the applause changed to boos when Rostenkowski brushed past them, refusing to stop and answer questions.

"Talk to us! Talk to us! You work for us!" somebody shouted. Then the crowd's simmering anger suddenly hit the boiling point. Angry, insulting shouts erupted. People screamed boos at him. "Liar!" "Chicken!" In the congressman's wake, TV cameras found raging faces. "We think that this man is inhuman!" sputtered an elderly man, his face red with hatred. As Rostenkowski and his aides pushed through the exit, a knot of furious men and women surged outside behind him.

By now, Rostenkowski had begun to sense that something was wrong, and it was beginning to dawn on him that his troubles had not been spontaneous. In fact, a rough script was unfolding. Two days before the meeting, network correspondents in Washington had been tipped that something big would happen at the Copernicus Center, and they had their Chicago affiliates out in force to cover Rostenkowski's appearance. As Rostenkowski looked anxiously up and down North Milwaukee Avenue for the car that had brought him here, he felt instinctively that he had been lured into a trap.

As it turned out, this was a setup, devised by the seniors groups and abetted by the media, and Rostenkowski's tough-looking, deeply lined -- and now heavily perspiring -- face would be flashed across TV screens across the country that night to illustrate the story of an arrogant, powerful member of Congress who had brushed off the concerns of aggrieved senior citizens about their Medicare benefits.

Rostenkowski began to move forward again, heading for the Chevy Caprice an aide had waiting for him, engine running. But he had several yards to go and a gauntlet of TV reporters to run. "Is this the first time you've ever been chased out of a meeting?" one of them asked, poking a microphone at him.

Disgust and anger were bright in Rostenkowski's face and his voice failed to conceal his contempt for the question. "You think I was chased out of that meeting?" he said.

"It sure looks like it," said the reporter.

"These people are nuts," Rostenkowski muttered as he pried open the door to the car, got in, and told his driver Mike to get the hell out of there. Mike blew the horn and began inching away from the curb, but the furious knot of sign-wielding protesters encircled the car and blocked the way, forcing Mike to lurch to a stop. Rostenkowski and his aides were trapped. When Mike tried to inch the car forward again, a tiny, white-haired woman leaned forward over the hood. "You hurt her!" screamed a man. "You're trying to hit her! You're trying to run her down!" Panic and fury swept through the crowd, redoubling their rage. Screaming, they bashed the car with their fists and their placards.

The woman was Leona Kozien, and she would later become a minor celebrity as Rostenkowski's chief tormentor this day. With her rose-colored, heart-shaped sunglasses and a placard that said "Seniors for Repeal of the Catastrophic Act," she hardly looked like a match for the beefy congressman inside his heavy sedan. But she was not to be denied. On an impulse, she began slowly climbing up the hood. Kozien, a woman who had never before gotten involved in any kind of demonstration, now was spreadeagled on the hood of Rostenkowski's car.

She continued to inch her way forward until her face was pressed up against the windshield. Peering through the glass, she was eyeball to eyeball with the by-now badly shaken Rostenkowski. "I was a little nervous," Kozien later told reporters who clamored to interview her. "But I could see through the car window that he looked more afraid than I was."

With no other way out, Rostenkowski suddenly sprang from the car and started half-running, half-walking up North Milwaukee Avenue. "There he goes!" somebody in the crowd shouted. "Coward! Coward!" shouted others. "Recall!" "Impeach him!"

It was a breathtaking scene: Dan Rostenkowski, son of a prominent Chicago alderman, a one-time protege of the late and beatified Mayor Richard J. Daley Jr., a 30-year veteran of the House of Representatives who had served under eight presidents going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the chairman of a committee that wrote the tax laws of the land and a political comer once touted as the next Speaker of the House -- now he was just a frightened man being chased down a street in his own city by a gang of enraged septuagenarians.

The TV crews hustled to keep up. What a story! With the cameras on him, Rostenkowski strove for a measure of dignity and damage control. "I don't think they understand what the government's trying to do for them," he said. "I don't think they understand what's going on."

Then Rostenkowski cut through a gasoline station, broke into a sprint and joined up again with Mike, who had somehow managed to extricate the car from the crowd and drive it around the block.

"Let's get the hell outta here," Rostenkowski gasped as Mike gunned the engine. Tires screeching, the car shot away as the elderly protesters jeered in rage and triumph.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

FROM CHAPTER 6

"Read My Lips ... I Lied"

The defiant, six-word declaration that would ultimately unravel his presidency came a little more than halfway through the speech George Bush made when he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in New Orleans in August 1988.

"The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no," Bush began, setting up the line, deftly linking two of the things the Superdome full of Republicans most loathed: taxes and the Democrat-run Congress.

"And they'll push and I'll say no," Bush continued, building momentum. He was working hard to get out from under the shadow of Ronald Reagan, the man to whom the vice president had been such a self-effacing understudy for the last eight years that he seemed devoid of any firm convictions of his own. "And they'll push again and I'll say to them --" and here Bush paused for dramatic effect -- "Read my lips: no new taxes!"

By the end of the campaign two and half months later, the phrase would be so familiar that crowds would shout it out in thunderous unison with the candidate. Even in Bush's quavery imitation of Clint Eastwood, the line had punch. A candidate with no edges suddenly had one, and the buoyant, giddy throng in New Orleans' mammoth convention center exploded with surprised delight.

In one clear stroke, Bush had made himself sound tough and gone a long way toward placating those on the right wing suspicious of his moderate Republicanism. It was Bush, after all, who had derided supply-side as "voodoo economics" when he ran against Reagan in the Republican primaries in 1980. They could forget about that. Tonight he defiantly signaled that he would uphold the no-tax tradition that Reagan had made a cornerstone of Republican political rhetoric.

It was socko campaign politics. It proved to be a disastrous plan for governing.

Twenty-two months later, seated at a polished conference table in the Roosevelt Room of the White House and flanked by the five top Democratic and Republican congressional leaders and his own senior aides, President Bush looked anything but defiant. It was June 26, 1990, and he was in trouble. Almost since the beginning of the year, the economy had been weakening. Deficit projections, once encouraging, had soured badly. For a little more than a month, the president's men had been trying to work out a budget deal with Congress to extricate themselves from the deepening mess. But Democrats, who had been waiting for two years for Bush to weaken like this, were stalling, refusing to deal until Bush made it clear that he would back down on his no-tax pledge.

There had been no advance warning before Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, House Speaker Tom Foley and House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, were summoned early that morning for an urgent meeting with the president. White House chief of staff John Sununu, the imperious former New Hampshire governor who put out the calls, had strongly resisted Democratic overtures to Bush to soften his tax stand. In that respect, Sununu was at odds with Dick Darman, the White House budget director and political pragmatist who had urged the president to leave open the door to a possible deal that included taxes.

But with budget talks going nowhere and the deficit projections and the economy only getting worse, Bush suddenly, unexpectedly, gave in. Early in the meeting, it was clear to Senate Leader Mitchell that Bush had already made up his mind. House Speaker Foley gave a passionate speech about the need for a balanced budget package that included both spending cuts and tax increases. It was the same old Democratic line that Republicans had been rejecting for months. But this time, Bush shocked the Democrats by agreeing with Foley: "Well, I think you're right," the president said, "let's go ahead and do it."

Bush asked Sununu and Darman to draft a statement to that effect, but when it was handed around the room 10 minutes later, Mitchell frowned and asked for a few minutes to huddle in a side room with Foley and Gephardt. Sununu and Darman had written the statement in the third person, so that all the negotiators--including the Democrats--would appear to share the responsibility for putting taxes on the table. That wasn't the way it was going to be, Mitchell insisted. He took out a pen and quickly edited the statement, crossing out the third person references and substituting the first person "me," to make it clear that it was Bush who was calling for tax increases. Back at the table, the president agreed to the rewording. As edited by Mitchell, Bush would say explicitly that it was "clear to me" that among the things needed to make a budget deal work were "tax revenue increases."

Those last three words had escaped Mitchell's editing, and Sununu believed them to be ambiguous enough to convince Democrats that Bush was accommodating them when in fact the White House could claim it was still holding to the tax pledge. "Don't overreact," Sununu told Newt Gingrich, who had recently been elected to the House's number two GOP leadership spot and was the party's key House conservative, "it really doesn't mean taxes. We've really got a very artful formulation."

Indeed, some of the very first wire stories out of the White House that morning, written from press releases delivered to the White House press room shortly after the meeting, treated the announcement as nothing extraordinary. Reporters and editors interpreted "tax revenues increases" just the way Sununu hoped they would--an equivocal construction that could mean something as innocuous as more revenues from the same taxes, something that would happen if the economy picked up.

But as soon as they got back from the White House, Mitchell, Foley and Gephardt went before the TV cameras in the Senate Radio and TV press gallery to give their version of what had happened, and instantly the story changed. The Democratic leaders left no doubt that Bush had, in fact, dropped his tax pledge. "The statement speaks for itself," said Mitchell. "The president has concluded that tax increases are necessary." Foley, who believed Bush had done the right thing for the country at great political danger to himself, made a gentlemanly call for restraint: "I would hope that this would not be the subject of anybody's effort to create political advantage."

But restraint was in short supply. This was the moment Democrats had been waiting for ever since Bush had stuck it to Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis with the tax pledge in November 1988. "George Bush has announced that he is raising taxes," gloated New Jersey Democratic Rep. Bob Torricelli. "The charade is finally over." Arkansas Democratic Rep. Beryl Anthony, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, delightedly trashed the Republicans: "This is an admission that the Republican policies of the last 10 years were a dismal failure."

Publicly, Republicans put on a brave front, following Sununu's line. "The statement was worded very carefully," said Pennsylvania Rep. Bob Walker, one of the House's most avidly hardline Republicans. "It said `tax revenue increases.' Tax revenue increases can mean a cut in capital gains taxes because that gives you additional revenues." But privately they were enraged. "They had lied to everybody," said Gingrich. Bush had suddenly jeopardized the chief distinction that Republicans claimed separated them from Democrats--Republicans would always hold the line against the Democrats' tax increases.

Vice President Dan Quayle got the news while he was taking a shower in his hotel room in California, where he was on a fundraising trip for GOP candidates. "I probably should have looked at the drain, because that's where the Republican Party's best issue--the one that had gotten us elected in 1980, 1984 and 1988; the one that had, more than any other, made the Reagan revolution possible--was headed," he wrote in his autobiography.

Sununu had grossly overestimated his ability to handle Bush's about-face. Besides being angry, Republicans were mystified: Why was Bush making concessions in June, when the end of the budget process was months away, in October? Not only that, the White House had not done Republicans the elementary courtesy of warning them what was coming. The reaction was pure fury.

Nick Calio, Bush's chief congressional lobbyist, had no idea what was happening until calls started coming in from infuriated Republicans on the Hill. Calio immediately went looking for Sununu to find out what was going on, and he found the chief of staff and Darman sitting outside the Oval Office.

"What's the problem?" Sununu demanded.

"This is the problem," said Calio, holding up a copy of the "tax revenue increases" statement. "We just broke the tax pledge." "We did not," shot back Sununu. "That doesn't change anything. We didn't say we'd go for taxes."

Ignoring that issue for the moment, Calio said, "The secondary problem is nobody on Capitol Hill knew about this; we didn't notify anybody, and people are up in arms."

Sununu said that wasn't a problem, either, and if it was, it was chiefly a problem in Calio's mind. The two argued back and forth awhile longer before Sununu angrily called Calio a "pinhead" and insisted one more time that this was not a problem. "I think by the end of the day, his view may have changed," Calio said later with a rueful smile.

Editors and news directors had little trouble picking the day's major story, and the press reaction was quick and savage. That afternoon, the New York Post's front page headline was: "Read my Lips ... I Lied." That evening, all three networks led with the tax story, and two used videotape of Bush making the pledge in 1988.

Unhappily for Bush, this turned out to be the defining moment of his presidency. Bush's trajectory in office is forever described by the liftoff when he made the pledge and the beginning of the long downward plummet that began the moment he gave it up. "When Bush rescinded his tax pledge, that day Bush was over," wrote Peggy Noonan, who had crafted the "read my lips" line and fought to keep it in Bush's speech over the strenuous protests of other advisers. "And he was over not only because he had gone back on his central pledge of 1988--the informing pledge, the one that said, `I'm not an old-style liberal Republican, I'll hold the line as Reagan did'--but because in going back he signaled that higher taxes, higher spending and bigger deficits would continue, which threw a cold blanket over an already shivering economy, which soon enough cooled further."

To conservative Republicans, reneging on the pledge was an act of betrayal and stupidity for which they never forgave the president, despite Bush's repeated, abject apologies. "If I had it to do over, I wouldn't do what I did then," Bush would say nearly two years later, when he was deep in his reelection race against Democrat Bill Clinton and the furor still hadn't died down. "I did it, and I regret it and I regret it."

But for most seasoned politicians, including many Republicans, the fundamental mistake wasn't that Bush gave the pledge up, but that he made it in the first place. It had been a gross political blunder to box himself in so unequivocally in the sort of situation where only compromisers--including Reagan, for all his professed opposition to taxes--could survive. "The mistake that Bush made was when he took the no-tax pledge, which we thought was a travesty," said the chief of staff to one of the Hill's most senior Republicans. "You never as a legislator lock yourself into that kind of a position. And in fact, realistically, [the abandonment of the pledge] was bound to come, and it just provided fodder for everybody to go after him. Anything that's that absolute when it's not an absolute world I think is trouble. For anybody who's had to sit up here and get these things done, it was just complete stupidity."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Bush's terrible 1990 experience was the last time a president of one party faced off over the budget against a Congress dominated by the opposition, just as Bill Clinton would fight a Republican House and Senate in 1995. The results were a debacle; Bush was mortally wounded and not even the victorious Democrats came away unscathed. No year resonated more in the minds of the 1995 combatants than this one, and both sides drew lessons that determined the way they would act in 1995 and which would largely make the outcome inevitable.

Lesson one: Never mind whether Bush should have made the tax pledge in the first place; once chained to it, politics demanded that he should never have dropped it except under extreme duress. Schooled by that bitter experience, Clinton and Gingrich both determined not to give ground on party-defining principles so much that they lost their core constituencies the way Bush lost his. This would obviously work to make a deal difficult at best in 1995.

Lesson two: A weak or indifferent president will find plenty of ambitious people ready to do what he should do himself, to his peril. Bush was much more interested in global affairs than arcane arguments over taxes and spending. "When it came to domestic policy, he was pretty much an in-box president," said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "I don't think he had any clear domestic ambitions other than to do the right thing. As a result as often as not he was reacting to what fell into his lap." Inside the White House, his own powerful advisers pushed him in opposite directions on the critical question of tax increases. Up on Capitol Hill, two ambitious new leaders looking for ways to assert themselves--Senate Democratic Leader Mitchell and House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich--were laying in wait to whipsaw him. These two men played the game with a destructive ferocity that made the 1995 budget negotiators look back and shudder--and vow not to live through such an experience again.

Lesson three: As silly and ineffectual as the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings antideficit law was, it had the virtue of embarrassing all sides into dealmaking in 1990; they simply could not afford to ignore the targets again in an election year (they had given themselves a two-year extension in 1987). But by 1995 GRH had been defanged, there was no external mechanism to force the two sides to compromise, and both sides could refuse to bend.

Lesson four: Ross Perot notwithstanding, there is nothing easy about deficit politics, especially when the White House and Congress are controlled by different parties. There was no magic wand to wave in 1990 to make deep party differences over the budget go away. Republicans and Democrats disagreed bitterly in 1990 and 1995 over the same things that had divided them for a decade or more: taxes vs. tax cuts, spending for the Pentagon vs. spending for social programs, and the very role of the federal government in American life. When neither side is strong enough to crush the other, someone has to bend. In 1990, Bush bent.

* * * * * * * * *

FROM CHAPTER 7

"The Education of Bill Clinton"

As a rookie president in 1993, Bill Clinton made deficit-reduction his first major initiative, bringing a big package of tax increases and spending cuts to a Democratic House and Senate that would presumably be a friendly venue for the first Democratic president since Jimmy Carter. It turned out to be anything but easy, and the votes got tougher and tougher until finally it seemed that Clinton might actually lose--a potentially devastating defeat for a brand new president. Here are the last two crucial votes in the House and Senate.

* * * * *

The final vote in the House on August 5 gave Democrats an awful choice. Vote no, kill the package, send the financial markets reeling and quite possibly destroy the effectiveness of the first Democratic president in 12 years. Vote yes, support the president, and take a flyer on a horribly risky plan full of politically damaging taxes and spending cuts, a plan that might not even work. There were plenty of perfectly good excuses to vote no. The taxes were too big. The spending cuts were too small. The plan was unfair. The easiest thing to do--and this was true anytime Congress voted on a real deficit-reduction package--was to vote no. No wonder congressional whips and White House were having such a terrible time rounding up the votes to pass it.

But leaders had to win or die. There was no fallback strategy, no Plan B. If they lost this vote, they would have to improvise a new package to attract the mostly conservative Democrats who were walking away, but any concessions to them would just drive down support on the left.

At 1:00 in the afternoon on August 5, with the House vote now just nine hours away, the count stood at 198 yeses plus 10 leaners, for a shaky total of 208, still 10 votes short of the magic 218 it took to win.

Two Democrats had signaled they might be there at the end if Clinton absolutely needed them. Freshman congresswoman Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky of Pennsylvania was a 51-year-old former TV reporter who had narrowly upset a Republican in a heavily GOP district that included Philadelphia's old-money, Main Line suburbs. She had voted no in May, preserving a campaign promise to oppose taxes. She hoped to vote no again and had even told her hometown paper the day before that she would oppose the plan.

Montana congressman Pat Williams also planned to vote no. The 55-year-old former school teacher had earlier talked up the Btu tax, arguing at a town meeting that it was a much better deal than a gasoline tax for Montana. With leaders dropped the Btu tax and replaced it with a gasoline tax, Williams thought he would look like an idiot if he voted yes. But he was there if Clinton needed him.

A third possibility was Ray Thornton, an Arkansas Democrat who was a close friend of White House Chief of Staff McLarty. The whips had been carrying Thornton as a yes for weeks, but just that morning he had called a deputy whip to warn him that he wasn't a solid yes at all. He had told his constituents he would not vote for a gasoline tax. Foley and other Democratic leaders were aghast that Thornton and others were seizing on the pathetically small increase in the gasoline tax as an excuse to vote against the president's plan.

Clinton was working the phones steadily now, trying to round up votes that only a direct call from the president could bring. Early on, the House's hardnosed vote counters complained that Clinton would call members only reluctantly and then engage them in a sort of Socratic dialogue that ended without his directly asking for their vote. "He was not enthused about making a lot of phone calls to people originally," said a senior Democrat. "Then when he started to do them, he'd spend 15, 20 minutes on a call to someone, and then he wouldn't close the deal." But now that they were down to the wire, Clinton was at last getting tough and direct. When he called Williams that afternoon, Clinton got right to the point: "Pat, I need you on this," Clinton said. "It will not pass without your vote. My presidency is at stake."

With time running out, the yeses would not move above 212--a stubborn six votes from the 218 they needed. Majority Leader Gephardt was deeply worried. "I was the one in the leadership who was saying, we've really got a problem here. I mean, this thing well may not pass," he said. There was talk of postponing the vote, but Gephardt said they had no choice but to go. "These votes have kind of a rhythm to them, and you get down to the moment of truth and you've got to go into the machine guns," he said. "I mean, you've got to go, you've got to try to make it happen. There's no other way to do it." The vote began at 9:55 that evening, and with all time expired 15 minutes later--the nominal time allowed for a House floor vote--the count was tied at 210-210. Now, thought New Mexico Democrat Bill Richardson, now we're going to lose. It's really going to happen. Richardson was chief deputy whip for the Democrats, and he had done little for the past several days but live and breathe this vote. Things looked very bad.

The tally moved to 211-212, and as it looked as if Clinton really would lose, cheers erupted on the Republican side of the chamber, punctuated by shouts for "Regular order," a demand that the presiding officer bang the gavel and bring the vote to an end, recording it as a loss for Clinton. But more votes trickled in, and the count seesawed for several minutes before it finally stuck at 216-215. Three Democrats had still not voted; two had to vote yes or the bill would lose on a tie, 217-217, or outright, at 216-218.

The chamber was in pandemonium. To the whips and the Democratic leaders, what had to happen was clear. Williams and Thornton would have to vote yes, so Margolies-Mezvinsky could vote no. It was time for Thornton to deliver, but Richardson could tell from his face that he wasn't going to do it. Once the 15 minutes usually set aside for a House vote expire, the automatic voting machine shuts down and the only way to vote is with a cardboard card, a red card signifying no, a green card yes. Thornton held a green card and a red card as he walked toward the dais to vote. But as members crowded around him to make sure he would vote for the package, he signaled that he would vote no.

The beefy Richardson intercepted him. "Ray, you told the president that you were with us," he said. "Ray, you've got to do this." Thornton, a former Arkansas attorney general, shook his head. His face was ashen. He was shaking. "I promised my constituents I couldn't do this," Thornton muttered. "I told the president that the gas tax would kill my constituents."

If Thornton voted no, Margolies-Mezvinsky would have to vote yes. Foley, normally a placid, gentle soul, grabbed Thornton's arm and angrily reminded him of what he was doing. "You can't let her make this vote!" he shouted. "You've got to be with the president, he's from your state!"

It was no good. Thornton handed in his red card. The vote was 216-216. If the tie held, the bill would die. It was clear to everyone in the well what was going to happen next, and Democrats were furious. Tim Penny accosted Richardson and shook him angrily. "You've killed her; you killed this woman with this vote, you can't do this to her." But there was nothing else they could do, Richardson told him. "We don't get her, we lose," he said simply.

Margolies-Mezvinsky was waiting 30 feet away next to the vote computer on the Democratic side of chamber, where nervous members and aides were anxiously watching the vote count. To anyone looking down from the spectators' galleries high above the floor, Margolies-Mezvinsky was instantly noticeable. Around her, people swirled in constant motion, conferring, shouting, grabbing arms and yelling in each others' ears. She alone seemed to stand stock still, her face ghost-like, her eyes wide and fixed in the middle distance, contemplating what must have seemed like the imminent end of her short career as a House member. Foley walked up and told her they needed her vote. Barely glancing at him, she hesitated and then began to walk slowly down the aisle toward the well. She had the look of someone on the way to her own hanging. A Democrat handed her the green card she would need to vote yes. She joined Williams at the desk at the foot of the Speaker's dais. Williams signed his card and handed it in and, finally, agonizingly slowly, Margolies-Mezvinsky did the same.

After a few seconds' delay, the orange lights displaying the vote total blinked out the changes: from 216-216 to 217-216 and finally to 218-216. It was over. Cheers swelled from the Democratic side of the chamber. Republicans hooted derisively. "Goodbye, Marjorie," they shouted, pantomiming extravagant goodbye gestures. Margolies-Mezvinsky was in tears. Michigan Democrat Sander Levin kissed her on the cheek and gently guided her off the floor into a small holding area called the Red Room, where California Democrat Anna Eshoo comforted her. Richardson came hustling in and thanked her for her vote. "But I may have lost my seat," she protested, choking back tears. Eshoo flashed a venomous look at Richardson. "I can't believe you guys did this to her," she said. Outside, GOP aides eagerly distributed Xerox copies of the Philadelphia Inquirer article that quoted Margolies-Mezvinsky saying she would vote no.

In sharp contrast to the wild, all-elbows roller derby match in the House, where the winning margin came from a fissionable group of a half dozen or more members, the Senate was a master-level chess match where in the end just one person was in play: the stubbornly independent, capricious Senator Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat who had fought Clinton for the presidential nomination and lost in the early going. Now he had the fate of a president he did not much care for in his hands. Kerrey had voted for the president's plan the first time, chiefly to keep the process going. But now, he signaled, he was unhappy with the finished product and warned he would vote against it.

Kerrey and the handful of other Democrats determined to vote no insisted the package just wasn't good enough. Yet each of these politicians was a self-styled deficit hawk, who believed the deficit was the government's single most important problem. Each had proposed a different approach, but each had failed to attract sufficient support to adopt his scheme. Now they were turning their backs on the only proposal that had a chance of passage. They were saying, in effect, that no deficit reduction was better than what Clinton was offering.

The day before the vote, Clinton got on the phone to try to persuade Kerrey to vote yes. Kerrey told Clinton the plan wasn't good enough. Both men's tempers began to rise. Clinton complained that he had tried to do the right thing, and now Kerrey was going to make it impossible. "I shouldn't have even done this. I try to do the right thing and I just get beat up," Clinton said. Kerrey was disgusted at Clinton's whining and told him so. The two men hung up angrily.

Few knew what Kerrey would do until shortly before he finally came to the Senate floor at about 7 p.m. the next evening to speak. The situation was so fluid that Dole went to Kerrey with a last minute scheme to defeat Clinton's package and then work together on a bipartisan plan. Kerrey turned him down. When he finally took the floor to speak, the chamber quickly grew hushed. In a strong, clear voice, Kerrey said that while he regretted it, he would vote for a bill that "challenges America too little" because he did not trust Republicans to do any better if he voted no.

He reserved his strongest criticism for Clinton. In a gesture that was part shameless theatrics and part riveting oratory, Kerrey directed the rest of his speech at Clinton, looking into the TV cameras that ringed the chamber. "President Clinton, if you are watching, as I suspect you are, I will tell you this: I could not and should not cast a vote that brings down your presidency," he said. "Get back on the high road, Mr. President," he said, reminding Clinton of the "shared sacrifice" the president had called for months earlier in announcing the plan. "It is not shared sacrifice for us to brag that we are only raising taxes on those who earned over $180,000 a year. It is political revenge.

"You had the right idea, Mr. President, with the Btu tax. And when we came after you with both barrels blazing, threatening to walk if you did not yield, you should have let us walk," he said. "Instead, we find ourselves with a bill that asks Americans to pay 4.3 cents a gallon more. If they notice I will be surprised. And if they complain, I will be ashamed." An hour later, Kerrey voted yes, the roll call tied at 50-50, and Gore again cast the decisive vote, allowing the plan to pass the Senate and go to the White House. Shortly afterward, Senate leaders gathered for the ceremonial phone call to tell Clinton what he already knew. With exhausted staff looking on, they let Clinton know that his long roll of the dice was over, that he had won. Clinton's voice, husky and relieved, came back to them over the phone. "Thanks," Clinton said to the senators. "Now I can govern."

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