"Hey, You Hear That Vote?"

Carter takes a stand against spending and wins a surprising victory

A mysterious green button bearing only the initials FCBCD blossomed on the chests of some White House staffers last week. The letters, it was happily explained, meant, "For Carter Before Camp David." And that meant, in turn, that the Carter bandwagon was rolling along faster than ever. At one point, Presidential Aide Hamilton Jordan literally skipped down a White House corridor, chortling, "Hey, you all hear the vote? You hear that vote?"

The vote that so buoyed Ole Boy Jordan was perhaps the most impressive --and unexpected--in Carter's string of recent victories in the once recalcitrant 95th Congress. The House, by a margin of 223 to 190, fell a surprising 53 votes short of overriding Carter's veto of a $10 billion public works bill that would have funded 59 highly varied water projects scattered throughout the legislators' home districts. In a three-day publicity blitz, the President had labeled the bill "wasteful," "inflationary" and an example of "pork barrel" politics.

Carter's assault on the bill, in which he was opposed by all Democratic congressional leaders, was part of a presidential campaign to exploit the anti-inflationary, antitax, anti-Government-spending mood of the voters. Fiscal conservatism appears to be part of Carter's philosophy; although it appeals to many middle-class voters, it also threatens to alienate traditional Democratic supporters: blacks, labor leaders and the poor, who advocate such costly social programs as national health insurance and greater aid to the cities. Trying to keep such groups in line, Vice President Walter Mondale went to Minnesota, Missouri and Pennsylvania last week to assure doubting Democrats that Jimmy Carter will remain true to the traditions of his party by helping "those in American society who without our help will never have a chance for the fullness of American life."

Still, Carter's veto of the bill meant a split with his party allies on Capitol Hill: Speaker Tip O'Neill, House Majority Leader James Wright, Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd and Majority Whip Alan Cranston. When Carter spurned them, they were resentful.

"He won't listen to us," protested Wright. "He's turned his guns on his own congressional leaders. He's campaigning for himself two years before he's up, and 435 Democrats are up now. I don't ever recall a Democratic President making a scapegoat of a Democratic Congress." Snapped another Democratic leader about the veto: "It's the moral equivalent of demagoguery." Added another: "He proposes sacrificing the energy bill on the altar of his own ego."

The warning about the energy bill reflected a widespread feeling on Capitol Hill that Carter had endangered final passage of his energy package by angering some lukewarm supporters of that bill with his public works veto. The natural gas deregulation section of the energy program will be voted upon in the House this week. Some Republicans who supported Carter's veto even conceded that they had done so for the devious purpose of encouraging opposition to the energy bill.

The clash between the Hill and the White House thus raised conflicting claims of political cynicism. Congressional leaders grumbled that the public works bill was not really inflationary at all, and that Carter was raising a phony issue to serve his own ends. Carter has complained just as fervently that it would be irresponsible for a member of Congress to reject the energy bill on the basis of what the President may have done to that legislator's pet local project back home. Both sides have valid points. While any increased and inessential public spending can be considered inflationary, the public works bill actually appropriated nearly $1 billion less than Carter had originally requested. And while it might indeed be cynical for a Congressman to vote against the energy bill out of revenge or even mere pique, this would be in the tradition by which the political game has long been played in Washington.

Whether Carter's veto victory will prove costly to him remains to be seen. But it was a well-earned triumph of hard work and skillful lobbying against heavy odds. The House had passed the public works bill on Sept. 14 by an overwhelming 319 to 71, a margin of better than 4 to 1. The Democratic leaders in the House would need only a two-thirds vote, or a margin of 2 to 1, to override the veto.

To block them, Carter first bought time by announcing on Tuesday that he would veto the "totally unacceptable" bill, but delaying the actual act of veto until Thursday. His staff issued elaborate 40-page press kits explaining why he found the bill so objectionable. Beyond the debatable contention that it was inflationary, he raised more valid issues. One was that the bill, as usual, included relatively small amounts of money to start new water projects that would grow in size and cost as time passed. Carter wanted to start a new procedure in which the full cost of a project would be stated and voted on at the beginning. Carter also made it clear that he did not object to everything in the bill. He approved of 26 new projects. But he specifically criticized 33 others as unnecessary or wasteful.

Once the battle lines were set, Carter dispatched his whole Cabinet to fight for his veto. He even asked General David C. Jones, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to lobby for him on the Hill --but Jones prudently let members of Congress know that he had rejected this involvement of the military in a political issue. More judiciously, Carter summoned 17 second-level House Democrats to the White House and urged them to go against their leadership. On the Hill, White House lobbyists huddled with Abner Mikva of Illinois, who led a group of Democrats that rallied behind the veto. The President then invited key House Republicans, including Party Leaders Robert Michel and John Anderson, to the Cabinet room. "The Republicans have helped me greatly this year," he admitted to them. "I need you Republicans now."

Carter even went outside Washington to enlist the support of six Governors, thus applying unusual home-state pressure from sources who would normally support federal spending in their areas. They were New Mexico's Jerry Apodaca, Idaho's John Evans, Oregon's Robert Straub, Nevada's Mike O'Callaghan, Nebraska's J. James Exon and North Carolina's James Hunt.

As the hour of the vote approached, Carter worked the telephone to doubtful Congressmen. He sometimes spent a full half-hour pleading in his soft way with an individual member, emphasizing the inflation issue. Mondale moved into the fight suggesting bluntly that it was time to repay past political favors. Said he, over and over: "You owe me one." Conceded Alabama Democrat Tom Bevill, chief sponsor of the bill: "The White House did a topnotch job of lobbying."

On Capitol Hill, Democratic House leaders watched their support slip under the new pressure of the post-Camp David President. Last month 208 Democrats had voted for the bill. On the day before the vote, O'Neill and Wright could still count 183 Democrats firmly pledged to override the veto. House Republican Leader John Rhodes thought on Monday that he had 120 Republicans with him in opposition to the President. On Tuesday his tally had slipped to 100, by Wednesday it was down to 96--still enough to beat the President if the Democratic leaders' count was accurate.

During the debate on the House floor, O'Neill argued to no avail that the country faces a future water shortage, just as it has been approaching a serious energy crisis, and that the water projects would soon be seen as urgently needed. "I don't call it pork barrel," he pleaded. "I call it investing in America's future." But when the roll call began, the votes to override soon fell short of the necessary tally. The legislators clearly were worried about being tagged as big spenders. Many Congressmen opposed to the veto sensed as they waited to vote that Carter was winning, and they found it politically safer to vote with him. Thus Carter's margin of victory swelled. In the end, only 150 Democrats and 73 Republicans voted to override.

Rushing toward a pre-election adjournment, Congress is expected soon to approve a substitute public works bill devoid of most projects that prompted the veto. The House also approved last week a $35.2 billion weapons authorization bill after eliminating money for a $2 billion nuclear carrier, which had prompted Carter to veto the earlier defense bill. The House even gave the President a huge potential patronage advantage by approving a bill to create 152 new federal judgeships in a move to unclog court calendars.

Meanwhile, the Senate grappled with two controversial issues. It approved the House-passed 39-month extension of the period for state ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Then, under the watchful management of Russell Long, it began a series of votes on Carter's tax-cut legislation. It readily rejected the Republican Roth-Kemp amendment, which would have cut income tax rates by 33% across the board over the next three years, by a 60-to-36 vote. But it approved an attempt by Senators Edward Kennedy and Dale Bumpers to limit tax relief almost entirely to people making less than $30,000 a year. The tax fight is far from over, though, since whatever the Senate does must then be reconciled with the House-passed bill.

Although the President continued to get his way with Congress, he was encountering difficulty in combatting inflation. The President's Council on Wage and Price Stability reported that consumer prices had risen at an "ominous" annual rate of 9.5% in the first eight months of this year.

Fully aware of the political stakes involved, the President plans to reveal, on Oct. 16 in a televised fireside chat, a so-called Phase II anti-inflation program. Phase I, based primarily on seeking voluntary restraints on wages and prices, has not worked. The new plan is still unsettled and could be changed, but it will require no new legislation. Since the President does not have the power to initiate wage or price controls, his maneuvering room is limited. He is expected to set specific guidelines, asking that wage increases be held to perhaps 7% and price increases to 5.75%.

The problem is how to force unions and manufacturers to observe the guidelines. The main federal lever apparently will be to require contractors doing business with the Federal Government (some 100,000 firms deliver $80 billion in products to the Government each year) to follow the guidelines or risk loss of their contracts. Yet even that pressure could be largely symbolic. "We're not going to cancel the cruise missile because Boeing doesn't agree to the guidelines," concedes one White House economic planner. Some private economists believe that unless there are powerful means of enforcement, Phase II will be no more effective than Phase I.

Such gloomy economic foreboding may check some of the euphoria in the Carter White House. But officials there can point to the even greater pessimism that prevailed about seeking a Middle East agreement at Camp David. As his veto fight demonstrated, the rejuvenated President seems ready to join almost any battle he faces.

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