Bob Michel: conservative in philosophy, practical in politics

Photo by Diane Stebbins

The immigrant story is ingrained in American folklore. It is the story of people trying to find a better life for themselves and their children. Lately, the story has taken a Democratic slant. In 1984 New York Gov. Mario Cuomo electrified the Democratic convention and a nationwide television audience with his keynote speech that compared compassionate government to a family and referred to the sacrifices of his immigrant parents. This year, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the son of Greek immigrants, paid homage to his Greek immigrant parents as he accepted the Democratic nomination for president. Immigrant stories are not the sole property of Democrats however.

U.S. House Republican Leader Robert Michel's father was a French immigrant factory worker; his mother was a first generation American, the daughter of German immigrants. He is a hard-working leader, a Republican who represents the traditionally conservative central Illinois district that includes Peoria.

Michel's ornate Capitol office, with a stunning view of the Mall, is one of the perks of being GOP leader. It's in the Rayburn House Office Building, just off Statuary Hall and the House chamber and a few steps from the office of Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-8, Chicago).

Throughout his career, Michel has been a fiscal conservative, who has enjoyed the opportunity to cut the cost of government. Recently he recalled thinking, "Oh good, now I'll be able to dig in," when he won assignment early in his career to the House Appropriations Committee. In many ways, he is the prototypical conservative from the Midwest, where dignified self-reliance is a virtue and government is often seen as a money-wasting intruder. "Bob Michel epitomizes the spirit of America and the individualism of her people," says a personality sketch distributed by his office. Those standards were thrown back in his face in 1982 when his district seemed to say it found government programs appealing, especially during recession.

Unlike some unbending conservatives, Michel, with a genial booming speaking voice and a strong baritone singing voice, carries the air of a man willing to listen to opponents and take their views into account. In the early 1980s he said that an Easter weekend tour of his district convinced him to vote for repeal of the law requiring income tax withholding on interest and dividends. Michel is an accomplished floor leader, a man who can accurately judge when to press an issue, rouse the troops with a strongly worded short speech or decide to seek a compromise. The flaw some observers see in Michel is that decades on the Appropriations Committee may have left him more adept at crafting legislation than crafting policy.

His political career started as an aide to Rep. Harold Velde, a Peoria area congressman in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Now, 32 years later, Michel is finishing his fourth term as House Republican leader and his 16th term as congressman. If elected to the House again this fall from the 18th District and to another term as leader — both seem likely — he soon would pass Gerald Ford for second place in length of tenure as GOP leader. Ford led the House Republicans for nine years. Michel is finishing his eighth. The record is 12 years, held by Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, who also was speaker for four years.

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If Michel has a political dream, it is to be speaker. But it looks beyond his reach. The Republicans have not had a majority in the House since Martin was speaker, and that was before Michel's election to Congress in 1956. Democrats now have a 78-seat margin, and gains for either party in recent elections have averaged only two dozen seats. The closest he may ever come to the speakership was for a few moments in late 1986 when his friend and rival, then-Speaker Thomas O'Neill (D-Mass.), arranged for Michel to be on the dais, gavel in hand to preside at the farewell session for O'Neill. Michel clearly enjoyed the interlude, smiling and nodding as he received a standing ovation from his colleagues. It was a rare moment in which the House ignored the usual rules of partisan behavior.

Michel is respected in the House as a skillful leader and a man of his word, an important trait in the political world. It is common to hear him described as a decent man. He is also respected for working hard. U.S. Rep. Edward Madigan (R-15, Lincoln), chief deputy GOP whip, credits Michel's tenure to a realization by Republicans that no one can top him. "He holds on because he does the work. And people recognize it." That record of hard work was key to Michel's election as GOP leader in 1981 following the Reagan landslide. He campaigned as the workhorse candidate who could win the battles for President Reagan, in contrast to his rival, Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan, a powerful orator. Veteran Republicans, including the moderate wing, backed Michel. After two decades on the Appropriations Committee, Michel was a master of House rules and skilled in putting together a sellable package.

To critics, Michel is a die-hard believer in an outdated philosophy and a maladroit speaker. His conservative philosophy is sometimes at odds with the heart of his district with its industries and strong union element. As for his speaking abilities, the 1984 edition of Politics in America says, "[H]is sentences often begin with volume and emphasis and end in a trail of prepositions." Nonetheless, Michel can deliver a rousing floor speech to rally the troops or to decry shoddy tactics and bad ideas from the opposition.

Michel quickly proved his mettle as leader. While Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker was winning praise for getting Reagan's tax and spending cuts through the GOP-controlled Senate, Michel was winning the support of conservative Boll Weevil Democrats so that their votes with the unified Republicans approved the Reagan program. "Very satisfying," Michel says. Those were heady days.

Those days nearly ended in electoral defeat. Recession put Michel's central Illinois district into economic turmoil. Reagan embargoed the sale of U.S. equipment for building a natural gas pipeline in the Soviet Union, hurting Caterpillar Inc., the industrial keystone of Peoria. At the same time, reapportionment gave Michel a vastly different district for the 1982 election. His district stretched to Decatur and Springfield instead of going west to Galesburg. Michel was also caught off-guard in that election by labor lawyer G. Douglas Stephens, who won the Democratic nomination on a write-in. He portrayed Michel as the villain who promised riches with Reagan's supply-side economics but delivered hard times to Peoria. Stephens' TV ads used footage of House debate to question whether Michel cared about the welfare of Social Security recipients. "Vote against Bob Michel and you send the president a message," was Stephens' message, recalled Michel this summer.

It got worse. Irked by an off-camera argument over the rules for a debate with Stephens, Michel interrupted the moderator while the debate was being televised. It was far from an image of competent leadership. Congressman Madigan views the 1982 race as one of Michel's most trying times, particularly with the Caterpillar embargo. "It was a big issue in the election. All Bob Michel could do was bite his tongue and suffer through it," Madigan said, even though Reagan in a trip to Peoria had hinted that the embargo would be lifted after the election. Michel won by only 6,125 votes out of 188,000. While he won reelection, his party lost 26 seats in the House in that year, putting Michel and his minority party out of striking range to pull enough Democratic votes to form a majority coalition on most issues.

Since his near loss in 1982, Michel has taken care to stay in touch with his district. "We've been functioning like a freshman or sophomore," he said in a 1984 interview, meaning plenty of trips home and many attempts to show the constituents he was keeping them in mind. With his links to the administration, Michel's office frequently wins the cut-throat race among congressmen to announce — and get credit for — federal grants and contracts for central Illinois firms. To assure reelection, he has also tapped into the Republican campaign funding pipeline. He spent $600,000 more than his challengers in both 1984 and in 1986, and he won each with over 60 percent of the vote.

Michel lamented his constituents' view of his role as House leader. "I guess one of the toughest things [for me]. . . in that tough race was how little importance my own constituents attached to being leader as opposed to being an ombudsman for the district," Michel said in an interview this summer in his Capitol office. "But it's a lesson I've learned. After eight years [as leader] I can point to projects that are coming to my district as a result of my being the leader and how we've shaped some major legislation." As one example, Michel mentioned a "technology transfer" bill that allows federal laboratories, like the agricultural lab in Peoria, to work with private firms.

He gave other examples, including shaping the GOP versions of catastrophic care and welfare reform. He could have mentioned, but did not, his vote in March 1987 to override Reagan's veto of a multibillion dollar highway bill that included money for widening U.S. 121 between Peoria and Springfield. Michel said it was his first vote against Reagan on a major piece of legislation.

Stephens is back running against Michel this year, after passing up two chances for a re-match. He also has a new round of charges that Michel is not representing the needs of the district. By early August, Stephens was a third of the way through his "heartland tour" of the district during which he's promised to stop in every one of its 241 communities, some with only one family. "In 1988, my assessment is Bob Michel is infinitely more vulnerable than in 1982," Stephens said in an interview.

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At the end of June, Stephens had raised about $130,000, 10 times better than at the same point in his 1982 campaign but nowhere close to Michel. The challenger said his advantage rested on issues such as Peoria's loss of manufacturing jobs and the 60-day advance notice to employees before a plant closes. He said the 18th District leads the nation in population loss in recent years. "They [voters] feel they've had smiles and promises but no follow-through," Stephens said.

In some respects Michel is the latest in a series of congressional leaders from central Illinois. Leslie Arends, who represented an adjoining district, was GOP whip for more than three decades. Republican Joseph Cannon, speaker of the House from 1903-1911 came from Danville. Everett Dirksen, whose prowess made him Senate Republican leader, represented the Peoria district beginning in 1932 but retired in 1948 because he thought he was going blind. He was not, and he won election to the Senate in 1950, defeating Democrat Scott Lucas, the majority leader. Michel's predecessor, Velde, was famed chiefly as the chairman of the House Un-American Affairs Committee.

Michel was born in Peoria on March 2, 1923. As a youth he worked in a factory and on a farm. He enlisted in the Army in World War II and served as an infantryman in England, France, Belgium and Germany before being wounded by machine gun fire during the Battle of the Bulge. Returning to Peoria, he completed his education at Bradley University, married Corinne Woodruff and then went to work in Washington as an administrative assistant to Velde.

Michel won election to the House when Velde retired and in his second term won a choice assignment — the Appropriations Committee. Michel relished the opportunity to dig into federal spending and to look for ways to trim it, particularly in the labor and social services budget. Although he often lost these fights, Michel gained prominence. A high point came in 1978 when the House, at Michel's urging, responded to audits showing widespread Medicaid abuse. The House required the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to eliminate $1 billion in waste and fraud. The following year, the House voted with Michel to keep child welfare payments from becoming an entitlement program.

His entry to party leadership was election as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the GOP's House campaign wing, for the 1974 election. "It got me into the business of counting votes very carefully," Michel says, but "as a matter of fact, I didn't do that well." That's an understatement of the slaughter Republicans suffered because of Watergate.

The NRCC chairmanship might have been the summit of Michel's career but Arends retired, opening the door in 1974 for Michel to become GOP whip, the No. 2 post. The next opening came when GOP Leader John Rhodes of Arizona announced late in 1979 that he would step down, but Michel had to compete for the job with Vander Jagt, who has been NRCC chairman for the past decade. At the 1980

House Republicans, with a record of infighting, are no respecters of seniority. Every few years the newcomers accuse the leadership of being too cozy with the Democrats

Republican National Convention Vander Jagt got the plum role of keynote speaker, balanced against Michel's becoming floor manager for Reagan. Michel wanted the job of House GOP leader so much that he decided to "go for broke." If he had not become House leader, he would not have stayed on as whip.

House Republicans, with a record of infighting, are no respecters of seniority. Every few years the newcomers accuse the leadership of being too cozy with the Democrats. Just as the Young Turks had earlier criticized the Rhodes team as being too compliant with Democrats, Michel was rapped in the early 1980s by newly elected members of the New Right as being too cozy with O'Neill. That challenge faded after the bitter 1985 Indiana recount in the 8th Congressional District. Michel stoutly attacked Democrats for steamrolling the GOP in the recount. As a way of demonstrating their bitter feelings, the Republicans called a surprise vote during a lightly attended session to seat their candiate in the Indiana recount. But Michel called off the vote when O'Neill accused Republicans of violating an agreement not to call major votes that day.

Michel had a leading role this spring when House Republicans again put Democrats on the spot, this time with statistics suggesting Democrats squandered the House's time and money on petty matters and were unwilling to allow debate on the serious ones. More important, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) led Republicans in obtaining a House Ethics Committee review of the financial dealings of Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas). All the GOP leaders except Michel signed a letter asking for the investigation. When asked later why he was the only exception, Michel said that it was a matter of practical politics that he be free of partisan animus when he confers with Wright about legislation or House matters. "I don't see the speaker stepping down," Michel said. "I still have to work with him as long as he's speaker." Michel did agree firmly with his colleagues that a review of Wright's dealing was warranted and that an outside counsel was needed. Asked during a mid-summer interview whether Wright acted improperly, Michel said, "I don't know if I can make that judgment."

He still remembers his father's advice, which he seems to heed as a politician and GOP leader: Follow the rules, expect other people to do the same, but don't worry about it if they don't.□

Charles J. Abbott is a reporter in Washington, D.C., covering midwestern issues for the The United Press International.

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