WHEN HOUSE EDUCATION and Workforce chairman John Boehner unveiled the president’s retooled education bill two weeks ago, conservatives howled. Key provisions candidate Bush had stumped for and which Republicans were led to believe formed the backbone of his reform proposal — school vouchers, for example, and local control of federal funds — were either missing or substantially diluted. Over 50 national and state groups promptly withdrew their support. For conservatives looking for a scapegoat, Sandy Kress was their man. On loan from the Austin office of powerhouse lobbying firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld for the administration’s first four months, Kress serves as the president’s point man on education. It’s an issue on which he has an impressive record in Texas. As a former president of the Dallas school board, Kress was the chief architect of that city’s education reform that caught the eye of Texas’s ambitious Republican governor. But Kress also has an impressive record as a lifelong Democrat — as a deputy assistant secretary in Jimmy Carter’s Treasury, a founding member of the Democratic Leadership Council (to which he still belongs), and the pro-choice chairman of the Dallas County Democratic Committee. He launched one congressional campaign for retiring representative John Bryant’s seat in 1990 — aborted when the Texas Democrat decided to stand for reelection after all — and considered at least one other. Perhaps most damning of all, senator Ted Kennedy seems to like him. Given those credentials, it’s no wonder conservatives fumed in private that Kress had sabotaged the president’s education plan. “He’s not a conservative,” says one activist. “He doesn’t see things from the same viewpoint that we do. So right off the bat you have to wonder about whose interests he had in mind.” Says an Education Committee Republican who voted against the bill: “He was real polite, and he’s a real nice guy, but I guess you never really thought he was listening.” There’s no evidence, however, that Kress has done anything but his boss’s bidding. “To the extent that people feel uncomfortable about someone who is not their own being the lead person — yeah, I think that’s a legitimate concern,” says a House leadership aide. “But he’s not the one person driving the machine.” In fact there’s a whole team of them at the White House. Beltway wisdom holds that the key to a successful Bush presidency will be massaging the 50-50 Senate, but it’s the House that is perhaps the administration’s most powerful ally in passing meaningful legislation. With the even split, a highly disciplined Democratic caucus, and a handful of maverick GOP moderates, the best that can be hoped for from the Senate is to limit the damage — witness that chamber’s education bill, crafted principally by Kennedy and liberal Republican James Jeffords of Vermont. Conservatives had pretty much resigned themselves to the emasculation of Bush’s plan by the Senate, but largely bit their tongues, assuming these losses could be mitigated in theHouse-Senate conference by splitting the difference with a more Republican House bill. That didn’t happen. Boehner’s office insists his goal all along was to pass a bipartisan bill, but in a leadership meeting just days before the unveiling, he told House colleagues he had an all-Republican version that could narrowly pass. According to education and leadership sources, the White House insisted that Boehner go with the bipartisan bill. “The president said he wanted a bipartisan bill,” says Michael Schwartz of Concerned Women for America. “That means we’ll have a partisan bill” — with the support of Democrats and “a rump of renegade Republicans.” Indeed, when the measure sailed out of Boehner’s committee 41-7 last Wednesday, six of the seven no votes came from conservative Republicans. Those no votes came less than two hours after a meeting in the Capitol in which senior White House officials and House GOP leaders sought to persuade eight conservative committee members to vote for the bill. The officials, who included White House chief of staff Andrew Card via phone and top congressional lobbyist Nick Calio, managed to sway just two. The unhappiness of House Republicans goes beyond the six defecting committee members. The White House is trying to undo some of the damage, saying the administration will support amendments made by conservative members on the House floor as long as they will vote for final passage. But leadership aides are not sanguine, calling the overall strategy of last-minute Republicanizing “naive” and “unsophisticated.” As one education committee staffer says, “If two moderate bills go to conference, the end result is guaranteed more spending.” Despite their unhappiness, Capitol Hill conservatives would still rather complain about Kress than about his bosses in the White House, including the president. Perhaps what conservatives should really be worried about, though, is that administration aides genuinely seem to believe that the bill is good policy, and not just a poll-driven public relations triumph. “This is as solid as an education bill can get,” says one administration official. Leading conservative education expert Chester E. Finn Jr. scoffs: “I’m disappointed, because I thought this time we’d get the dramatic overhaul that these programs have needed for decades. Instead it’s mostly just incremental, tweaking-type amendments.” Still, conservatives are mostly in a forgiving mood towards the White House. “Maybe it’s a lesson learned,” says one. It’s a lesson, all right. But for whom? Sam Dealey is a writer living in Washington, D.C. May 21, 2001; Volume 6, Number 34
