Tip and the Gipper by Chris Matthews

Author:Chris Matthews
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Momentarily stunned, staff members of the Senate Republican Conference who had worked hard to arrange the event, sprang to the defense of their pie, leaping into the apples and attempting to drag out the offenders. By the time the Park Police showed up, almost everyone involved was covered with goo.

“All the local news shows played it big,” I wrote gleefully in my journal that night. “The Committee for Creative Non-Violence vs. the Republican Senate Conference, TWA, Holiday Inn, Pepsi Cola, the Heritage Foundation. On some of the TV news programs it came off as if the demonstration was the purpose of today’s event. It was not clear at all that the pie was to celebrate a tax cut.”

• • •

Now came more street theater. Just two weeks after the pie-soaked melee, President Reagan himself showed up on the Mall. It was a sweltering Washington Monday and he was there to cheerlead at a rally staged by his canny White House showmen. In yet another attempt to turn the nation’s attention from his proposing the largest federal deficit to date, the pastry metaphor had been abandoned in favor of what the president termed a “people’s crusade.” Standing in front of a crowd of roughly five thousand tourists and government workers—not to mention a goodly contingent of Republican National Committee staffers—he was loudly demanding that lawmakers approve an amendment to the Constitution requiring the federal budget be balanced, penny by penny. Commented House majority leader Jim Wright, “It’s like the saloon keeper demanding that everyone take a vow of total abstinence.”

I managed to pull together a modest-sized protest on the other side of the Capitol to coincide with the Reagan-led spectacle. It featured Democratic stalwart Claude Pepper, the eighty-one-year-old congressman from Miami who was the country’s best-recognized advocate for seniors. The old New Dealer called the proposed constitutional amendment a “sneak attack on Social Security.” That night on the evening news, the Pepper-led rally of a hundred or so people nearly won the attention of the significantly larger gathering on the other side of the Capitol. In my journal I noted happily how the coverage we got must have galled “the White House people who did so much to put the day together and had so much to work with.”

Not completely satisfied with that success, I had the idea to plan a Democratic rally on August 4, the one-year anniversary of Congress giving its final approval of the Reagan economic program. My notion was to stage an event focusing solely on the jobs issue—the July unemployment rate had hit 9.8 percent—and away from the budget one. To ensure the most attention, I decided to hold it at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the highly unusual hour of 4 a.m. The battle cry would be “Wake up, Mr. President!” This way we’d be playing not just to the mounting jobless number but also to the White House occupant’s reputation for keeping gentleman’s hours when it came to his workday.

The Associated Press reported on the

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