The GOP's master strategist.

In the summer of 1984, when William Kristol was a young assistant professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, he visited Washington to write about how Reaganites were running the agencies they had so long reviled. Fatefully, Kristol chose William Bennett, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, as one of his subjects. In an article for Policy Review, Kristol used the outspoken Bennett to illustrate how a realpolitik conservative should operate: "... [I]n politics, unlike football, there is no referee who makes sure you have a turn on offense. ... One implication of this perspective is that the political executive ought not to be afraid of publicity - or controversy."

The point: Politics is a game, and what matters is offense, crushing your opponents, carrying the day. The piece impressed Bennett, who was even more impressed by young Kristol, the son of two prominent intellectuals who had recommended Bennett for the NEH job - Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. So when Bennett, a master at rhetorically skewering his opponents, moved to the Department of Education, in 1985, he called Bill Kristol and asked if he'd come to work for him. "I knew his DNA pretty well," says Bennett now. "Bill [Kristol] wanted to apply what he had been teaching, and that was what I had wanted to do, too."

Once in the capital, Kristol rose rapidly through the GOP ranks, becoming Bennett's chief of staff and, later, "Dan Quayle's Brain" (as The New Republic dubbed him in 1990). In both jobs, he quickly shed any academic reserve and executed famous conservative blitzes - with Bennett, against the education establishment; with Quayle, against "the cultural elite"; and, with both, against supposed enemies of family values, including the media, Hollywood, and liberals in general. Today, as head of a small think tank called the Project for the Republican Future, Kristol has expanded his brief and is masterminding nothing less than the GOP opposition to Clinton and the Democrats. "Bill really loves the stimulation of Washington - all the phone calls, all the maneuvering, the latest bit," says Kenneth Adelman, a Reagan arms control director and friend of Kristol's. "He loves the operational game."

There's no more important player in that game right now than Kristol. "He's the most learned and intelligent political advocate the Republicans have had in a long, long time," says R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor of The American Spectator. Mississippi Senator Trent Lott observes: "Kristol's always pushing the envelope, keeping Republicans focused on what's possible if we stick to our line." Adds Linda Chavez, a conservative columnist and former Reagan official: "He's the only game in town in terms of ideas."

To understand why Washington is so sharply divided on major issues, left, right, and center - why, for example, no Republicans voted for the president's budget in 1993 and why so few are even slightly inclined to cooperate on significant health care and welfare reform - it is essential to understand Kristol, the party's leading in-house strategic thinker.

Kristol's power comes from an understanding that in politics, what you say matters as much if not more than what you actually do. One May Sunday in 1993, for example, Kristol was a guest on CBS' "Face the Nation" and weighed in on the prospects for the Clinton economic plan. The next day, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on the plan, quoting the titans of the Democratic party - Bentsen, Panetta, Mitchell, Rostenkowski. The only opposition voice in the piece was Kristol's, who had wittily and memorably remarked on the show, "The Clinton budget is like a giant pasture full of sacred cows, cheerfully mooing and contentedly munching at the federal taxpayers' expense." This from a man who served in two GOP administrations that actually asked for more money than the Democratic Congress agreed to spend.

But Kristol got his shot in at the president, and nobody's better at taking those anti-Clinton shots than he is. A smart man (no one in Washington since Kissinger is so universally regarded as "brilliant" by friend and foe alike), Kristol's strategic moves are informed by a grasp not only of tactics but of theory. Now 41, he finished Harvard College in three years, carefully studied de Toqueville, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the philosophical antecedents of the American judicial system, drawing heavily on The Federalist Papers - itself a conservative, 18-century case study, of course, on how to check popular impulses for radical change. Kristol later taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard.

Sitting in his downtown Washington office one July morning, talking about politics and philosophy, Kristol could be conducting an especially interesting seminar: soft-spoken, funny, apt to smile genially at the conclusion of a point. In the span of an hour, he mentions Aristotle, Richard Weaver, the Founding Fathers, and thoughtfully muses about the state of the country. "People aren't happy with the way things are going. Two-thirds of the country think the country is on the wrong track, which is really a mind-boggling statistic, though from a partisan point of view I suppose it's good for Republicans," he says. "But it's really worrisome: The country has never been wealthier or more physically secure, and yet people are genuinely unhappy."

But Kristol is not spending his time wondering how to make America a happier place in practice. Instead, he is doing all he can to turn Washington into a place where Democratic ideas are met with monolithic Republican opposition. A political tactician who wants to win, he believes he has to knock out his opponents altogether: "Inevitably," he says, "Republicans in Washington are going to spend most of our time fighting Clinton."

Kristol's effective, reflexive opposition (the only thing Clinton has done to win even a grudging nod from him has been NAFTA) sadly comes at a time when rarely has there been a greater consensus identifying the country's problems: schools, welfare, crime, values. Kristol has the skills - insights, shrewd political instincts, the ability to communicate clearly - to advance any idea or cause he chooses. But instead of seeking common ground with Democrats to produce solutions, Kristol, who is widely touted as the next GOP White House chief of staff, is raising adversarialism to empyrean heights: Defeat the Democrats, no matter what the issue, no matter what the consequences.

Left in Charge

This adversarialism has deep cultural roots, for conservatives have long felt themselves to be outside the mainstream of respectable elite opinion. In the thirties and forties, liberalism was generally thought of as the prevailing philosophy of the thinking classes, and the fault line seemed to run like this: Liberalism was for smart people - the Schlesingers and the Galbraiths - and conservatism was for dumb people - the McCarthys and the Goldwaters. But William F. Buckley, Jr.'s God and Man at Yale, in 1951, his founding of National Review, in 1955, and the writings of Russell Kirk in the early fifties began to inch conservatism toward intellectual respectability. A second landmark came in the late sixties and early seventies, when men like Kristol's father and Norman Podhoretz - former leftists who moved to the right on defense, foreign policy, and values - founded the neoconservative movement, establishing a conservative beachhead in what Lionel Trilling once called "the adversary culture" of academics, artists, and writers.

Growing up in the house of a neoconservative was Kristol's first formative philosophical experience; the other came at Harvard, where he encountered the teachings of Leo Strauss, the German-born political philosopher who had a long postwar American career at the University of Chicago. Straussianism attracted bright young people like Kristol to conservatism by the mid-seventies - the kind of bright young people who staffed Reagan's Washington. Strong believers in virtue and natural law, Straussians are fundamentally anti-utopian and skeptical of the idea of human progress. "My philosophical background gave me a healthy respect for reality," says Kristol. "Straussianism is very hostile to the notion that we can radically change the world for the better."

Hence Kristol's dark vision of the New Deal/Great Society worlds. He is right to say that many public enterprises fail; so do private ones, a point that conservatives always seem to overlook. And Kristol is certainly wrong in campaigning on the idea that government can't work, period. In the thirties, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority worked; in the late forties and early fifties, the G.I. Bill sent a generation of veterans to college; in the sixties, NASA was superb in getting America to the moon. And just recently, the military in Bush's Persian Gulf War did its job.

To be sure, Kristol does not ignore history altogether. Like his mother, whose studies of Lord Acton and Victorian England, for example, reveal a formidable appreciation of the complexity of human affairs, Kristol knows the world is a complicated place. Still, he has difficulty publicly overcoming his tactical instincts to acknowledge that the other side - in this case, the Democrats - ever has a point. "Conservatives do of course favor an energetic government within its proper sphere," Kristol said in a speech last year. Today, asked directly about what the "proper sphere" is, he says: "What's most striking today is when there's a problem - spouse abuse, you name it - right away someone stands up and introduces federal legislation. There is something crazy about politics of this sort. It creates a politics that is so driven by the crisis of the day or of the week that it's awfully hard to have a sensible debate about anything."

A wonderful answer: witty, glib, partly true. There is a lot of posturing and nattering on Capitol Hill. But that doesn't tell us what government's "proper sphere" is. Ducking the hard choices about what services should continue and what should be cut, Kristol instead argues for dismantling the federal government as we know it. He proposes term limits for lawmakers, a balanced budget amendment, a flat income tax. Fair enough; they are all ideas that deserve a hearing. But note that these are ideas that don't require taking on any particular interest. The GOP has promised such prairie fires before, including abolishing the Departments of Education and Energy, and never delivered. The real question, then, is whether Republicans have anything beyond Kristol's indisputably clever way with words to recommend their being trusted with government again.

Right Jabs

When Kristol was at Education, for example, he and Bennett did some smart things, including beating back the more extreme aspects of bilingual education and making the right speeches about values. People who were there remember Kristol as an excellent manager and strategic thinker. But for all of Bennett and Kristol's commendable rattling of the cages of the education lobby, what did they actually accomplish in those years? Not a great deal. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation noted, in 1989: "Inside Washington, Bennett accomplished little to make reforms part of the legislative framework. He preferred the bully pulpit to negotiating on the Hill."

Kristol brought the same fondness for strategic style over substance to the Council on Competitiveness, a small body with a staff of eight that worked under Kristol in Quayle's office. Though the Bush administration generally failed to live up to its anti-regulatory rhetoric - it published 35,000 more pages in the Federal Register than Reagan did in his first term - Kristol used the Council to position Quayle as a conservative champion of business interests within the White House. The Council would review major proposed federal regulations (usually at the request of affected industries, which were usually big-dollar GOP donors) and would in turn lobby agencies to soften the proposals.

Access to the Council's lobbying powers was for sale: The Washington Post reported that "In almost every city he visits as a campaigner, Quayle holds closed-door roundtables with business people who have made sizable contributions to the local or national GOP." And the Council met in secret, claiming to be like the National Security Council. The difference, of course, is that the National Security Council doesn't solicit problems from paying constituents and then pressure federal agencies to reverse course.

In late 1990, the Council's first victory was to remove a recycling requirement for municipal incinerators. Emboldened by this success, the Council reviewed the EPA's first set of regulations implementing the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which Bush had enthusiastically signed into law. Quayle's office marked up the proposals with 100 suggested changes, including giving industries the power to unilaterally increase their emissions of pollution without public notice, judicial review, or agency oversight.

There were other cases of interference with regulations intended to provide safe factories and intelligently protect the environment: The Council tried to change the definition of "wetlands" to open more land to development (this after Bush promised "no net loss of wetlands" in 1988); tried to stop OSHA from regulating formaldehyde, a carcinogen; and tried to allow power plants near the Grand Canyon to pollute more than the EPA wanted them to.

Nevertheless, few figures in the Bush administration came out as well as Kristol, who spearheaded the Council. This is because Kristol brought the same strategic skills that he uses to promote the GOP opposition line to promoting himself.

Quayle alumni report that journalists streamed in and out of Kristol's office, and that the chief of staff rarely failed to return reporters' phone calls. He was close to Fred Barnes, whose columns in The New Republic frequently argued that the technocratic John Sununu and Dick Darman were wrecking Bush, and the young conservatives were the president's hope for salvation. (After one especially Kristolian Barnes column, White House staffers joked that "Barnes must be mainlining Kristol this week.") Kristol was also attentive to writers at work on books: Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, Time correspondents who wrote Marching in Place, an unflattering portrait of the static first three Bush years, used Kristol as a source. And John Podhoretz, whose Hell of a Ride skewers Bush's "solipsistic presidency," "practically had his headquarters in Kristol's office," recalls one Quayle staffer.

Because Kristol was so close to reporters, people who might criticize him were reluctant to do so; his influence in the White House was based, in part, on the fact that he could always get his spin published or aired. In a July 5, 1992 New York Times Magazine profile of Quayle in which Kristol's staff was called "one of the leanest and meanest operations in Washington," the reporter wrote of the mood inside the White House in the spring of 1992: "For months, Quayle and his staff had been on the verge of panic about the Bush decline. From their perspective, the White House, despite major staff changes since the beginning of the year, had let slip a series of opportunities to win back the affection of American voters." And on September 9, Kristol told the Times, "I'm much less sure that we deserve to win than that the country doesn't deserve for the Democrats to win."

Needless to say, this kind of candor did not endear Kristol to his West Wing counterparts. "You're heralded as a genius if you admit the obvious, even when admitting the obvious hurts the president," says Ed Rogers, a former Sununu deputy. "People in the White House who have access and information with no responsibility or authority can very often use that position to be unhelpful - but still be called a genius by the press, because all the press wants is controversy." True to form as an unapologetic tactician, Kristol shrugs off the criticism. "I actually regret not being more of a pain-in-the-neck," he says now. How did he get away with it? Kristol was justly credited with keeping Quayle from more disasters ("potatoe," "happy campers") than the vice president got into anyway. As long as Kristol kept Quayle in line - and he usually did - he was too valuable to get rid of.

After the election, the defeated Bush began weighing a pardon for Iran-contra figures. At first, the president was interested only in pardoning Caspar Weinberger, but Kristol pushed for more - including a pardon for former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who is a friend of Kristol's and the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, the old neocon ally of Irving Kristol's. [Bill] Kristol was very helpful on the whole issue of going beyond just Weinberger," recalls C. Boyden Gray, Bush's White House counsel. This has a political implication as well: Abrams and others had been convicted for misleading Congress about the Reagan administration's role in aiding the contras; in short, for running a hard-headed, ideologically driven operation. It is the sort of undertaking - the sort of game - that Kristol, as a tactician, appreciates. (Kristol, too, had been an architect of the GOP argument that the Walsh prosecution was out of control and leading to "criminalization of policy differences," a strategic line, of course, intended to deflect attention from the crimes that had unquestionably been committed.) On Christmas Eve 1992, Kristol prevailed, and Abrams and others were pardoned.

That essentially marked Kristol's first foray as an out-of-power operator. His next splashiest undertaking - the Project for the Republican Future - is the site of his most striking achievement: creating and sustaining the GOP opposition to health care reform.

Offensive Plays

On December 3 of last year, Kristol faxed a five-page memo, unsubtly entitled "Defeating President Clinton's Health Care Proposal," to Republican offices across the land. Bob Dole read it; so did the rest of the capital, and Senate and House candidates far and wide.

At the time, Republicans were contemplating their own versions of large-scale reform of the nation's troubled system. Long before Clinton, Dole had been talking about a crisis in health care: "Mr. President, yesterday, President Nixon sent to Congress a comprehensive health message," Dole said on the floor of the Senate on February 19, 1971. "This message recognizes the present health care crisis in our nation." On June 6, 1991, he did it again: "Mr. President, yesterday the Majority Leader, joined by four of his colleagues, announced their solution to certain aspects of the health care crisis confronting this nation. They are to be commended for helping to begin and shape a long overdue debate on access to health care." Today, the problems are even worse: The system costs $1 trillion a year, leaves millions of people out in the cold, and costs are rising so fast that in a few years paying for health care may be untenable.

Kristol, however, urged scorched-earth tactics to defeat reform. "Simple, green-eyeshades criticism of the [Clinton] plan... is fine so far as it goes," he wrote. "But in the current climate, such opposition only wins concessions, not surrender. ... Any Republican urge to negotiate a |least bad' compromise with the Democrats, and thereby gain momentary public credit for helping the president |do something' about health care, should also be resisted."

It was Shermanesque: politics, and policy, as total war. In a subsequent Wall Street Journal piece in January, Kristol coined the mantra of GOP opposition: "Passage of the Clinton health care plan in any form would be disastrous.... There is no health care crisis." Despite the fact that we spend a third more for health care than the next-largest industrialized nation, have a disturbingly high rate of medical inflation, and lag behind other major countries on basic measures of health such as infant mortality, the line caught on. That it worked is a classic example of how Republicans buy off the vast middle class with appealing polemics and short-term fixes.

After bringing Dole (who began 1994 publicly scoffing at Kristol's no-crisis strategy but by midsummer was telephoning Kristol just to stay in touch), Gingrich (a longtime Kristol telephone pal), and others over to his position, Kristol explained how to move the debate entirely his way. "If we are to negotiate with Democrats over health care reform," Kristol wrote in a memo on June 7, "it must be on our terms, not theirs."

That prefigured what Dole - the 20-year-old "crisis" he once worried about long forgotten as the Clinton plan sunk in the polls - said at the July 19 meeting of the National Governors Association in Boston, where the president (briefly) abandoned his universal coverage pledge. "The health care system may not be perfect but it is the best in the world," said Dole, parroting Kristol's memos. "It needs repair but I'm not certain it needs a complete and total overhaul and certainly not a complete and total takeover by the federal government." Helpfully, the senator added, "I think the seeds of a bipartisan agreement still exist - if the administration is willing to come our way."

A singular triumph of tactics: the president on the run, appearing to break a fundamental promise, and the Republicans getting credit for saving the country from another damn giveaway program. Problem is, universal health insurance is anything but a giveaway program if you understand the problems in the current system.

"Our insight was that to beat Clinton we had to defend the quality of the current system," Kristol says now. He argued that most people, while they have generalized anxieties about health insurance and costs, are pleased with their own care. Since polls indicate that 60 to 80 percent of Americans are worried about things like losing coverage if they change jobs, Kristol argued that Republicans should appear to remedy those specific problems and close the deal.

But if this happens, even if you are now well-insured, you lose. Why? Because Kristol's alternative health plan, micro-reforms and repairs to the current system, does nothing to address the central questions driving health care reform: how to control costs and how to achieve universal coverage. The experience of every other major nation that has reformed its health system teaches us the two are intimately connected: That is, to control costs, we need universal coverage. Yet Kristol's provisions - the ones picked up by Dole, Gramm, and others - would only take care of one of the middle class' primary fears: that a private insurer will not insure someone with a pre-existing condition. But if the ranks of the uninsured remain vast, and if doctors and hospitals can continue to charge whatever they can get for services, prices will keep going through the roof (reaching 18 percent of GDP by 1998, if current trends hold). And before long, even moderately affluent people won't be able to afford coverage even if an insurer - in a Kristol-reformed system - will have them.

In spite of its anti-"welfare state" packaging, Kristol's plan whistles government into the game by asking it to regulate the insurance market. Kristol, however, abandoned even this minimal position when Congress was working to get a bill ready for the floors in late summer. When Gephardt and Mitchell proposed compromise measures, Kristol told Republicans to run the clock out. "At bottom this debate is now a political one," he wrote in a strategy memo on July 26. "Sight unseen, Republicans should oppose [the new Democratic bills]." (emphasis Kristol's.)

Health care is not the only place Kristol has blocked possible agreement between liberals and conservatives. On June 15, when the president introduced his long-awaited plan "to end welfare as we know it," Gingrich and Kristol were quoted in The Washington Post's news story about the plan. In opposition, of course. Hearing two Republicans denounce a plan to make welfare recipients go to work - long a staple of Reaganite rhetoric - would be mind-boggling if you didn't know that Kristol was behind the gambit, this time with Charles Murray, a leading conservative social expert.

The Kristol hallmarks were clear: A strategy memo appeared, arguing for a no-compromise line. "Republicans should not busy themselves seeking promising signs or areas of possible agreement in the president's plan," Kristol wrote on June 13. "Instead, we should make plain what this welfare proposal amounts to: marginal tinkering...."

Well, no. As Mickey Kaus argues, Clinton's plan is not without its small holes, but there are no black holes. The two-year limit on benefits before you have to go to work only begins at age 18; new mothers get a year extension after the birth of a child; states can excuse 10 percent of their pool for "good cause"; etc., etc. Sure, public employee unions broke Clinton in the drafting process, successfully inserting a clause that prohibits welfare recipients from doing work unionized government workers are already doing. Nevertheless, the limit is there in the Clinton bill - the first serious initiative in a generation to take on welfare directly.

That, in a nutshell, is Kristol's problem. Politically, the Republicans, who have been railing against welfare for 30 years, can't be seen abetting a Democratic president who will be able to say in 1996 that he's putting people on the dole to work. So Kristol, Murray, Gingrich, Bennett, and other Republicans are racing to Clinton's right.

You could argue that this is merely a case of the GOP making a principled stand in opposition. But you would be wrong. Up until Clinton's election, Republicans were all for welfare-to-work; only since then has the GOP mainstream gone over to Murray's new thesis, laid out in a 1993 Wall Street Journal op-ed: that the problem driving the underclass is illegitimacy, not welfare. That's where things get tricky. Of course it's true that children born out-of-wedlock are more likely to be poor than legitimate kids, and illegitimate children in welfare homes are even more likely to have a hard time of it. But if conservatives thought illegitimacy, not work, was the real policy problem, then why did they only begin talking about it as central after Clinton co-opted the welfare-to-work issue? Because they needed a political trick to trump a smart Democratic president. Despite their basic agreement on how to solve a catastrophic problem - the plight of the underclass - the GOP, sensing a Democratic advantage, moved the goalposts.

Of course, Kristol hasn't got much to work with in the way of substantive GOP policy alternatives that aren't close - perilously close, in Kristol's view - to what Clinton and moderate Democrats want. Clinton was elected, remember, after he carefully distanced himself from traditional liberal dogma on these matters. He acknowledges, joining with many conservatives, that schools have to be accountable for performance; that work must be part of welfare reform; that violent crime has to be strongly punished; and that many of our troubles are, at bottom, the result of family breakdown. (Quayle and Kristol had their "Murphy Brown" speech on family values; Clinton had his speech to black ministers in Memphis.)

Rhetorically, then, Kristol is frequently forced back to anti-government shibboleths: "In our day and age, government has become such a problem and is so much too big and so bad for our character that simply cutting government is a pretty good practical program for a while." These arguments would have more force if the Republicans had a record of anti-government action to stand on. But they don't. The federal payroll grew in the eighties; federal spending under Reagan increased 3 percent a year beyond inflation; the number of federal bureaucrats writing regulations in 1992 was 122,000 - more than there were at the end of the Carter administration. Nevertheless, sensing political opportunity, Kristol and the Republicans shamelessly batter government.

That's good politics, but it doesn't change anything. There are real problems out in the real world, beyond think tanks and strategy memos. And those problems - bad schools, a growing underclass, increasingly violent crime - undoubtedly require enlightened governance if they are to be solved. And enlightened governance comes not from shrewd political tactics but from a willingness to concede a point here and there. The concession may not win you votes, or the sound-bite you want, or the lead quote in Sunday's New York Times, but it's what the great men in our history have done to do great things.

It's how, for example, we won World War II and the Cold War. From about 1940 to about 1965, American foreign policy was largely bipartisan, and congressional Republicans, on issues such as Lend Lease and the Marshall Plan, supported FDR, Truman, and Kennedy. In turn, congressional Democrats supported Eisenhower. On the critical foreign matters of that time, there was a prevailing understanding that fascism and communism were problems that had to be confronted, so cooperation was at a premium. And on some major domestic landmarks that shape the way we live now, more Republicans joined in than not. In the years when most Americans thought we ought to abolish segregation and provide health insurance for the elderly, cooperation worked. On the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1964, and 1965, for instance, only a handful of Republicans in Congress dissented; in 1965, Medicare passed with more House Republicans voting yes than voting no.

A similar kind of consensus about some domestic problems exists today - again, on schools, welfare, crime, and values. But Kristol ("Inevitably, Republicans in Washington are going to spend most of our time opposing Clinton") constrains solutions, even where he agrees with the president in general. This is because, under the rules of the game Kristol is playing, he wins only when Clinton loses ("Republicans should not busy themselves seeking promising signs or areas of possible agreement in the president's plan.") But what's good for Kristol is not always what's good for the country. That's why opposition for opposition's sake is so ultimately destructive.

Asked where he might cooperate with Clinton, Kristol says, "To the degree to which Clinton comes back to the New Democratic message, I would support him. But inevitably I think we would want to go farther and get other things, too." That is, simply, a loss for the Republic. As the welfare example shows, even where real progress is possible, Kristol chooses to use his formidable skills to obstruct clearly needed action.

So the hour of possible cooperation slips away. Meanwhile, Kristol has unabashed visions of this period being like the Carter interregnum, when supply side economics took wing and gave the Reagan forces of 1980 an intellectual veneer. Kristol and his fellow Republicans are playing for cheers, points, and victory. At the end of the day, however, they don't care what the game is

really about - all of us - but only that the win.