“Yeah, sure. Where to?” I glanced at his father, who was amused by his son’s nervousness. Bucky was a good kid, with good grades. He had two hobbies that I could detect, motorcycles and girls. If he was into anything more serious, I couldn’t see it.
My namesake breathed a sigh of relief, which I found amusing. Was he actually worried I would say no? I snorted in derision and glanced at his dad, who looked amused. “Well, tell him where you want to go!” urged Tusker.
“I applied to the University of Pennsylvania. Maryland, too, but the University of Pennsylvania is my first choice. I want to study business, and they’re supposed to be really good,” came out in a rush.
I looked over at Tusker, who was obviously proud of his son. “The University of Pennsylvania, hmmm? The Ivy League! Pretty good for the son of an itinerant bicycle repairman.”
“Fuck you, Carl,” laughed Tusker, who flipped me the bird. “I’ll tell Tessa you said that, and let you put up with her.”
“Heaven forbid!” I turned back to Bucky. “Well, why not. My old man went to Pennsylvania. Wharton’s a good school for business, too. I bet the Buckman Group has hired a few MBAs from there over the years. You figuring a letter from me on Congressional stationery might help?” Before he could answer, I looked back at my old friend. I raised my right hand and rubbed my thumb across my fingers. “The Ivy League? You are going to have to repair an awful lot of bicycles!”
He laughed some more. “Now I really am telling Tessa!”
“Give me a couple of days, and I’ll get something for you.” I jotted a note to myself and stuck it in my pocket.
The next morning I was in the front office with Mindy and a few of the others, and I mentioned it to her. She simply nodded and pulled one of the stock recommendations we had around the place. We red-lined a few sentences and added a few replacements, so that it was obvious I actually knew the kid, and she promised to get it typed up on some Congressional letterhead for my signature.
Marty came through as she was reading the final version, and he commented, “If he really is a friend of yours, whatever you do, don’t tell them the truth! Any namesake of yours must have majored in beer and cheerleaders in high school!”
I had to laugh at that, as did a few others there, and Mindy said, “We should write up a real recommendation for him!”
“I should. We can give it to his parents and tell them we’ve already mailed it. Maybe something about how he is expected to be released in time for classes to start in September.” That earned some more laughter.
Mindy grabbed a notepad and jotted that one down. Other phrases that made the cut included, ‘A pre-law curriculum is highly recommended, so that in his future endeavors he will be able to assist his attorneys in his defense’, as well as ‘Buckman is possessed of a spirited and lively sense of humor. A review of property, accident, and general liability insurance requirements should be considered.’ Half the office was weighing in on this, and we wrote a very nice recommendation for a young man applying for incarceration at the maximum security prison in Jessup.
The following weekend we had the Tusks over for dinner, and I gave them the phony recommendation first. Tusker snorted his beer out through his nose halfway through the letter, and was laughing as he passed it over to Tessa. She started squawking as she read it, with Marilyn over her shoulder, especially after I told them I had already sent it off. Marilyn simply said, “You didn’t!”
“Hmmm? I didn’t? Maybe it was this one I sent.” I handed over a copy of the real letter.
Tusker handed Bucky the phony letter. “Keep this. It’s an example of truth in advertising.” The real letter was much nicer, and combined with the Congressional stationery, looked pretty impressive. If he failed to get in, it wouldn’t be because of the letter.
Slick Willie fought us tooth and nail through the summer and the fall. In November I managed to get just enough Senators to generate an override of the veto on D2A. We essentially rewrote the bill as a new bill, which technically meant that the President could legitimately veto it again. However, he could count noses, too, and when he saw the numbers I had cobbled together, accepted it with a certain degree of ill grace. There wasn’t a nice Rose Garden ceremony, that’s for sure!
I was advising some of the other Gang of Eight members, too. A few of them got some funding from ARI to help generate sufficient votes. Slick Willie came up with a tactic that Newt absolutely detested — he surrendered. Specifically, he would veto a bill, but then have a Democrat submit a similar bill, one that generated about 80–90 % of what the first bill did, which he would go along with. This new ‘Democratic’ bill, showing wonderful ‘bipartisan leadership’ that ‘addressed the needs of the nation, and not just the desires of a single interest group’ would pass. As far as Newt was concerned, Bill Clinton wasn’t being beaten into the dust. As far as I was concerned, we were getting an awful lot of what we were pushing for in the Contract, without getting the specific bills passed. We got a big chunk of the welfare reform bill enacted, along with most of the regulatory reform and social security reform bills passed. Clinton punted the tax reform and budget reform bills, promising to roll them into the next budget bill.
This was not at all the way Gingrich wanted to win the fight. He wanted more than just the substance, he wanted the flash and sizzle of ‘winning.’ He wanted to beat Clinton, and to have it publicly acknowledged that he had beaten him. He wanted Clinton to stand and fight, get beat up in the process, look ineffective, and then die from poor leadership abilities during the 1996 elections. As I told Newt months before, Slick Willie was more than capable of teaching Newt a thing or two. Clinton knew when and where and how to fight, and what battles to fight and what battles to cede. He was actually making Newt look more than a little childish and intransigent at times.
Bill Clinton, I think, knew how this was pissing Gingrich off. For reasons of his own, namely winning re-election, he couldn’t allow a Republican ‘victory’ on anything. Still, I had to wonder if he knew just how much it was pissing Newt off at a personal level. This became a full blown crisis in the late fall.
Clinton had managed to push John Boehner’s budget bill and John Doolittle’s tax reform bills into the hodgepodge of the general budget. When the fiscal year ended at the end of September, we still didn’t have a budget. The Republicans in the House, most definitely including me and the rest of the Gang of Eight, wanted to cut spending and balance the budget. Just as much, however, Clinton wanted to increase spending on any number of social programs. These were items like Social Security, education, and health care. Yes, we had already hit on a few of these in the Contract, but this was an end run on those. These were all popular programs designed to appeal to the Democratic base, and it wasn’t a surprise considering that we were about to enter an election year.
Everybody stood their ground, and no budget bill was forthcoming. Normally, when this happens, and it happens a fair number of times, they pass what’s called a ‘continuing resolution’, which simply means we get to keep going at last year’s budget numbers until we could get things sorted out. Gingrich got totally pissed off and decided to throw sand in the gears. He demanded a limit to increasing the national debt. I tried to talk him out of it, in a private meeting with Newt, John Boehner, John Doolittle, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and a few others. Newt saw this as simply a tactic to force Clinton to his will.
“Newt, I am warning you, this will have consequences beyond what you can imagine. You are messing with the promise of the United States government to pay its debt. I guarantee that this will not look good on Wall Street!” I warned him.