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The President had courted the Democrats shrewdly. He invited 60 Democratic Congressmen to the White House in groups of five to eight, applied his genial soft sell for up to an hour, then gave each Representative a little blue box bearing his signature on the outside and a pair of presidential cuff links on the inside. The cuff links, which cost about $4.40 a pair, were bought by the Republican National Committee. Many of the legislators emerged from the Oval Office wearing big smiles. Presidential aides also applied pressure through influential constituents in the home districts of wavering Democrats.
On Capitol Hill, Speaker O'Neill described Reagan's salesmanship extravagantly: "There is no question that this is the greatest lobbying in the history of the country." O'Neill was blowing smoke, trying to obscure his own failure to hold his party together. Ten days before the vote, the old pro had blundered by predicting a Democratic defeat: "I know when to fight and when not to fight." That admission undermined House Budget Committee Chairman James Jones, who had put together a package designed to please conservative Democrats as well as appeal to moderate Republicans. It protected some social programs supported by urban Republicans as well as by most Democrats, and called for smaller tax cuts and a smaller budget deficit than Reagan's own proposal — features long advocated by conservatives in both parties. At the time, Jones figured that he had a good chance to win about eleven Republicans to his package and hold the Democratic defectors to 35. That, by Jones' reckoning, would have produced a Democratic victory by as many as five votes.
O'Neill tried to recover lost stature within his party by rounding up Democratic votes for Jones' budget resolution. But he undercut those efforts by continuing to predict that the Democratic fight was hopeless. A party leader traditionally makes rosy forecasts of a close battle even when he knows the outlook is bleak. O'Neill, however, made another public admission on the eve of the vote. "There's a feeling among the American people to give the President what he's asked for," he said. "Only the Lord himself could save this one." Dismayed at the Speaker's gloom, Wisconsin's liberal Democrat David Obey quipped: "I think I'll take my harmonica and play Our Only Friend Is Jesus."
The outnumbered Democrats in the Senate realistically had no hope of blocking Reagan's budget there. But Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd further undercut his party's position in the House by announcing that even he planned to vote for the Reagan package. One Democratic leader in the House soon began getting calls from Republicans who had considered voting for the Jones bill. "We can't be hanging out there if your people are throwing in the towel," one of the Republicans complained. On the day before last week's vote, only one Republican, James Jeffords of Vermont, still leaned toward the Jones proposal.