(6 of 7)
When silence didn't work, Darman employed finely calibrated displays of emotion to keep the talks moving. During one debate on entitlements, Sununu exploded at House Budget Committee chairman Leon Panetta, shouting that Democratic proposals for cutting entitlements fell short of the $120 billion the White House demanded. Sununu put his feet up on the bargaining table and screamed, "Where's the other $20 billion?" Before Panetta could respond, Darman piped up, "You guys ought to know who your friends are in this thing. I'm going to recommend we ((end)) these talks." By mid-September, Mitchell's campaign to burst the bubble began to work. Opinion polls revealed that the White House's insistence on a capital-gains tax reduction, which would benefit mainly those earning more than $200,000 a year, was backfiring. Voters were again thinking of Bush as a guardian of the wealthy, an image the White House had long sought to erase. Says a Republican Party official: "It took us years to start to change the image of the G.O.P. as the party of the rich, and now they've revived that image in the public mind in a matter of weeks." To cut G.O.P. losses, Republicans urged Bush to quit the talks. Within days, JUNK THE SUMMIT buttons appeared on the lapels of House Republicans. Darman held back, arguing repeatedly that such a walkout would hurt the President more than the Democrats.
Finally, with time running out, leaders of both parties excused obstructionists like Byrd and Representatives Gingrich, Conte and Jamie Whitten, and bargaining resumed among a so-called Group of Eight. Thus some of the most influential spokesmen and powerful chairmen of both parties were ousted as the final sprint ensued. Many were angered by the slight -- and some, including Gingrich, led the House uprising that sank the pact last week.
At one point the smaller group nearly swapped a cut in capital-gains taxes for higher tax rates on the wealthy. But the bargaining broke down along old battle lines. "The issue had such symbolic intensity on both sides that progress was impossible," Darman said later. The impasse continued until Sept. 20, when Dole proposed separating the contentious capital-gains issue from questions that had already been resolved. Dole's 11th-hour move led several White House aides to surmise that Darman had put the Senator up to it. It sounded plausible: Darman had saddled up stalking horses to move another President off the mark. One curious staff member put the question to Darman directly, with Sununu standing nearby: Did you ask Dole to revolt so Bush could make a graceful exit? Darman laughed. "Let 'em think that," he said. "But we're not that smart."
Dole's defection was followed six days later by that of House Republican leader Robert Michel, who declared that a capital-gains victory was not worth trading for higher rates. "The price is too high."
In the end, the pact that Darman crafted was done in partly by his own | design. He had tried to remove the budget talks from the political arena, only to find the two inseparable. As the sequester fell, Darman's impatience with the political cowardice of elected officials rose. "It has always puzzled me that there are so many people in the House who are essentially unopposed," he mused last week. "How is it that with 350 unopposed, they have so much trouble looking at the general interest?"