Word: cloakrooms
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...public life, a closed club with rituals and codes and rules about how to dress and what to call one another and where to sit and what to say. It is a place where two doorkeepers stand like griffins by nearly every door, where the interns in the cloakroom will unwrap his Snickers bar for him, where everyone is so civil and cordial they just pitch in unbidden. When Dole ran for majority leader in 1985, his friends watched in horror as he frittered away week after week making speeches instead of locking up votes. John Danforth of Missouri...
...colleagues found him personally aloof, they also knew no one worked harder to ease their lives, rescheduling votes around fund raisers, personal trips, the school play. Dole liked to hold court in the cloakroom, ear to the ground, counting votes, making wisecracks. Larry Pressler, an occasionally clueless South Dakotan, was a favorite target. Dole once came down to the Senate well during a vote and said out loud, so everyone could hear, "Don't know which way to go on this one. How did Pressler vote?" Even the clerks would start to laugh. But then it would be Dole...
...warned. "In 1980 George Bush mischaracterized Reagan's policies as 'voodoo economics,' and it haunted him for the rest of his career," Armey argued. "The flat tax is the future of the Republican Party." As Armey and Dole hashed out the details of the congressional schedule in the Senate cloakroom recently, Dole sought to mollify the House majority leader, saying he was referring only to the version of the flat tax that Forbes has been touting. "That's my flat tax," Armey growled. And just in case that was not enough to get his point across, Armey made a special...
Apprised of Gingrich's pique, Dole takes the Speaker aside for a huddle in the Senate cloakroom. "It didn't take much more than a pat on the head and a few words assuring Newt that he's still in charge," says a congressional aide privy to the conversation--although the soothed Newt is reported to have exploded again at the start of the White House meeting when he said, "You've got a chicken-shit operation here, Mr. President...
After a week of negotiation, there came a day in April when the first major spending-cut bill of the G.O.P. Congress had reached a delicate final stage. That was when someone in the Senate cloakroom handed a slip of paper to Trent Lott of Mississippi, the second-ranking Senate Republican. On it was a column of figures -- the Democrats' final offer. Lott looked it over and paused. "I guess the only thing left to do is check this with the leader," he said. That would not be necessary. Poring over the numbers with him was a weary-looking blond...