Road Warriors

The budget-busting highway bill was more than the troubled President could endure: "Have you looked at the condition of the Treasury, at the amount of money it contains, at the appropriations already made by Congress, at the amount of other unavoidable claims upon it?" That President was Andrew Jackson in 1830, and he had enough political clout to make his veto of the Maysville Road Bill stick. The graveled National Road that aroused Old Hickory's ire has, of course, evolved into today's 44,000-mile Interstate Highway System. But the 19th century conflict between pork barrel and public purse endures as a staple of American democracy, often pitting a fiscally conscious President against a Congress determined to deliver better transportation to the voters who elected it.

So it was again last week as the House, overwhelmingly, and then the Senate, after a stop-and-go drama, overrode Ronald Reagan's veto of the $88 billion highway bill. For a President determined to put the political damage from Iranscam in the rear-view mirror, the final 67-33 defeat in the Senate was an unwelcome reminder of his weakened political condition. But after months of lassitude Reagan put the full force of the presidency into his search for that elusive final vote. In fact, as jarring as the defeat was, it could end up strengthening the President: the personal energy he put into defeating the bill reinforced his image as a warrior against Congress's profligate pork-barrel ways, and it is likely to quiet fears that he is detached, out of touch and content to serve out the last 21 months of his presidency as a ceremonial caretaker.

On the morning of the final vote, Reagan knew the odds were against him: all 54 Senate Democrats opposed him, as did 13 Republican defectors. Even so, he rejected the option posed by Chief of Staff Howard Baker that he quietly accept defeat rather than risk losing more political capital on a hopeless cause. The President also dismissed Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole's warning that his chances of success could be as low as 1 in 100. Instead, with the firm declaration "I want to do it," Reagan traveled the extra mile down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol to plead personally with Senate Republicans for the single vote he needed to sustain his veto.

Meeting with all 46 members of the Republican minority in the ornate Old Senate Chamber, the President began by quoting from the same folk ballad that he used in acknowledging defeat at the 1976 Republican Convention: "I am wounded but not slain. I will rest awhile. But I will rise and fight again." Then Reagan uttered six words that Presidents use sparingly at best: "I beg you for your vote." The G.O.P. Senators, awkwardly divided between loyalists and mavericks, at first responded to the President's plaintive appeal with stiff formality. Then one of the rebels, Senator Steven Symms of Idaho, suggested that all 13 holdouts switch their votes as a bloc. "I wouldn't be the only one to go," said Symms, "but I'd go if I were one of 13."