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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 11/25/2003 3:30 PM (GMT -6) |   |
Welcome to the Machine
How the GOP disciplined K Street and made Bush supreme.
By Nicholas Confessore
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0307.confessore.html#byline
When presidents pick someone to fill a job in the government, it's typically a very public affair. The White House circulates press releases and background materials. Congress holds a hearing, where some members will pepper the nominee with questions and others will shower him or her with praise. If the person in question is controversial or up for an important position, they'll rate a profile or two in the papers. But there's one confirmation hearing you won't hear much about. It's convened every Tuesday morning by Rick Santorum, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, in the privacy of a Capitol Hill conference room, for a handpicked group of two dozen or so Republican lobbyists. Occasionally, one or two other senators or a representative from the White House will attend. Democrats are not invited, and neither is the press.
The chief purpose of these gatherings is to discuss jobs--specifically, the top one or two positions at the biggest and most important industry trade associations and corporate offices centered around Washington's K Street, a canyon of nondescript office buildings a few blocks north of the White House that is to influence-peddling what Wall Street is to finance. In the past, those people were about as likely to be Democrats as Republicans, a practice that ensured K Street firms would have clout no matter which party was in power. But beginning with the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, and accelerating in 2001, when George W. Bush became president, the GOP has made a determined effort to undermine the bipartisan complexion of K Street. And Santorum's Tuesday meetings are a crucial part of that effort. Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum's responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican--a senator's chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. "The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that that was the purpose of what we were doing," says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. "It's been a very successful effort."
If today's GOP leaders put as much energy into shaping K Street as their predecessors did into selecting judges and executive-branch nominees, it's because lobbying jobs have become the foundation of a powerful new force in Washington politics: a Republican political machine. Like the urban Democratic machines of yore, this one is built upon patronage, contracts, and one-party rule. But unlike legendary Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, who rewarded party functionaries with jobs in the municipal bureaucracy, the GOP is building its machine outside government, among Washington's thousands of trade associations and corporate offices, their tens of thousands of employees, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in political money at their disposal.
At first blush, K Street might not seem like the best place to build a well-oiled political operation. For most of its existence, after all, the influence industry has usually been the primary obstacle to aggressive, ambitious policy-making in Washington. But over the last few years, Republicans have brought about a revolutionary change: They've begun to capture and, consequently, discipline K Street. Through efforts like Santorum's--and a House version run by the majority whip, Roy Blunt (R-Mo.)--K Street is becoming solidly Republican. The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer, are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the GOP. Through them, Republican leaders can now marshal armies of lobbyists, lawyers, and public relations experts--not to mention enormous amounts of money--to meet the party's goals. Ten years ago, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the political donations of 19 key industry sectors--including accounting, pharmaceuticals, defense, and commercial banks--were split about evenly between the parties. Today, the GOP holds a two-to-one advantage in corporate cash.
That shift in large part explains conservatives' extraordinary legislative record over the last few years. Democrats, along with the press, have watched in mounting disbelief as President Bush, lacking either broad majorities in Congress or a strong mandate from voters, has enacted startlingly bold domestic policies--from two major tax cuts for the rich, to a rollback of workplace safety and environmental standards, to media ownership rules that favor large conglomerates. The secret to Bush's surprising legislative success is the GOP's increasing control of Beltway influence-peddlers. K Street used to be a barrier to sweeping change in Washington. The GOP has turned it into a weapon.
Lobbyists on a Leash
To see how effective this machine can be, one need only compare the Bush administration's current push to reform Medicare with Bill Clinton's 1993 attempt to pass universal health insurance. Both set out to enact revolutionary changes in the nation's health-care system. And by most measures, Clinton would have seemed more likely to succeed, having staked his presidential campaign on the popular issue at a time when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. By contrast, Bush rarely mentioned Medicare during his campaign, and enjoys much slimmer majorities in Congress. Furthermore, although his prescription-drug benefit is popular, Bush's stated goal of moving more seniors into private health plans is most definitely not. Yet where Clinton's plan met an ignominious death, Bush's appears headed for speedy passage.
There were, of course, many reasons why Clinton failed, from mishandling relations with congressional leaders to the perceived insularity and arrogance of the task force of policy wonks Hillary Clinton assembled to tackle the challenge of achieving universal health care. But another major obstacle was the business and health-care interests on K Street. Clinton worked to win their backing. Among other things, his plan would have capped employer contributions to workers' health insurance at a level far below what many large companies, like General Motors and Kodak, were already paying to their employees' health plans, saving the companies billions of dollars. But some of those firms nevertheless denounced Clinton's plan after it was unveiled, rightly believing that they could bid up the price of their support even more. Meanwhile, conservative activists, eager to deny a new Democratic president his first major political victory, worked to convince business lobbyists that they would gain more by opposing Clinton than by supporting him. As more and more K Street lobbies abandoned Clinton, the plan went down to defeat.
Bush has taken a different approach. Instead of convening policy wonks to solve a problem, he issued a price tag and a political goal: Set Medicare on the road to privatization. When legislators from both parties balked at his initial proposal to offer more generous drug benefits to seniors who left Medicare for private plans, Bush dropped it--but retained incentives to lure seniors into the private market. What he didn't have to do was fight K Street, because the lobbyists were already tamed. Those health-care interests that had doubts about Bush's plan have been successfully pressured to keep quiet. Most of the rest have given Bush their full support.
A good example is the pharmaceutical industry. Drug companies have a natural affinity for the GOP's effort to move seniors into private plans, because if Medicare were to begin providing prescription drugs, its bargaining power could drive down drug prices. But over the past few years, Republican leaders have carefully cultivated and cajoled the industry. The upper ranks of its Washington trade group, PhRMA, are stocked with former aides to powerful Republicans, and its political behavior reflects it: The industry, which gave roughly evenly during the fight over Clinton's health-care plan, now contributes 80 percent of its money to Republicans. PhRMA has essentially become an extension of the GOP. It supported Bush's plan with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign even before the plan had been finalized and made public, and continued its support even as Bush compromised in ways that went against the drug industry's interests. By contrast, large corporations waited to see what Clinton's plan looked like and then haggled over its details, while health-care companies funded the famous "Harry and Louise" ads that eventually helped sink it.
Bush's Medicare legislation could still stall or get watered down. But the fact that the White House and the GOP have pushed it so far, so fast, regardless of the risk and downside, hints not only at the power of an organized K Street, but at the political end to which it is being directed. For years, conservatives have tried and, mostly, failed to significantly reduce the size of the federal government. The large entitlement programs in particular command too much public support to be cut, let alone abolished. But by co-opting K Street, conservatives can do the next best thing--convert public programs like Medicare into a form of private political spoils. As a government program, Medicare is run by civil servants and controlled by elected officials of both parties. Bush's legislation creates an avenue to wean people from Medicare and into the private sector--or, at least, a version of the private sector. For under the GOP plan, the medical insurance industry would gradually become a captive of Washington, living off the business steered to it by the government but dependent on its Beltway lobbyists--themselves Republican surrogates--to maintain this stream of wealth. Over time, private insurers would grow to resemble the defense sector: closely entwined with government, a revolving door for Republican officials, and vastly supportive, politically and financially, of the GOP. Republicans are thus engineering a tectonic political shift in two phases. First, move the party to K Street. Then move the government there, too.
Rise of the Machine
The emerging Republican machine is the mirror image of that built by the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successors. The edifice of federal bureaucracy that emerged between the 1930s and the 1960s shifted power and resources from the private sphere to the public, while centralizing economic regulation in federal agencies and commissions. Democratic government taxed progressively, then redistributed that money through a vast and growing network of public institutions. Those constituencies that Democratic governance serviced best--the working class, the poor, veterans, the elderly, and, eventually, ethnic and racial minorities--made the Democrats the majority party. "Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect," as Roosevelt's aide Harry Hopkins put it, became the basis of Democratic power.
For many years, most business leaders adopted a conciliatory approach to the new system and accepted its basic premises. But during the 1970s, prodded by intellectuals like Irving Kristol and Lewis Powell, businesses began funding a new wave of aggressively ideological think tanks and advocacy groups to challenge the intellectual underpinnings of Democratic governance. Corporations sought influence by opening Washington offices, launching PACs, and pouring money into their trade associations. Savvy GOP operatives steered that money toward the Republican Party. Between the early 1970s and mid-1980s, the number of trade associations doubled; between 1981 and 1985, the number of registered lobbyists in Washington quadrupled, vastly augmenting business power and giving rise to K Street.
But there was a limit to what these groups could accomplish: Democrats still enjoyed an entrenched majority in Congress. The need to cultivate them meant that K Street's immediate interests would never align with the GOP's even if, more often than not, their long-term interests did. As a result, there emerged a broadly bipartisan lobbying culture. To facilitate broad access, most trade associations hired lobbyists from both parties, who were expected to be pragmatic and nonideological. Although certain industries may have had traditional ties to one party, most corporate PACs distributed money roughly equally.
This culture flourished even during Ronald Reagan's two terms. When Reagan was elected and Republicans won the Senate, GOP activists urged business to donate more to their party. But a little-known California Democrat named Tony Coelho stopped them in their tracks. As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he reminded business lobbyists that his party still controlled the House and, with it, the committees and subcommittees through which any legislation would have to pass. At the same time, he worked to convince businessmen that Democrats, too, could deliver for them. During Reagan's first two years, Coelho tripled the DCCC's fundraising. So even as the Republican realignment chugged ahead, Democrats retained a rough parity on K Street.
But while Democratic power endured, it contained an inherent tension. For the most part, K Street groups supported Democrats because they had to and Republicans because they wanted to. The Democrats needed corporate money to stay competitive, but were limited by the pull of their liberal, labor-oriented base. Although the party became generally more pro-business during the 1980s, it had few natural constituencies on K Street. At best, control of Congress allowed Democratic leaders to cut occasional deals with business interests, delivering key compromises--a tax break here, a floor vote there--in exchange for a portion of business giving.
Thus, under Democratic rule, the private sector remained unorganized, with lobbyists wielding huge influence, but in the service of a thousand different agendas and interests. And, as these multiplied, K Street became an obstacle to any large reforms. Lobbyists grew adept at larding ambitious legislation with special-interest provisions. When a reform threatened a large enough bloc, ad hoc coalitions could defeat almost anything, regardless of its popularity with voters. This inherent incoherence disadvantaged Republican presidents as much as it later would Clinton. Reagan's 1981 tax cut, primarily intended as an across-the-board rate reduction for individuals, passed Congress as a special-interest bonanza adorned with far more corporate loopholes and special breaks than his advisers had planned, so ballooning the federal deficit that Reagan spent the remainder of his presidency ratcheting taxes back up, four times between 1982 and 1984 alone. "The hogs were really feeding," David Stockman, Reagan's budget director, later confessed. "The greed level, the level of opportunism just got out of control."
The DeLay School
It took something that hadn't happened in 40 years to begin to change the culture of K Street: In 1994, Republicans won control of Congress. All of a sudden, the Democrats' traditional power base evaporated, and with it much of their leverage over lobbyists. New Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and a handful of close advisers like Ed Gillespie and Grover Norquist, quickly consolidated power in the House, and turned their attention to the lobbying community. Revolutionaries all, they nursed a deep disdain for K Street pragmatism. "They had a hard time dealing with lobbyists who were used to dealing with Democrats [and] were looking at ways to change this in the interests of the [conservative] coalition," says one conservative activist.
One way was to start ensuring that the new GOP agenda of radical deregulation, tax and spending cuts, and generally reducing government earned the financial support they thought it deserved. In 1995, DeLay famously compiled a list of the 400 largest PACs, along with the amounts and percentages of money they had recently given to each party. Lobbyists were invited into DeLay's office and shown their place in "friendly" or "unfriendly" columns. ("If you want to play in our revolution," DeLay told The Washington Post, "you have to live by our rules.") Another was to oust Democrats from trade associations, what DeLay and Norquist dubbed "the K Street Strategy." Sometimes revolutionary zeal got the better of them. One seminal moment, never before reported, occurred in 1996 when Haley Barbour, who was chairman of the Republican National Committee, organized a meeting of the House leadership and business executives. "They assembled several large company CEOs and made it clear to them that they were expected to purge their Washington offices of Democrats and replace them with Republicans," says a veteran steel lobbyist. The Republicans also demanded more campaign money and help for the upcoming election. The meeting descended into a shouting match, and the CEOs, most of them Republicans, stormed out.
DeLay's attempt to corral the private sector stalled soon after. While corporate giving took on a more Republican cast and more Republicans began to be hired, the GOP leadership experienced significant pushback, for two reasons. One was that Democrats still controlled the White House. The other was that, by most measures, Clinton's presidency had been very good for business, especially for the large corporations who had supported Clinton's efforts to bring the budget deficit under control. By 1996, corporate and trade association PACs still gave roughly three-quarters of their money to both parties' incumbents. After Clinton's 1996 reelection, Gingrich's subsequent combustion, and Democratic gains in Congress two years later, the bipartisan lobbying culture remained largely intact.
It took the 2000 elections, which gave Republicans the White House and Congress, to completely change the climate. In the months after, Santorum became the Senate's point man on K Street and launched his Tuesday meetings. Working on the outside, Norquist accelerated what he calls the "K Street Project," a database intended to track the party affiliation, Hill experience, and political giving of every lobbyist in town. With Democrats out of power, these efforts are bearing fruit. Slowly, the GOP is marginalizing Democratic lobbyists and populating K Street with loyal Republicans. (DeLay alone has placed a dozen of his aides at key lobbying and trade association jobs in the last few years--"graduates of the DeLay school," as they are known.) Already, the GOP and some of its key private-sector allies, such as PhRMA, have become indistinguishable.
Dinging the Chicks
Republicans, of course, see things differently. "The Democrats are terrified that our K Street Project is going to replicate the way that they behaved when they had the House and Senate," says Norquist. For him and many of his contemporaries, Democratic rule prior to 1994 was no less autocratic than that of Republicans today. But there's a fundamental difference: Democrats were limited by the basic tension between pleasing their labor base and corporate interests. Unions did, and still do, function as arms of the Democratic Party. When it came to the vastly bigger interests on K Street, someone like Coelho could aim only for financial parity and perhaps a slight advantage in jobs. The emerging GOP machine, however, is premised on a unity of interests between party and industry, which means the GOP can ask for--and demand--total loyalty.
With thin Republican majorities in the House and Senate, a market for Democratic lobbyists remains, and traditional bipartisan lobbying firms still thrive. But increasingly, the trade associations and their corporate representatives--those firms run by Republicans--are the beneficiaries of Washington's new spoils system. And like Mayor Daley's ward supervisors, they are expected to display total loyalty. "These guys come downtown thinking that they owe their job to somebody on the Hill or the influence that somebody brought to bear for them, and they think it's their primary function, in addition to working for the entities they've joined, to sustain the relationship between the Hill and themselves," says Vic Fazio, a top Democratic lobbyist and former congressman from California. "They rationalize it by saying it's good for the old boss and the new one, too."
Day-to-day, the most trusted lobbyists--like those who attend Santorum's meetings--serve as commissars, providing the leadership with eyes and ears as well as valuable advice and feedback. And generally, placing party surrogates atop trade associations makes them more responsive to the party's needs. However, the K Street strategy also provides the GOP with a number of specific advantages. From a machine perspective, such jobs are far more useful than appointive positions in the executive branch. Private sector work has none of government's downside. Political machines thrive on closed-door decision-making; on K Street, there's no other kind. Neither are trade associations subject to inspector generals or congressional oversight; there are no rules against whom you can meet with, no reporters armed with FOIAs. These jobs also make for better patronage. Whereas a deputy undersecretary might earn $140,000, a top oil lobbyist can make $400,000. Controlling K Street also helps Republicans accumulate political talent. Many ex-Clintonites who might have wanted top lobbying positions couldn't get them, and so left Washington for posts at universities, corporations, and foundations elsewhere. But the GOP, able to dole out the most desirable jobs, has kept more of its best people in Washington, where they can be hauled out for government or campaign work like clubs in a golf bag.
But jobs and campaign contributions are just the tip of the iceberg. Control a trade association, and you control the considerable resources at its disposal. Beginning in the 1990s, Washington's corporate offices and trade associations began to resemble miniature campaign committees, replete with pollsters and message consultants. To supplement PAC giving, which is limited by federal election laws, corporations vastly increased their advocacy budgets, with trade organizations spending millions of dollars in soft money on issue ad campaigns in congressional districts. And thanks to the growing number of associations whose executives are beholden to DeLay or Santorum, these campaigns are increasingly put in the service of GOP candidates and causes. Efforts like the one PhRMA made on behalf of Bush's Medicare plan have accompanied every major administration initiative. Many of them have been run out of the offices of top Republican lobbyists such as Ed Gillespie, whose recent elevation to chairman of the Republican National Committee epitomizes the new unity between party and K Street. Such is the GOP's influence that it has been able to marshal on behalf of party objectives not just corporate lobbyists, but the corporations themselves. During the Iraq war, for instance, the media conglomerate Clear Channel Communications Inc. had its stations sponsor pro-war rallies nationwide and even banned the Dixie Chicks, who had criticized White House policy, from its national play list. Likewise, last spring Norquist and the White House convinced a number of corporations and financial services firms to lobby customers to support Bush's dividends tax cut. Firms like General Motors and Verizon included flyers touting the plan with dividends checks mailed to stockholders; Morgan Stanley included a letter from its CEO with the annual report it mailed to millions of customers.
Lobby Horses
Although this arrangement is intended to mutually benefit the GOP and the businesses who support it, in practice, the new Republican machine must balance the needs of K Street with the interests of the party. Sometimes that requires the GOP to take positions that it knows will be unpopular with voters or open the party up to criticism from the press. Shortly after Bush took office, at the behest of business groups, congressional Republicans summarily tossed out a set of ergonomics standards that Bush's father had sent wending through the rule-making process a decade earlier. Similarly, in June, Republican-appointed commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission--bowing to the wishes of large broadcasters and newspaper chains--dumped 50-year-old federal regulations on media ownership, causing a wave of public anger. And while it's not uncommon for lobbyists to have a hand in writing legislation on the Hill, the Bush administration has sometimes shifted the locus of executive policy making so far towards K Street that Bush's own appointees are cut out of the process. While environmental groups complained loudly about being excluded from meetings of Dick Cheney's energy task force, Bush's own energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, was barely involved. As Public Citizen pointed out in a February 2003 letter to Congress, Joseph Kelliher, a senior advisor to Abraham and his point man on the task force, didn't write white papers or propose ideas of his own, but merely solicited suggestions from a cross-section of energy lobbyists and passed them on to the White House, where they were added to the task force's recommendations nearly verbatim. Top administration officials then handed the package down to the House, where it was approved almost unaltered.
But the flip side of the deal is that trade associations and corporations are expected to back the party's initiatives even on occasions when doing so is not in their own best interest. When Bush's recently passed dividends tax cut proposal was first announced, the life insurance industry complained that the bill would sharply reduce the tax advantage of annuities sold by insurance companies, potentially costing them hundreds of millions of dollars. The industry's lobbyists were told to get behind the president's proposal anyway--or lose any chance to plead their case. So they did. In mid-March, Frank Keating, the head of the industry's trade group and a close friend of Bush's, hand-delivered a letter to the White House co-signed by nearly 50 CEOs, endorsing the president's proposal while meekly raising the hope that taxes on dividends from annuities would also be included in the final repeal (which they weren't). Those firms that didn't play ball on Bush's pan paid the price. The Electronic Industries Alliance was one of the few big business lobbies that declined to back the tax cut, in large part because the high-tech companies that make up a good portion of its membership don't even issue dividends. As a result, the trade group was frozen out of all tax discussions at the White House. The final bill reflected the ability of the GOP machine to pass legislation largely on its own terms: Whereas Reagan's 1981 tax bill was a Christmas tree of special breaks, Bush's was relatively clean, mainly benefiting wealthy individuals and small businesses, as the administration had intended.
Positively K Street
If you read The Washington Post last spring, you might have come across what seemed, on the surface, to be just another small beer scandal. This one involved Rep. Michael Oxley (R-Ohio), who heads the House Committee on Financial Services. Late last year, Oxley was set to launch an investigation of pricing practices in the mutual fund industry. But in December, one of his staffers allegedly let it be known that Oxley might go easy on the mutual funds if their trade group, the Investment Company Institute (ICI), pushed out its Democratic chief lobbyist, Julie Domenick. The Post's reporting caused a minor uproar; the House Ethics Committee briefly considered an investigation. The press coverage, however, never made clear why a powerful committee chairman like Oxley would risk his career over one job on K Street.
What explains Oxley's decision is the same thing that explains why the Bush administration would risk angering voters by attempting to privatize Medicare: The GOP needs K Street's muscle for long-term ideological projects to remake the national government. For years, conservatives have been pushing to divert part of Social Security into private investment accounts. Such a move, GOP operatives argued, would provide millions of new customers and potentially trillions of dollars to the mutual fund industry that would manage the private accounts. The profits earned would, of course, be shared with the GOP in the form of campaign contributions. In other words, by sluicing the funds collected by the federal government's largest social insurance program through businesses loyal to the GOP, the party would instantly convert the crown jewels of Democratic governance into a pillar of the new Republican machine. But to make the plan a reality, the GOP needed groups like the ICI to get behind the idea--by funding pro-privatization think tanks, running issue ads attacking anti-privatization Democrats, and so on. The ICI, however, had always been lukewarm to privatization, for which conservatives blamed Domenick. Hence, the GOP machine decided she had to go. In the end, to quell the Oxley scandal, Domenick was allowed to keep her job. But ICI hired a former general counsel to Newt Gingrich to work alongside her, and the GOP's campaign to get K Street behind Social Security privatization continues.
If the GOP is willing to be aggressive enough, even the federal payroll can become a source of patronage. Recently, as part of Bush's "competitive sourcing" initiative, the Interior Department announced that over half of the Park Service's 20,000 jobs could be performed by private contractors; according to the Post, administration officials have already told the service's senior managers to plan on about one-third of their jobs being outsourced. (Stay tuned for "Yosemite: A division of Halliburton Corporation.") But the Park Service is only the beginning. Bush has proposed opening up 850,000 federal jobs--about half of the total--to private contractors. And while doing so may or may not save taxpayers much money, it will divert taxpayer money out of the public sector and into private sector firms, where the GOP has a chance to steer contracts towards politically connected firms.
Anyone who doubts this eventuality need look no further than Florida. There, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out last year, Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, has outsourced millions of dollars worth of work formerly performed by government employees to private contractors. There's little evidence that doing so has improved state services, as the governor's own staff admits. But it has vastly improved the financial state of the Florida Republican Party. According to an investigation by The Miami Herald last fall, "[t]he policy has spawned a network of contractors who have given [Bush], other Republican politicians, and the Florida GOP millions of dollars in campaign donations."
The New Spoils System
The Bush brothers would not be the first political family to turn government contracts into a source of political power. When the current mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, won his father's old job 14 years ago, civil service reform had already wrecked the old system of bureaucratic patronage. So the new mayor began to farm out government services to private contractors, many of which returned the favor by donating generously to Daley's reelection campaigns. Today, Daley dominates Chicago politics almost as thoroughly as did his father. Like his father, Daley has used his power, in part, to improve city services voters care about, from better schools to the flower beds lining Lake Shore Drive. By contrast, the fruits of today's Republican machine--tax cuts and deregulation--have been enjoyed mainly by corporations and upper-income voters, while federal services, from college aid to environmental protection, are getting scaled back.
Indeed, it's striking how openly and unapologetically Bush and his party have allied themselves with corporations and the wealthy. The rhetoric of compassion aside, no one who pays attention to what goes on in Washington could have much doubt as to where the Bush administration's priorities lie. If the economy doesn't improve or unemployment continues to get worse, the GOP may find it's not such an advantage to be seen catering so enthusiastically to monied interests. But most Republicans seem confident that the strength they gain by harnessing K Street will be enough to muscle through the next election--so confident, in fact, that Bush, breaking with conventional electoral wisdom, has eschewed tacking to the political center late in his term. And if the GOP can prevail at the polls in the short term, its nascent political machine could usher in a new era of one-party government in Washington. As Republicans control more and more K Street jobs, they will reap more and more K Street money, which will help them win larger and larger majorities on the Hill. The larger the Republican majority, the less reason K Street has to hire Democratic lobbyists or contribute to the campaigns of Democratic politicians, slowly starving them of the means by which to challenge GOP rule. Already during this cycle, the Republicans' campaign committees have raised about twice as much as their Democratic counterparts. So far, the gamble appears to be paying off.
It wouldn't be the first time. A little over a century ago, William McKinley--Karl Rove's favorite president--positioned the Republican Party as a bulwark of the industrial revolution against the growing backlash from agrarian populists, led by Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. The new business titans flocked to McKinley's side, providing him with an extraordinary financial advantage over Bryan. McKinley's victory in 1896 ushered in a long period of government largely by and for industry (interrupted briefly, and impermanently, by the Progressive Era). But with vast power came, inevitably, arrogance and insularity. By the 1920s, Republican rule had degenerated into corruption and open larceny--and a government that, in the face of rapidly growing inequality and fantastic concentration of wealth and opportunity among the fortunate few, resisted public pressure for reform. It took a few more years, and the Great Depression, for the other shoe to drop. But in 1932 came the landslide election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the founding of the very structure of governance today's Republicans hope to dismantle. Who knows? History may yet repeat itself.
Nicholas Confessore is an editor of The Washington Monthly. < C$>
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 11/26/2003 12:32 PM (GMT -6) | | Divorce reveals Neil Bush secrets
The president's brother was divorced earlier this year
George W Bush's brother Neil outlined business deals and admitted to sexual liaisons with strangers in his divorce proceedings, a news agency has said.
Neil Bush was to receive $2m in stock options from a semiconductor firm despite having no education in the field, he told the court in March.
He also said he had sex with women in Asia who had come to his hotel room. He said they had not asked to be paid.
"It was very unusual," Mr Bush said in response to a lawyer's question.
He told the court he did not know if they were prostitutes, the Reuters news agency reported, saying it had seen a transcript of the 4 March deposition.
Neil Bush is now divorced from Sharon, his wife of 23 years.
He is the third child of former President George Bush and his wife Barbara.
Silverado
He came under heavy criticism when a bank of which he was director collapsed in the 1980s - and was bailed out by the government at a cost of $1bn.
I personally would object to the assumption that they're investing $2m in me
Neil Bush
on his contract with Grace
He denied wrongdoing in the failure of Silverado Savings & Loan, but was fined $50,000 and banned from banking.
In the divorce proceedings, Sharon Bush's lawyer pressed him on why a semiconductor firm would offer him $2m in stock.
Mr Bush signed a contract with Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp in August 2002.
The firm is backed by the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
Marshall Davis Brown, the lawyer, suggested Mr Bush had "not a lot of demonstrable business experience that would bring about a company investing $2m in you".
"I personally would object to the assumption that they're investing $2m in me," Mr Bush replied.
He said has was acting as a consultant for the company and sitting on its board of directors.
He added that he had not yet received stock from Grace.
Reuters said that Grace, Mr Bush and Mr Bush's divorce lawyer declined to comment or were unavailable.
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 11/27/2003 11:28 AM (GMT -6) | | This is a nice piece of political history that gets at how R. Reagan's presidency has taken on an unifying symbolism among conservatives that is quite removed from the actual ambiguities of his presidency. All that without pointing out how the man, perhaps from a politically pragmatic standpoint, spent next to none of his political capital on abortion.
dlw
Reagan's Liberal Legacy
What the new literature on the Gipper won't tell you.
By Joshua Green
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Over the past several months, Nancy Reagan has quietly been alerting friends and family that the health of her husband Ronald Reagan, the nation's 40th president, is failing rapidly due to Alzheimer's. Reagan will turn 92 on Feb. 6, and the signs seem to suggest that he won't be with us for very much longer.
It is not uncommon, when such circumstances involve a national figure, for the media to prepare tributes and obituaries in anticipation of the event. But in the case of Ronald Reagan, the magnitude of this ritual seems certain to eclipse anything that has preceded it. As long as five years ago, the three main newsweeklies had locked up eminent presidential historians to write his valedictories. The conservative Heritage Foundation has underwritten a multimedia Reagan legacy project, cued up and awaiting word of his death. The major networks and the History Channel have prepared exhaustive documentaries (the latter didn't even wait for Reagan's departure, airing "Ronald Reagan: A Legacy Remembered" over Thanksgiving). And media jockeying to pay tribute has already begun: This month's Esquire dubs Reagan the "greatest living American."
But the clearest indicator can be found at the bookstore. The last few months have brought an avalanche of Reagan biographies, from John Harmer's Reagan: Man of Principle to Peter Schweizer's Reagan's War to Peter Wallison's Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency. They join such recent fare as William F. Buckley Jr.'s Ronald Reagan: An American Hero, Peggy Noonan's When Character Was King, and Dinesh D'Souza's Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, themselves just a fraction of the 427 listings on Amazon.com, many of them gauzy tributes, each striving to bestow an encomium more noble and gallant than the last. Indeed, what is so striking about these books--besides their sheer number--is their collective determination to exalt Reagan as the heroic embodiment of American conservatism.
This is no accident. In fact, there is an active campaign to nail into place a canonical version of Reagan's life and career. Energetic conservatives have organized a drive to glorify the former president by trying to do everything from affixing his name to public buildings in each of the nation's 3,066 counties to substituting his face for Alexander Hamilton's on the $10 bill. A similar dynamic applies here. Many of these hagiographies are written by noted conservative authors (Buckley, Noonan, D'Souza) or former Reagan staffers (Wallison, Martin Anderson, Michael Deaver), under the auspices of conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (Wallison), the Hoover Institution (Anderson and Schweizer), and the Heritage Foundation (Stephen F. Hayward's The Age of Reagan, the first of two volumes).
One would have to go back to FDR to find a comparable example of a president portrayed in such consistently glowing terms--and the swashbuckling triumphs depicted in these books mythologize Reagan to a degree which exceeds even that. As one might expect, most gloss over or completely avoid mentioning the many embarrassing and outright alarming aspects of his presidency: from consulting astrologers to his fixation with biblical doom to the tortured rationalizations that enabled him to believe that he never traded arms for hostages. But they also do something else. Most of his conservative biographers espouse a Manichaean worldview in which Reagan's constancy in the face of liberal evils is the key to his greatness. But to sustain such an argument requires more than simply touting (and often exaggerating) his achievements, considerable though some of them were. The effort to gild Reagan's legacy also seems to demand that any accomplishment that didn't explicitly advance conservative goals be ex-punged from his record. And so they have been.
Reagan is, to be sure, one of the most conservative presidents in U.S. history and will certainly be remembered as such. His record on the environment, defense, and economic policy is very much in line with its portrayal. But he entered office as an ideologue who promised a conservative revolution, vowing to slash the size of government, radically scale back entitlements, and deploy the powers of the presidency in pursuit of socially and culturally conservative goals. That he essentially failed in this mission hasn't stopped partisan biographers from pretending otherwise. (Noonan writes of his 1980 campaign pledges: "Done, done, done, done, done, done, and done. Every bit of it.")
A sober review of Reagan's presidency doesn't yield the seamlessly conservative record being peddled today. Federal government expanded on his watch. The conservative desire to outlaw abortion was never seriously pursued. Reagan broke with the hardliners in his administration and compromised with the Soviets on arms control. His assault on entitlements never materialized; instead he saved Social Security in 1983. And he repeatedly ignored the fundamental conservative dogma that taxes should never be raised.
All of this has been airbrushed from the new literature of Reagan. But as any balanced account must make clear, Reagan acceded to political compromises as all presidents do once in office--and on many occasions did so willingly. In fact, however often unintentionally, many of his actions as president wound up facilitating liberal objectives. What this clamor of adulation is seeking to deny is that beyond his conservative legacy, Ronald Reagan has bequeathed a liberal one.
Roosevelt Republican
Reagan arrived in Washington with a full head of steam, vowing, as he put it in the major economic speech of his 1980 campaign, "to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending." To conservatives, and many others, he seemed destined to fulfill campaign pledges to abolish entire government agencies, rein in the excesses of the welfare state, and end Americans' overreliance on government. Sensing the historical moment, Reagan echoed John F. Kennedy in famously declaring, "If not us, who? If not now, when?"
At the outset of his first term, Reagan's revolution appeared to have unstoppable momentum. His administration passed an historic tax cut based on dramatic cuts in marginal tax rates and began a massive defense buildup. To help compensate for the tax cut, his first budget called for slashing $41.4 billion from 83 federal programs, only the first round in a planned series of cuts. And Reagan himself made known his desire to eliminate the departments of Energy and Education, and to scale back what his first budget director David Stockman called the "closet socialism" of Social Security and Medicaid.
But after his initial victories on tax cuts and defense, the revolution effectively stalled. Deficits started to balloon, the recession soon deepened, his party lost ground in the 1982 midterms, and thereafter Reagan never seriously tried to enact the radical domestic agenda he'd campaigned on. Rather than abolish the departments of Energy and Education, as he had promised to do if elected president, Reagan added a new cabinet-level department--one of the largest federal agencies--the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Though his budgets requested some cuts in some areas of discretionary spending, Reagan rapidly retreated and never seriously pushed them. As Lou Cannon, the Washington Post reporter who covered Reagan's political career for 25 years, put it in his masterful biography, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, "For all the fervor they created, the first-term Reagan budgets were mild manifestos devoid of revolutionary purpose. They did not seek to 'rebuild the foundation of our society' (the task Reagan set for himself and Congress in a nationally televised speech of February 5, 1981) or even to accomplish the 'sharp reduction in the spending growth trend' called for in [his] Economic Recovery Plan." By Reagan's second term, the idea of seriously diminishing the budget was, to quote Stockman, "an institutionalized fantasy." Though in speeches Reagan continued to repeat his bold pledge to "get government out of the way of the people," government stayed pretty much where it was.
This hasn't stopped recent contemporary conservative biographers from claiming otherwise. "He said he would cut the budget, and he did," declares Peggy Noonan in When Character Was King. In fact, the budget grew significantly under Reagan. All he managed to do was moderately slow its rate of growth. What's more, the number of workers on the federal payroll rose by 61,000 under Reagan. (By comparison, under Clinton, the number fell by 373,000.)
Reagan also vastly expanded one of the largest federal domestic programs, Social Security. Before becoming president, he had often openly mused, much to the alarm of his politically sensitive staff, about restructuring Social Security to allow individuals to opt out of the system--an antecedent of today's privatization plans. At the start of his administration, with Social Security teetering on the brink of insolvency, Reagan attempted to push through immediate draconian cuts to the program. But the Senate unanimously rebuked his plan, and the GOP lost 26 House seats in the 1982 midterm elections, largely as a result of this overreach.
The following year, Reagan made one of the greatest ideological about-faces in the history of the presidency, agreeing to a $165 billion bailout of Social Security. In almost every way, the bailout flew in the face of conservative ideology. It dramatically increased payroll taxes on employees and employers, brought a whole new class of recipients--new federal workers--into the system, and, for the first time, taxed Social Security benefits, and did so in the most liberal way: only those of upper-income recipients. (As an added affront to conservatives, the tax wasn't indexed to inflation, meaning that more and more people have gradually had to pay it over time.)
By expanding rather than scaling back entitlements, Reagan--and Newt Gingrich after him--demonstrated that conservatives could not and would not launch a frontal assault on Social Security, effectively conceding that these cherished New Deal programs were central features of the American polity.
"Mondale Would Have Been Proud"
It's conservative lore that Reagan the icon cut taxes, while George H.W. Bush the renegade raised them. As Stockman recalls, "No one was authorized to talk about tax increases on Ronald Reagan's watch, no matter what kind of tax, no matter how justified it was." Yet raising taxes is exactly what Reagan did. He did not always instigate those hikes or agree to them willingly--but he signed off on them. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous year's reduction. (In a bizarre bit of self-deception, Reagan, who never came to terms with this episode of ideological apostasy, persuaded himself that the three-year, $100 billion tax hike--the largest since World War II--was actually "tax reform" that closed loopholes in his earlier cut and therefore didn't count as raising taxes.)
Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservatives--and probably cost Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, reelection--Reagan raised taxes a grand total of four times just between 1982-84.
This record flummoxes the best efforts of today's Reagan hagiographers to explain away. Peter Wallison, for instance, after proclaiming that Reagan "stayed the course against changes in his economic plan," later dismisses the president's tax increases as "a modest rollback" that "seems to have been the result" of his accepting a Democratic promise to cut spending by twice that amount. (Whatever happened to "Trust, but verify"?)
Reagan continued these "modest rollbacks" in his second term. The historic Tax Reform Act of 1986, though it achieved the supply side goal of lowering individual income tax rates, was a startlingly progressive reform. The plan imposed the largest corporate tax increase in history--an act utterly unimaginable for any conservative to support today. Just two years after declaring, "there is no justification" for taxing corporate income, Reagan raised corporate taxes by $120 billion over five years and closed corporate tax loopholes worth about $300 billion over that same period. In addition to broadening the tax base, the plan increased standard deductions and personal exemptions to the point that no family with an income below the poverty line would have to pay federal income tax. Even at the time, conservatives within Reagan's administration were aghast. According to Wall Street Journal reporters Jeffrey Birnbaum and Alan Murray, whose book Showdown at Gucci Gulch chronicles the 1986 measure, "the conservative president's support for an effort once considered the bastion of liberals carried tremendous symbolic significance." When Reagan's conservative acting chief economic adviser, William Niskanen, was apprised of the plan he replied, "Walter Mondale would have been proud."
So would Russell Long. In 1975, the Democratic senator from Louisiana had passed into law the earned income tax credit (EITC), essentially a wage subsidy for the working poor. Long's measure was tiny to begin with and had dwindled to insignificance by the time Reagan agreed to expand it in 1986 as part of the tax reform act. Despite years of opposing social insurance programs, Reagan's support of the EITC gave rise to what has become one of the most effective antipoverty measures the federal government has ever devised--by the late 1990s, the EITC was lifting 4.3 million people out of poverty every year. Reagan's decision to expand it was "the most important anti-poverty measure enacted over the past decade," wrote The Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt. The exemption of millions of low-wage earners from income taxes through the EITC and other reforms in 1986 added a significant measure of progressivity to the tax code. As evidence of its popularity with liberals, Clinton dramatically expanded the EITC in 1993.
At the time, many Republicans touted Reagan's support as proof that he wasn't the coldhearted tyrant liberals made him out to be. Other conservatives, like Niskanen, however, saw it as troubling evidence of their leader's weakness. Today, there is a growing movement within the Bush administration to roll back these changes by making the working poor pay their "fair share" of taxes.
These evident lapses in conservative ideology are a fact that some liberals have a much less difficult time coming to terms with than conservatives. "There were two Reagans," says Robert J. McIntyre, director of the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice, who was instrumental in the 1986 act, "the good one and the bad one. Liberals and conservatives wouldn't agree on which is which, but they would have to agree that Reagan completely flipped after 1981. If you like one, you can't like the other."
Bellicose Peacenik
Reagan has a good claim to the credit he receives for a foreign policy of confronting and challenging the Soviet Union that helped bring on its collapse--a central theme of any account of his life. But the vexing problem for conservatives, then and now, was that Reagan's bellicosity, which they liked, obscured an equally strong belief that nuclear weapons could and should be abolished, a conviction found mainly on the liberal left. Long before he became president, Reagan had argued for a massive military buildup not just to confront the Soviets, which hardliners approved, but also to put the United States in a stronger position from which to establish effective arms control--a goal to which conservative pragmatists subscribed. But no one shared, or even understood until late in the game, Reagan's desire for total disarmament. "My dream," he later wrote in his memoirs, "became a world free of nuclear weapons." This vision stemmed from the president's belief that the biblical account of Armageddon prophesied nuclear war--and that apocalypse could be averted if everyone, especially the Soviets, eliminated nuclear weapons.
Driven by this dream, Reagan embraced Mikhail Gorbachev and initiated a series of negotiations that ultimately alarmed everyone in his administration. Hardliners like Patrick Buchanan, Richard Perle, and Caspar Weinberger reacted in horror to the very idea of engaging the Soviets in such talks, warning against the "grand illusion" of peace. "Reagan is a weakened president, weakened in spirit as well as clout," echoed New Right leader Paul Weyrich in The Washington Post. Administration pragmatists like George Shultz and Robert McFarlane, who supported negotiations but believed in deterrence, were shocked by how far Reagan took them. At the Reykjavik summit, he and Gorbachev almost agreed to the "zero option" to eliminate both sides' thermonuclear arms. Reagan's unwillingness to give up his cherished missile-defense program doomed the agreement, though the talks did yield the signature arms-reduction pact of his presidency, the 1987 INF treaty.
Conservative biographers like Peter Schweizer seem determined not to acknowledge Reagan's timely softening toward the Soviets: Reagan "would not change course, even in pursuit of personal political glory." But, thankfully, Reagan did change course. After a defense buildup that pushed the Soviets to the verge of economic collapse, this shift, augmented by a reduction in U.S. military spending in the latter years of his presidency, strengthened Gorbachev's ability to proceed with reform in the Soviet Union, and set the stage for George H.W. Bush to oversee a peaceful end to the Cold War.
Reagan was similarly helpful in advancing another great liberal cause, one in which his overall record is deeply tarnished: human rights. The idea of pressuring despotic governments to better treat their citizens had long appealed to the left and rankled the right. Like other conservatives, Reagan criticized the Helsinki Accords when Gerald Ford signed them in 1976, and disparaged Jimmy Carter during his 1980 campaign for what he considered a soft refusal to engage with the bitter realities of communism. Reagan's indifference to human rights abuses committed by the United States' erstwhile allies in Central America is an especially ugly stain on his presidency. Yet, as time progressed, there was one place where he did apply the logic of bringing human rights into public policy: the Soviet Union. Through the latter part of his presidency, Reagan spoke forcefully and openly about human rights in speeches and in meetings with Gorbachev, presenting lists of thousands of persecuted Soviet Jews and dissidents, many of whom were ultimately allowed to emigrate. "Human rights became for Reagan the final shame that he could bring to bear on that aspect of the Communist empire," says Sean Wilentz, director of the American Studies program at Princeton University.
Reagan's human rights policy may have been inconsistent and hypocritical. But the very fact that he had one transformed the politics of human rights. With dissidents from Andrei Sakarov to Vaclav Havel testifying to the power of his words in sustaining their movements, it became impossible for conservatives to deny the usefulness of such commitments as a component of American foreign policy. Today, there are almost as many human rights proponents on the right side of the aisle in Congress as on the left.
Mourning in America
Many of Reagan's actions that wound up furthering liberal ends were to some extent the result of the normal compromises of political office. The fact that his conservative biographers don't see fit to acknowledge these deviations is a clue that their aim is something besides an accurate depiction of the life and achievements of the 40th president. When conservatives mythologize the Reagan presidency as the golden era of conservatism, it's not Reagan that they're mythologizing, but conservatism.
The great success of Reagan's 1980 campaign was that it united the disparate strands of the conservative movement: supply-siders, libertarians, religious conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and big business. The fact that Reagan's presidency didn't accomplish anything approaching its seismic promise--the size of government grew, abortion remained legal, and entitlements still abounded--is one that his partisan biographers elide by focusing on what Reagan believed and said rather than on what he actually did. The imaginary Reagan who inhabits these books embodies the ideas on which all these groups can agree. His shining example helps maintain the coalition while putting pressure on current GOP politicians to hew to the hard-right ideal.
The real Reagan, on the other hand, would bring discord to the current conservative agenda. If you believe, as conservatives now do, that raising taxes is always wrong, then it's hard to admit that Reagan himself did so repeatedly. If you argue that the relative tax burden on low-income workers is too light, as the Bush administration does, then it does not pay to dwell on the fact that Reagan himself helped lighten that burden. If you insist, as many hardliners now do, that America is dangerously soft on communist China, then it is best to ignore Reagan's own softening toward the Soviet Union. As with other conservative media efforts--Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, The Washington Times--the purpose of the Reagan legacy project is not to deliver accuracy, but enhance political leverage.
But, as Reagan himself liked to cite from John Adams, facts are stubborn things. And the fact is that Reagan, whether out of wisdom or because he was forced, made significant compromises with the left. Had he not saved Social Security, relented on his tax cut, and negotiated with the Soviets, he'd have been a less popular, and lesser, president. An honest portrait of Reagan's presidency would not diminish his memory, but enlarge it.
Joshua Green is an editor of The Washington Monthly.
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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