The Wicked Wine of Democracy: A Memoir of a Political Junkie, 1948-1995

20. Reflections

20 REFLECTIONS 246 it is virtually obligatory that more than a half-century involvement with politics and government has to produce some profundities about what’s wrong and, of course, a plan to fix it. Short of the impossible -to-do “get the money out of the game,” I have scant advice to offer. Most remedies that I have seen are boilerplate Political Science 101—mostly unpassable, undoable, or loaded with loopholes. And having seen “cures” ultimately worse than the diseases they were designed to eradicate, I have become a go-slow skeptic. What I do have some hope for is the spotlight that the media has put on the role of money in lobbying and campaigns. Unfortunately, its reporting on lobbying has not reached the level of its political coverage, which now routinely covers the influence of political money on government. Political writing advanced a few light years when the media turned to in-depth reporting on the accuracy of television spots, who was making them, and what they cost. The voters get a far more accurate picture now than they did when campaign coverage was merely glorified sports writing. The media routinely needs to highlight the activities of lobbyists in the same way it has publicized political consultants. With more exposure, the playing field becomes more level. For a period in the late 1970s and 1980s, I was filled with rage, liable to erupt in profane fury at dinner parties or in meetings. What precipitated my outbursts? Anger at what was suddenly happening in money-mad Washington . The proliferation of PACs seemingly had turned every legislator and his staff people into Calcutta street beggars swarming our sacred shrines. Everybody had his hand out, and the cheapness of it all made me furious. I shouldn’t have been. As part-custodian of a million-dollar labor union political fund, I was being increasingly wooed by congressmen and their staffs, an ideal situation for a special-interest lobbyist like me. When I walked into a Capitol Hill fundraiser or meeting, the money-seekers sought me out and volunteered to bring me drinks. It was downright embarrassing. I came to believe that I had dollar signs emblazoned on my forehead, like Hester Prynne’s Scarlet A. Fundraising calls by the score came in daily. I grew sick of honeyed female voices seeking our bounty, and congressmen crying— literally—that their campaign was at Armageddon and would fail if we did not contribute. My reaction to my such celebrity status among the money-seekers was curious, to say the least. I disliked it. My pride as a lobbyist was my intimate knowledge of the politics of the issues I advocated, my reputation for candor , and a word that was known to be good. Now I was turning into little more than a political cash cow, to be milked regularly. “It’s a totally new ballgame up here,” an enterprising lobbyist from Oklahoma named J. D. Williams told me. “The political dollar has become king of the hill.” The House majority leader’s son, a sweet-faced idealist named Tommy Boggs, emerged as a master dealer of the political dollar to attain his lobbying ends. A famously funny, profane, and oh-so-shrewd Texan named Bob Strauss came out of nowhere to become a “Washington wise man,” primarily because of his smarts with the political dollar. Jesse Calhoon, the perceptive president of a maritime union that I represented , said to me early in 1977: “Our party used to be the party of FDR, Truman, Rayburn, and JFK. Now the lobbyists have taken over Washington like a swarm of locusts destroying a cornfield.” The last quarter-century or more has witnessed the accuracy of Calhoon’s comments. Yet, there are significant signs that the Era of Money, with its egregious excesses, may be ending. Public revulsion has been at an all-time high, and Congress has tried to provide some partial palliatives, prodded by public demands that something be done. And the states are acting. Maine reflections 247 already has an ingenious public-financing program for state legislative candidates , which has been so successful that other states are considering it or have moved to adopt it. Forgive me, as a disenchanted lobbyist, for dwelling long on money’s role as I have seen it. It is the paramount problem in government today, costing the nation the services of many outstanding people who...