On the Prowl
The New Republican Agenda B ob Dole has decided to cooperate with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward on a behind-the-scenes account of the political nominating process, with a focus on the GOP...
...Others argued that they had more to fear from Woodward if they didn't cooperate...
...She achieved her influence through stealth: known only to those in the know, Burke wouldn't have been recognized, by name or face, outside the Beltway...
...Ron Brown Doesn't Get It For almost a year, White House sources have been telling any journalist who would listen that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown would have no serious role in the Clinton '96 re-election campaign due to his high-profile ethical and legal difficulties...
...He's hoping Congress will reconsider...
...During the period that Pope assisted Bonior, she was a professional staff member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works...
...Bonior's Book Bind A s House Democrats and the press continue to stoke the controversy surrounding House Speaker Newt Gingrich's book deal, the Landmark Legal Foundation is quietly building the case for an ethics inquiry into House minority whip David Bonior, the leader of the anti-Gingrich brigade...
...All the elements in the complaint against Gingrich, then, appear to be applicable to Boniorexcept, of course, that Newt has not been accused of using his own congressional staff to help with his book...
...At the time, Champlin was servingon Bonior's congressional staff...
...She would have a role somewhere in the administration, but nothing so influential...
...Clinton had begun her campaign against the drug makers...
...Were they also congressional staffers, and were they working on government time...
...Who says there's no such thing as loyalty in Washington...
...Landmark has examined Bonior's own book, published in 1984 under the title The Vietnam Veteran: A History of Neglect...
...Relying on government statistics, Mrs...
...C. attacked the big drug makers for price increases that she claimed far outpaced the rate of inflation...
...Lee Brown Doesn't Get It, Either After two years of bungling the war on drugs, Clinton drug czar Lee Brown may finally be on the way out—with his whole office, too...
...Clinton strategist James Carville, a Palm regular, couldn't be seen crossing the union picket lines...
...It's not clear whether the full Senate and House will agree, but discontent with the Brown/Clinton drug policy is widespread and bipartisan...
...Democrats speak, perhaps wishfully, of "ADM-gate," implicating the Senate majority leader in an explicit cash-forvotes exchange...
...It isn't like he's saying this to cosmetically hide his disappointment at being locked out of the campaign," says an acquaintance...
...But the senior GOP staff on the committee is said to support the Democratic retentions, naively thinking that the Democrats will give them the same break if they take back the House next year...
...3) It didn't distinguish between price increases that resulted from improvements in drugs and those that represented only inflation...
...According to the Almanac of the Unelected: Staff of the U.S...
...At the subcommittee level, dominated by moderate GOP chairmen like Harold Rogers, 33 Democratic staffers from the previous Congress were retained, leaving only 24 positions for Republican staff...
...Now Samuels is in trouble for what he did tell Archer, and it's the White House that's mad this time...
...Someone must have forgotten to tell Brown...
...A recent report by the General Accounting Office reveals that the agency responsible for calculating the Producer Price Index for Prescription Drugs has been doing it wrong for years...
...Richard Shelby, who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that oversees the drug office...
...Much of the media nodded in agreement...
...Court of Appeals panel selected Florida attorney Daniel S. Pearson as independent counsel to investigate Brown on charges that he accepted nearly $500,000 from former business partner Nolanda Hill and filed false financial-disclosure forms, Brown is said to be telling friends that he may yet serve as chairman of Clinton's re-election campaign...
...The Prowler reports that one evening, after a particularly feisty rally, Carville arrived a mere fifteen minutes later—that's cutting it close to the bone, James...
...In other words, Bonior's publisher also has business before the U. S. Congress...
...Expecting to deliver a routine update on his efforts, Brown instead found himself on the receiving end of a Shelby threat—you've done a terrible job, we're very unhappy, and we just may zero you out...
...The book bears the following acknowledgment: "Our thanks to Sarah Dufendach, who read almost the entire manuscript, providing editorial comments, detailed criticism, and additional research...
...Who Is He...
...Even after a U.S...
...Never Mind Remember the first half of 1993, when Hillary Clinton was trashing pharmaceutical companies for their role in the "price gouging, cost shifting and unconscionable profiteering" of the health-care industry...
...If government funds, including salary payments to congressional staff, were used by Mr...
...In addition, the Democrats were allotted 18 minority staff positions...
...Bonior to subsidize the authorship of his book, such conduct would violate House rules and federal law," Landmark's Mark Levin wrote in a recent letter to the House Ethics Committee in which he called for an investigation of Bonior...
...Meanwhile, the buzz in political circles is that Dole's longstanding ties to Dwayne Andreas, of the agribusiness conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland, could return to haunt him once again...
...While the circumstances of the death of former White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster remain under investigation, word from Little Rock is that Foster's widow, Lisa, has begun to put her life back together—and has a new man in her life...
...The Phil Gramm campaign has commissioned opposition research into the matter, but Dole's people say that Gramm, as head of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, called on Andreas, too...
...If he workedas hard at his job as he has with all the calls he's made up here in the past week," said one Senate staffer, "it wouldn't have been an issue to start with...
...Oops...
...So to get hold of those juicy Palm steaks, Carville would call ahead, making arrangements to dine once the rabble had dispersed...
...In mid-July Brown met with Republican Sen...
...The GAO says the first mistake alone caused the government to overstate prescription drug inflation by as much as 36 percent for the period 1984-1991...
...Today she is his administrative assistant Also thanked is Martha Pope, for giving her "time to read nearly the entire manuscript and provide a final editorial review...
...Chewed by the Fat As reported by the Prowler last month, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Leslie Samuels got into trouble with Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer when he could not explain why Treasury continues to rely on tax-revenue numbers even congressional Democrats reject...
...2) It didn't take into account the widespread use of generic drugs...
...0 The American Spectator September 1995 15...
...There is no way in hell that Sheila would get that job," says a close Dole adviser...
...The chief of staff position will end up in the hands of someone the conservatives are happy with, and Sheila isn't it...
...The report claims that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the drug price index, messed up in three ways: (1) It used a so-called "market basket" sample of drugs which contained a disproportionate share of high-priced medicines...
...The report does not estimate how much the second and third factors may have skewed the numbers...
...The Vietnam Veteran was published by Praeger Press, part of Greenwood Publishing Group, which in 1984 was owned by CBS and is now controlled by Reed Elsevier PLC, a British conglomerate...
...Reed Elsevier, which last year purchased LexisNexis from the Mead Corporation, is currently lobbying Congress to change copyright laws governing database publishers...
...She later became chief of staff to former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell...
...The Right Staff Adocument circulating on Capitol Hill shows that the new House Committee on Appropriations and its thirteen subcommittees retained 76 Democratic staffers from the previous Congress and filled the remaining staff positions with 31 Republicans...
...He really believes he has a shot...
...In an unusual arrangement, the publisher continues to distribute and sell Bonior's book, even though only a few hundred copies have been sold over the years...
...Burke's Law There's nothing the Washington press I likes better than a political hanging—except when the condemned is one of their best sources...
...With leaflet and megaphone, they railed against dangerous working conditions, shoddy treatment—and the unusually high take-home pay of some of their nonunion colleagues...
...Her failed health care re14 The American Spectator September 1995 form proposal contained provisions for price controls on prescription drugs and would have nationalized some portions of the industry—all based, in good part, on a false picture of the problem...
...No more...
...The New Republican Agenda B ob Dole has decided to cooperate with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward on a behind-the-scenes account of the political nominating process, with a focus on the GOP frontrunner...
...Bonior wrote his book with two coauthors, Steven Champlin and Timothy Kolly...
...In July, Samuels was called into the Oval Office and chewed out by a livid Bill Clinton himself for giving Archer's committee the impression that the administration will give serious consideration to tax reform before the 1996 elections...
...Some Republicans are grumbling that the 76 Democratic holdovers, in jobs that could have gone to Republicans, have made their influence felt in sparing the Legal Services Corporation and the National Endowment for the Arts from deep budget cuts...
...Dole is smart enough to know when to cut the cord...
...The Bureau of Labor Statistics did not begin to correct its method of calculating the index until early 1994, well after Mrs...
...The major papers and newsweeklies were perfectly willing to sacrifice her obscurity to mount a high-profile defense of their old friend...
...Bob Livingston, a whopping 25 Democrats from the previous Democrat-controlled committee were retained by Livingston and seven Republicans were hired for the remaining positions...
...Congress, Dufendach was on the public payroll as Bonior's "communications organizer coordinating special district-related projects" in 1984...
...When rumors began to circulate that Sheila Burke, Bob Dole's long-time chief of staff, would be sacked to appease conservatives, bureau chiefs panicked...
...Some officials from the Dole campaign argued against the project, voicing worries that it will give Woodward enough rope to hang their candidate...
...Palm Eater Last fall, members of the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union (Local 25) picketed the Palm Restaurant, Washington's preferred spot for power dining...
...Finally, Bonior writes, "Our greatest debt in writing this book is to the many people who have generously granted us interviews"—implying that a team of interviewers assisted him...
...Despite it all, Brown has slogged along, even getting a little publicity recently by scolding the New York Yankees for signing drug-troubled outfielder Darryl Strawberry—and attacking, of all people, soft-drink makers for packaging that resembles alcoholic bottling...
...At the full committee level, under the chairmanship of Rep...
...But her newfound notoriety hasn't saved Burke's job—and, anyway, she had no chance of becoming White House chief of staff in a Dole administration in the first place...
...Woodward is now ushered into regularly scheduled interviews with both Dole and his top lieutenants—a far cry from the days of Deep Throat...
...A few weeks later, Shelby did just that...
...Burke had been a reliable background and off-the-record source for years, and was considered to be the most powerful staffer on Capitol Hill...
...According to the GAO, "recent research indicates that the [index] has overstated drug price increases substantially since at least 1984...
Vol. 28 • September 1995 • No. 9
