Just This Side of Bribery
GLASS, ANDREW J.
Just This Side of Bribery So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government By RobertG. Kaiser Knopf. 398 pp. $27.95. Reviewed by Andrew J....
...Strauss, 90, is a lifelong Democrat who served as a diplomat under Republican President Ronald Reagan...
...As matters stand, Kaiserhas written two interwoven narratives...
...Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee and, Kaiser notes, “an unabashed supporter of earmarks and pork-barrel spending,” occupies the pole position...
...Curiously, nowhere in So Damn Much Money do we encounter Barack Obama...
...when bureaucracies were staffed with "devoted public servants" who "marched to their own drummers" and "were not enticed by the new incentives to get rich...
...Although true, the depiction comes across as ungenerous...
...Nor does he mention that by the time Daschle became the Senate’s No...
...In return, the lobbyists influence legislation in ways that serve the interests of their often well-heeled clients...
...Along the way, we are also told that Cassidy went to mass every day...
...and that eventually he reconciled with his wife...
...At its zenith, his firm represented more than 1,100 clients, including 24 of the 50 largest U.S...
...It consists of lobbyists conveying checks to legislators...
...In 1945, Strauss founded what is today Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld...
...Retainers began at $10,000 a month and went up from there...
...Now he is an associate editor and senior correspondent...
...He grasps that if people knew what was really happening, they would demand change...
...The alternate narrative, which makes up most of the book, recounts the rise and relative decline of Gerald S.J...
...One of them was überlobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose four-month stint ended when the scandal that would eventually land him in a Federal prison began to brew...
...The author describes Cassidy as “smart and shrewd...
...Only a few paragraphs are devoted to Daschle...
...For whatever reasons,” Kaiser writes, “he . . . decided to cooperate...
...The Illinois Senator sought to ban privately funded travel by lawmakers...
...His first step was to devise a new specialty: helping colleges acquire government funds for their expansion plans through earmarks...
...Kaiser says “the idea of using the Cassidy story in a book about Washington and American politics over the last 35 years” came to him in 2004, while doing the research for “Citizen K Street,” a mammoth 27-par t series that the Post ran in the paper and online...
...Kaiser tags Strauss as simply "a great Washingtonfixer...
...Given Cassidy’s ties to McGovern, it is no wonder that as of 2007 former Democratic Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota ranked sixth on the alltime contribution list of Cassidy & Associates...
...A distinguished journalist who began his career at the Washington Post in 1963 as a summer intern, he has filled many slots on the paper abroad and at home, including serving as managing editor from 1991 to 1998...
...Lobbyists necessarily pay heed to legislative efforts to curb their most nefarious practices...
...Whatever its shortcomings, the quick passage this February of the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act drafted on CapitolHill, albeit with minimal Republican support, seemingly undermines Kaiser's portrayal of a gridlocked status quo...
...This is unfortunate, since Obama once j oined with Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a fellow Democrat, to press for passage of tougher lobbying disclosure and ethics rules of the kind that Kaiser says are badly needed but that the Senate at the time proved unwilling to accept...
...Fortunately, so does the politician I mentioned whose name does not appear in So Damn Much Money...
...The checks fund costly campaigns to attain or retain office...
...But what does not change as the goal posts move is the basic game...
...they deserve meaningful reform that will finally end the undue influence lobbyists and special interests have had over the laws we make...
...Cassidy...
...His portrayal of the lobbying boom will confirm what you probably already suspect: The craft's practitioners operate just this side of bribery...
...When George W. Bush entered the White House in 2001, Cassidy smoothly stocked up on Republican operatives...
...In using Cassidy as his sole lobbying template, however, Kaiser passes up a chance to report that in the four years since the voters retired him Daschle earned about $5 million, mainly from health-related corporate sources...
...In signing the legislation, Obama pointedly noted that it is free of earmarks...
...If he gambled that Kaiser would portray him as an egomaniacal, hot-tempered, manipulative, opportunistic yet lovable rogue, then he won his bet...
...After all, his echoing Sutton's scandalous words provided Kaiser with the title of his book...
...Obama pre-empted Kaiser's credo when he said on the Senate floor: "The American people deserve more than windowdressing when it comes to ethics reform...
...It's a company town, and the business is lobbying...
...In Robert G. Kaiser's latest book we learn that when former Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert S. Strauss was asked why the lobbying business has thrived in the nation's capital, he responded similarly: "There's just so damn much money in it...
...severely slow the revolving door between Congress and the lobbyists' warrens on ? Street...
...It turns out that in 2001 Cassidy and his wife, Loretta, gave Daschle two checks totaling $9,000 two weeks after Republican Senator James Jeffords of Vermont announced he would henceforth be voting with the Democrats, a change that made Daschle the Senate majority leader...
...Kaiser describes him as a "selfinvented man, driven to get rich by haunting memories of a violent, impoverished childhood in Brooklyn and Queens...
...With offices in 15 cities, it employs more than 900 lawyers and professionals worldwide...
...In one, bound to appeal to prospective talk show audiences, he argues that the vast influence of money has reduced Washington to a legislative cesspool, where "the players have ignored or avoided a great many grave national problems...
...Kaiser knows the terrain...
...They stretch First Amendment rights to their outer limits in petitioning the government...
...require meaningful lobbying disclosures, and broadly strengthen open government on Capitol Hill...
...There are so many people with issues in Washington, and people are more and more turning to government because it is involved in their lives...
...During the Presidential campaign, Obama pledged that, if elected his Administration would not be about "serving your former employer, your future employer, or your bank account...
...He began his climb to the top rungs of the national political ladder in 1937 by volunteering to serve in Lyndon ?. Johnson's first Congressional campaign while he was still an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin...
...1 Democrat, his wife, Linda, a former executive at the Federal Aviation Administration, was earning big bucks as a lobbyist for American Airlines, Boeing and other aviation clients...
...To do this, we must not only strengthen but enforce the rules governing our interactions with lobbyists, and finally make the legislative process fully transparent to the public...
...corporations...
...He bemoans the passing of an era when legislators still possessed an "appetite for taking on serious national problems, including many related to poverty and inequality...
...The law firm, while no slouch at lobbying, has grown to be one of the largest globally...
...Sutton, who achieved infamy by holding up roughly 100 of themfromthe late 1920s to his final arrest in 1952, replied "Because that's where the money is...
...Give Cassidy credit for being sufficiently perceptive to see “a day of reckoning coming...
...To be sure, Kaiser had no inkling that Daschle’s recently disclosed lobbying-generated tax problems would cost him his Cabinet post as health czar...
...Lawmakers had been dispatching earmarked Federal funds to their constituents since the 1930s, but Kaiser shows us how Cassidy made earmark brokering pay big-time for him...
...Reviewed by Andrew J. Glass Contributing editor, "Politico" A reporter once asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks...
...that he dumped his wife of nearly 40 years, had an affair and stopped going to church...
...Had the Feingold-Obama initiative been enacted, Kaiser would have been largely reduced to writing a well-informed historical yarn...
...Born in 1940, Cassidy became a lawyer for migrant workers in Florida, went on to serve as an aide to Democratic Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, and then set about amassing $100 million...
...establish an independent Office of Public Integrity as a Congressional watchdog...
Vol. 92 • January 2009 • No. 1
