Countdown

The Buying of the President 1996

Foreword

This book, in a nutshell, poses the $64 million question of the 1996 election: Have they — the big contributors, the megalobbyists, K Street, Wall Street, the white-envelope crowd — bought the next president yet?

The hopeful answer is No, not yet, although they’re certainly trying. But the cynic would say Yes, realistically, because that’s the way Washington and the two-party system have come to work.

Over the next 200-odd pages, however, readers can make up their own minds, drawing on an unprecedented compilation of numbers, analyses, and revelations. For some, The Buying of the President will flesh out what they’ve always suspected. More Americans, though, will be stunned. They’ll say: “I didn’t realize it was this bad. I had no idea. What on earth do we do?”

This concern should become a central part of the 1996 debate. In the 35-year cavalcade of presidential campaign books that began with Theodore White’s landmark The Making of the President 1960, no one has ever concentrated on the quiet but just as critical influence battle fought out with checkbooks — about how powerful patrons and interests invest in the people they expect to hold top offices, including the presidency, and what these donors expect to get (and worse, what they really do get) in return. Documentation like this has never before been compiled and published in advance of the election being described. Never. And the spotlight is scorching.

Executive Director Charles Lewis, the staff of the Center for Public Integrity, and the dozens of full-time and part-time researchers who backstopped them have outdone themselves. Their individual chapters on President Bill Clinton and other White House contenders or long shots go a long way toward documenting their all-too-provocative title. Moreover, not only is this buying of the president bipartisan, but, worse still, it’s arguable that the entrenched two-party duopoly constitutes a damp and dark climate in which the mushrooms of capital corruption grow. And the top political contests that determine who will make federal policy, taxes, rules, and regulations — led, of course, by the race for the White House — are the ultimate mushroom beds.

When Chuck Lewis invited me to write the foreword, he gave me a preview of some of the factoids and tabulations found in this book. Among the more notable and new pieces of information is that the 1996 candidate/public official to raise the most special-interest money for his own campaigns in the United States during the past 25 years is not Bob Dole, not Phil Gramm, but Pete Wilson, who has accumulated more than $80 million from these groups. Two presidential candidates — Bob Dole and Phil Gramm — have been close to fundraisers/contributors who have gone to prison. Two presidential candidates — Bob Dole and Phil Gramm — have been found by federal authorities to have taken hundreds of illegal corporate campaign contributions in the past. Three presidential candidates — Bob Dole, Phil Gramm, and Lamar Alexander — have entered into personal business dealings with wealthy contributors. No presidential candidate’s net worth has increased more than Alexander’s, whose net worth between 1978 and 1991 jumped 1,000 percent (300 percent between 1984 and 1994). Unsuccessful presidential candidate Pete Wilson’s largest patron over his political career is an organization representing government employees directly affected by his policies. Wilson received $1.57 million in contributions and independent-expenditure TV advertising from the California association of prison guards and other correctional employees. According to available records, Bill Clinton’s inaugural was the most expensive in U.S. history, costing $32 million, and his inaugural committee sold the rights to everything except the Lincoln Memorial, and has $9.7 million sitting in the bank, left over. The Center for Public Integrity has compiled a database of practically every CEO to travel around the world with Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, whether they contributed to the Democratic National Committee, the date, how much, and the amount of federal cookie-jar financing and insurance they have received.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, and no other organization has the author’s qualifications to measure it. Lewis launched the Center for Public Integrity in 1990, ending an 11-year career in television journalism that had made him a top producer for CBS’s “60 Minutes.” He was determined to fill what he (correctly) saw as a central gap in Washington monitoring and muckraking: No-holds-barred examination of the city’s own political corruption. Since then, some of the nonprofit organization’s best-known reports and findings have documented how

• from 1974 to 1990, nearly half of all former senior White House trade officials went to work for the people they had negotiated against, namely foreign companies and governments;
• since 1979, 112 former members of Congress converted to personal use roughly $10.5 million in unspent campaign contributions;
• based on the first systematic look at unpaid policy advisers to presidential candidates, the vice chairman of the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign and adviser to the Wilson campaign, James Lake, was also simultaneously a registered foreign agent on behalf of the owners of the scandalized Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI);
• since 1977, half of the national political party chairmen have had conflicts of interest, simultaneously receiving fees from corporations, law firms, and other sources, with no one having more entanglements than then-Democratic Party chairman Ron Brown;
• Mexican interests spent more than $30 million to promote the development and enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), hiring 44 law firms, lobbyists, public relations companies, and consultants, including 33 former U.S. officials;
• in 1993 and 1994, hundreds of special interests cumulatively spent in excess of $100 million to influence the outcome of health-care reform legislation with at least 97 law, lobbying, or public-relations firms hired by health care-related interests, including 80 former U.S. officials, and during 1992 and 1993, more than 85 members of Congress participated in 181 trips paid for by the health-care industry;
• of the members of Congress who left between 1984 and 1993, 81 of the 99 who stayed in Washington became — should anyone be surprised? — lobbyists.

Now Lewis and the Center have turned to the biggest influence-peddler target of all: the presidential campaign. In theory, ongoing study of Washington’s dirty-laundry baskets should give the observer a cast-iron stomach. But in fact, the subject matter is one of never-ending revelations and new dimensions. Lewis admitted that, “We found far more than we even imagined might exist.” Well, that’s Washington. My own book, Arrogant Capital, published in September 1994, sought to explain why the nation’s capital, in the half-century since the end of World War II, had become a massive enough entrenchment of lobbyists, special interests, and political professionals to take over the two-party system, neutralizing the ability of our national elections to clean house. This conclusion, which some at the Center have come to share, grew in my mind as the data (and the historical precedents) on Washington’s transformation mounted. What I found still seems extraordinary:

• Since the end of World War II, the number of people in greater Washington who are lobbyists or engaged in support of lobbying activities grew from several thousand to 91,000.
• The number of lawyers admitted to practice before the federal courts of the District of Columbia jumped from under 1,000 in 1950 to 61,000 in 1990. Washington is America’s lawyer-central.
• The size of the staff of the U.S. Congress, roughly 2,500 in 1945, swelled to 21,000 in the early 1990s and remains over 20,000 today. No other major nation’s legislature has even a quarter of that staff.
• Reflecting this same affluent buildup, by 1990 metropolitan Washington contained seven of the nation’s 20 highest per-capita-income counties.

These numbers were stunning, too. But let me underscore a point: They are an essential context for understanding the processes and corruptions described in this book. Washington is a giant influence-mongery, and the buying of the president is the hottest game in town. At the risk of stating the obvious, the reason all this matters so much is that it detracts from American democracy and from your role as a citizen and voter.

The data and relationships laid out in this book just scratch the surface, and the Center for Public Integrity has masses more documentation available online and in its files. But don’t read about it and weep. Instead, read about it and get angry.

Kevin Phillips
Bethesda, Maryland
September 1995