Countdown

The Buying of the President 2000

Introduction

It was a moment that exquisitely captured the state of American politics today.

Last August, nearly half a year before the Iowa caucuses on January 24, 2000, the state’s Republican Party staged its quadrennial fund-raising event. This peculiar political carnival — featuring live presidential candidates — fattened the state party’s coffers by at least $1 million. Approximately 650 reporters swarmed around defenseless Ames, Iowa, to cover what veteran journalist David Broder of The Washington Post branded “the totally unofficial but historically significant straw poll.” All of the 23,685 votes cast were paid for, legally. The two candidates who bought the most votes won, and their “victories” were front-page news nationwide.

Nine Republican presidential candidates set up operation outside the Hilton Coliseum at Iowa State University. The campaign of Texas Governor George W. Bush outbid the others and ended up paying $43,500 to rent the prime location — 60,000 square feet of grass — for the event. What transpired on August 14 was an orgy of free food, entertainment, walk-around celebrities, and gifts, with each campaign trying to outdo the others. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch’s tent had singer Vic Damone and Utah Jazz pro basketball star Karl Malone. Bush had former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach and singers Tracy Byrd and Linda Davis. Malcolm “Steve” Forbes, Jr., had singers Debby Boone and Ronnie Milsap crooning away in a huge air-conditioned tent with French doors, which one wag from a rival campaign dubbed “Chateau Malcolm.” The multimillionaire publisher also served up 3,100 pounds of pork and set up a miniature amusement park, complete with an inflatable mountain for children to rappel down. Bush and Forbes were the only candidates to have their tents next to the coliseum’s entrances.

Candidates were judged in part by the goodies they lavished on caucus-goers. Every campaign had T-shirts. Elizabeth Dole’s campaign offered up balloon hats, while Pat Buchanan gave away pot holders. The Bush folks also offered a free lunch and dinner. Hatch provided chicken, Alan Keyes free ice cream. Former Vice President Dan Quayle’s low-budget campaign was criticized for passing out bundles of com.

The Iowa Republicans who were hauled in for the event were pretty much props, too, like the singers and the barbecued pork. The Bush and Forbes campaigns each rented a hundred or so buses to fetch their supporters throughout Iowa. In the evening, inside the Hilton Coliseum, the only people allowed entry were the voters whose $25 entry fees had been paid for by the candidates. Each of the presidential candidates was permitted to speak for ten minutes, and their supporters were then allowed to demonstrate for up to three minutes. Forbes put on the most elaborate show of the night, with thousands of balloons dropped onto the crowd. Because the candidates had bought so many tickets, ordinary, nonpaying citizens who just wanted to listen to the speeches were turned away at the door.

The winner of the Iowa straw poll was Bush, whose campaign had shelled out $825,000 for 7,418 votes — about $111 a vote. “I am proud to be here,” Bush told the crowd that night, “for this grassroots exercise in democracy.” Broder breathlessly praised his triumph as a “combination of broad public appeal and skillful organization.” Forbes finished second, at an even steeper cost: He spent nearly $2 million for 4,921 votes — about $400 a vote.

Welcome to the 2000 presidential campaign. It is disconcerting to behold a political process that so matter-of-factly rewards unabashed, competitive gluttony, a process so utterly devoid of substantive discourse, a process so disdainful of the very people it is supposed to serve. But the lack of self-awareness and independence by the participants themselves is even more stupefying.

Of course, there’s much more to electing the most powerful leader on earth than straw votes and sound bites, primaries and party conventions and commercials. Fact is, it takes mammoth sums of money to obtain power. Precisely how that all evolves is not always apparent, but one thing is quite clear. As we noted in 1996 in The Buying of the President, “Before the first vote is cast in a presidential primary, a private referendum has already been conducted among the nation’s financial elites as to which candidate shall earn his party’s nomination.” Certain candidates are winnowed out, either choosing not to enter the fray at all or attempting it unsuccessfully. And a fundamental determinant in their decision — and in our choices at the polls — is money.

The dirty secret of American presidential politics is that the nation’s wealthiest interests largely determine who will be the next president of the United States, in the year before the election. As political fund-raising consultant Stan Huckaby has noted, without exception, in every election since 1976, the candidate who has raised the most money by the end of the year preceding the election, and who has been eligible for federal matching funds, has become his party’s nominee for president.

The most recent case in point: The two presidential candidates who raised the most money in 1995 and were eligible for matching funds — Clinton and Dole — won their parties’ nominations. Both men raised more than $20 million in the year before the election. Of the 16,200 donors who contributed $1,000 to the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign, 15,200, or 94 percent, gave their money early, in 1995. Of the 48,000 donors who contributed the legal maximum of $1,000 to GOP presidential candidates in the 1995-96 election cycle, 39,800, or 83 percent, gave in 1995.

It is the price of power that interests us the most in The Buying of the President 2000. What accommodations have been made to achieve that power, and with whom? What is the cost to the nation? Who are these presidential candidates, really, and what powerful interests are aligned with them?

For more than a year, roughly two dozen researchers, writers, and editors have been analyzing thousands of primary and secondary sources of information, including campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission and the Center for Responsive Politics, personal financial disclosure forms, and congressional voting records, in some cases going back 20 years. We have interviewed hundreds of individuals. The book has chapters on all major presidential candidates who were active contenders as of September 1999, which explains why we write about Elizabeth Dole and Dan Quayle herein but not Lamar Alexander or John Kasich. Once again, each candidate chapter contains a list of the Top Ten Career Patrons, those most steadfastly generous, important donors who have helped to underwrite the candidate’s political career. And, for the first time, we also list the Top Fifty Patrons since 1991 (measured in “soft money” contributions) for each of the two major political parties.

“The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy,” H. L. Mencken once wrote. “His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.” We respect the ideal of public service in the public interest, and we fully recognize that on a personal level, politics can be a brutal exercise. We have tried to be fair to the men and woman who aspire to hold the highest office in the land. For example, every reasonable effort to interview the candidates has been made, over many months. Unfortunately, the candidates all declined our repeated requests for interviews. (By way of comparison, for the 1996 book, half of the candidates consented to interviews.)

It should be clear that, simply stated, The Buying of the President 2000 highlights areas of interest to us, vital information that we believe the American people want — and need — to know. We did not seek to provide every detail of the candidates’ interactions with their contributors. Nor did we see it as our role to present slick, swooning profiles of the candidates — readers can get that stuff from their authorized campaign biographies or websites (which we reference in these pages and on the Center’s website). Indeed, the book does not contain full biographies of the candidates or personal financial disclosure reports, including investments, speaking fees, and all-expenses-paid trips, or specific details about many of the public policy decisions they have made in the past. This kind of information, plus each candidate’s “Top 25 Career Patrons” and capsule profiles of those patrons, is at http://www.publicintegrity.org.

We do not live in an inspiring time of candor or contrition when it comes to politics, and to the role of money in politics. Our politicians seem to have become increasingly shameless, arrogant, and loose with the truth. Unfortunately, after the decades of deceit since Vietnam and Watergate, the American people are no longer surprised when government officials ignore or mislead them. It’s gotten harder and harder to get straight answers from politicians and those who work for them. Lying is now called “spin” or “damage control,” and it’s studied, taught, and even admired by many people in Washington today as an effective public relations technique.

We spoke with Archibald Cox, the enormously respected former Watergate independent prosecutor whom President Nixon fired in October 1973, in the opening salvo of the infamous “Saturday Night Massacre.” Cox believes there is much less trust in government today than there was during the Watergate years. And he said that campaign finance abuses are “far worse today” than during Watergate, when many unlawful corporate contributions were discovered and prosecuted.

Cox believes that today the threat to the democratic process is even graver. “The abuses are worse partly because there’s much more money and . . . there’s much more pressure on those who receive the money to yield to the wishes of those who give it,” Cox told the Center. “I’m speaking of a lot of elected officials across the board, but particularly in Congress.”

Of course, what happens after public officials leave government is also troubling, a subject the Center for Public Integrity has investigated frequently over the years. The Washington mercenary culture, absorbing former government decision-makers who triple or quadruple their salaries as lobbyists or consultants, grows each year. Thirty years ago there were fewer than 100 registered lobbyists in the nation’s capital; today there are approximately 14,000. But we also are seeing more garish profiteering from public service. Some of the nation’s most respected political leaders now unabashedly cash in personally as soon as they’re off the public payroll. Some, such as former governors Ann Richards and Mario Cuomo, have done Doritos commercials. Robert Dole does TV ads about penile erection dysfunction for Viagra (you don’t see too many television ads about election, dysfunction). Former Senate majority leaders George Mitchell and Howard Baker, Jr., recently have made money the old-fashioned Washington way, by lobbying for the tobacco companies.

More broadly, in the three years since the 1996 election we have seen a steady deterioration in tolerable standards of political conduct. What was outrageous yesterday merely seems to be accepted reality today.

In late 1996 and throughout 1997, for example, we learned that President Clinton was personally involved in raising and channeling millions of dollars in Democratic Party contributions to his own reelection campaign, with the money spent on television commercials that he personally approved and that were aired more than a year before the 1996 election. The Democratic Party accepted millions of dollars in illegal contributions from foreign nationals, many of whom met personally with the president. Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., spoke at a fundraising event at a Buddhist monastery in Los Angeles, and everyone from a Colombian drug trafficker to Chinese arms dealers passed through the White House, obtaining access for cash. Separately, from January 1995 to August 1996, the White House hosted 103 coffees — attended by 1,544 people seeking “face time” with the president, the vice president, and their spouses — who collectively contributed at least $26.4 million to the Democratic Party for the 1996 election. Besides being rewarded with overnight stays at the White House and at Camp David, in 1995 and 1996, major Democratic Party donors and fundraisers rode on Air Force One, Marine One, Air Force Two, and Marine Two (the latter two are the vice president’s aircraft) more than 300 times. In addition, both the president and vice president solicited campaign contributions by telephone from the White House, Clinton from his residential quarters and Gore from his office. At first Gore said that he dialed for dollars “on a few occasions”; he later acknowledged that he did it 56 times. This was the potentially criminal matter that produced the now infamous statement by the vice president: “My counsel advises me that there is no controlling legal authority or case that says that there was any violation of law whatsoever in the manner in which I asked people to contribute to our reelection campaign.” [emphasis added]

Sadly, Gore was right. None of this unprecedented activity, which certainly had the stench of misconduct and impropriety, was seriously prosecuted by the Justice Department. Only the small fry were pursued. Attorney General Janet Reno steadfastly refused to name an independent counsel to investigate the various 1996 campaign-finance allegations. And when the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee attempted to investigate the 1996 election abuses, more than 45 potential witnesses fled the United States or invoked the Fifth Amendment. Months of public hearings were held, but it was painfully obvious that the committee was severely hamstrung by both the White House and the Senate Republican leadership. And there was the hypocrisy of virtually ignoring congressional campaign-finance issues, even though, over the years, 5 of the committee’s 16 members had themselves, through their campaigns, violated federal election laws.

To add insult to injury, the following year, Americans suffered through Monica Mania, ending with the first impeachment of an elected president in U.S. history. Whatever your opinion of Bill Clinton, former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, independent counsel Kenneth Starr, or Congress, one thing is clear: In 1998, we reached the lowest point in our nation’s political discourse and decorum, including the most blatant, look-you-in-the-eye-with-a-straight-face lying by a sitting president ever. And let us not forget that this whole sordid episode got its start with campaign contributions: Lewinsky became a White House intern in the first place because a friend of her family had given more than $330,000 to the Democratic Party.

In 1999 the presidential election season began with further evidence that the post-Watergate campaign-finance system is broken. The son of former President George Bush, George W. Bush, leading all prospective presidential candidates in public-opinion polls, set the political world on its ear. Without any detailed policy positions, federal government experience, or stated vision for the future, and while hardly leaving his home in Austin, he raised $37 million in four months. That is more money at that early point in a presidential campaign than any previous White House contender, more than the 10 other Republican contenders combined, and more than either Clinton or Dole raised for their respective campaigns in the entire 1995-96 election cycle. Bush’s campaign took in the astonishing sum of $310,748 a day — that’s $12,947 an hour — in contributions. The previous record had been set in 1995, when Clinton raised $26 million in seven months.

This kind of money isn’t raised at backyard barbecues or from neighborhood bake sales, of course. It comes from thousands of the wealthiest Americans, many of whom want something from the government. To be sure, significant cash is, by itself, certainly not sufficient to ensure future residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Just ask John Connally (1980), Ross Perot (1992 and 1996), or Steve Forbes (1996), to name three well-financed, unsuccessful aspirants. But without question, money is a necessary ingredient for a candidate, along with a timely, articulate message; credible professional credentials; confident, attractive presentation; and an effective campaign organization.

Weeks after his campaign’s dramatic disclosure that it had raised $37 million in the first half of 1999, Bush announced that he would forgo federal matching funds and the spending limits that accompany them. In so doing, he can ignore the spending ceiling of nearly $50 million in the preconvention phase of the election cycle as well as state-by-state spending caps. Forbes, who also will forgo matching funds, as he did in 1996, vowed to match Bush dollar for dollar. Bush put his family’s extensive network of political money-raisers under the charge of his best friend, Donald Evans, who told a reporter for The New York Times that he regards his work as a form of public service. “Behind every check, there’s a willing heart,” Evans said. “To me, it’s not a check, it’s a person, someone who cares about this great country.”

Bush’s calculation that Americans won’t mind how much money he raises, or what rules he plays by, is telling. Simply put, it marks a new level of political audacity. Heretofore, it would have been completely unthinkable for a popular candidate with serious hopes of landing a major party nomination to forsake the public subsidies established in the wake of the worst political scandal of the twentieth century. But this largely anointed GOP presidential candidate with the famous last name is willing to do it because he thinks he can do it. The nation’s political establishment even seems to canonize candidates with the Midas touch. The unfortunate wretches who are unable to amass sizable political war chests give off the fetid odor of dead meat, going nowhere fast. The actual merits of the candidates’ ideas and backgrounds are largely irrelevant. And meanwhile, there is little public consideration of precisely where the political money has come from or what the donors seek in return.

Certainly, the mutual dependency between politicians and their patrons is nothing new. But one can’t help wondering how Abraham Lincoln or Harry Truman would fare in today’s political, mega-fundraising milieu. Would they be willing to dial for dollars for several hours each day and, with frozen smiles, shake thousands upon thousands of strangers’ hands at hundreds of fundraising events throughout the country, a full year before the election? It frankly is difficult to fathom.

The stark fact today is that, increasingly, good people are not entering politics for a host of reasons, financial ones chief among them. In 1998 there were more than 90 uncontested elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, and the states of Arkansas, Florida, and Louisiana didn’t bother to even count votes. In Florida the names of those lucky candidates in uncontested House races didn’t even appear on the ballot.

In the past two election cycles we have seen record-shattering sums of private, special-interest money pouring into the political process. We have seen the worst campaign-finance scandals since Watergate. And, at the same time, we have witnessed the worst voter disillusionment in more than half a century.

How did things get so bad?

The short answer is that politicians have become so deeply enmeshed in the money chase and personally tied to powerful, economic interests that they have lost the esteem and trust of the American people.

Confidence in government has waned to historic lows. In 1996, 100 million eligible voters declined to participate in this democracy, the lowest turnout (49 percent) in a presidential election year since 1924, and the second lowest since 1824. Only 36 percent of eligible voters went to the polls in 1998, the lowest turnout since 1942.

Meanwhile, the ruling class of politicians and patrons has not felt compelled to open democracy to greater citizen participation. The 1996 presidential election revealed what moneyed interests have done to the political process. “The abuses of the campaign-finance system, as practiced by both panics in 1996 . . . destroyed what was left of this country’s campaign-finance laws,” journalist Elizabeth Drew observed in her 1999 book, The Corruption of American Politics. “There were now effectively no limits on how much money could be raised and spent in a campaign, and the limits on how it could be raised were rendered meaningless. Powerful people had undermined the law.”

The reckless orgy in 1996 between politicians and their deep-pocketed patrons came at the same time the rich were getting richer. More people have become billionaires in the past 15 years than at any other time in U.S. history, and the 189 American billionaires today (more than 12 times the number in 1982) have well over $1 trillion in wealth. In Silicon Valley alone, 64 new millionaires are made each day. One percent of the population controls 40 percent of the nation’s assets, and the United States now has the widest gap between rich .and poor of any industrialized country.

Meanwhile, the number of bankruptcy cases has risen almost 70 percent since 1995. One in five American children — a total of 14.5 million children — live in poverty. Every day, 1,827 babies are born in the United States without health-care coverage; 11.3 million children from coast to coast are without health care.

Wall Street bestowed $11 billion in bonuses in 1998, up from $2 billion in 1990. In this new Gilded Age of twenty-something millionaires and ostentatious materialism, from Manhattan to Silicon Valley, we are witnessing almost incomprehensible wealth wash over the political system as well, further transforming it. The same 535 members of Congress, two political parties, and presidential candidates who raised $2 billion in 1992 and $2.4 billion in 1996 are well on their way to amassing more than $3 billion in this election cycle. And that’s just the money we know about.

This game is too rich for ordinary folks. In 1996, for example, only 4 percent of the American people gave money to candidates for any political office. Only one-fourth of 1 percent gave $200 or more to candidates for federal office. Our electoral process is now so besotted by big money that millionaires now make up more than a third of the U.S. Senate, even though fewer than 1 percent of Americans are so fortunate. And while practically no one has noticed, at least 10 of the presidential candidates in 1999 — Lamar Alexander, Bill Bradley, Pat Buchanan, George W. Bush, Elizabeth Dole, Steve Forbes, Al Gore, Orrin Hatch, John McCain, and Dan Quayle — are millionaires. The richest candidate by far is Forbes, who will tap his personal wealth of more than $400 million to bankroll his own campaign, as he did in 1996. Among other things, he favors eliminating the tax on capital gains.

It is hardly coincidental that over the years, Congress has substantially reduced both the top income-tax rate and the tax on capital gains. Or that Congress and its banking patrons killed legislation that would have eliminated bank ATM fees. Or that Congress has failed to pass legislation that would have required employers to help pay for health-care insurance. Or that Congress has passed special “cheap labor” immigration-exemption laws and Y2K liability exemption laws at the request of Silicon Valley companies. The list of special favors for the privileged few is quite, quite long. As political scientist Louise Overacker wrote in 1932, “Even a dog will not bite the hand that feeds it, and a political party will hardly ‘sell out’ the person whose money it accepts.” And every public policy dispensation for political donors — no matter how crass or narrow the economic interest — is invariably cloaked under some kind of broader, nobler pretext.

At various times in the past century, the American people have expressed their outrage over the deterioration of their political process into a mercenary, pay-to-play culture, and insisted that system be reformed. The most recent eruption of public will was a quarter century ago, in 1974. After two years and hundreds of stories (including many of major campaign contributors getting special government favors), Americans were completely fed up with the widespread corruption and lying of Washington officials. “Watergate” was shorthand for cash contributions in paper bags, illegal corporate donations, secret slush funds, and the like. Just weeks after Richard Nixon’s resignation, the new president, Republican Gerald Ford, signed historic campaign-finance reform legislation. “The times,” he said, “demand this legislation.”

The law created a new regulatory agency, the Federal Election Commission (FEC); contribution and expenditure disclosure requirements for all federal elections; and specific limits on what individuals, political committees, and party organizations could give to federal campaigns. It also set up a system of partial public financing of presidential campaigns — voluntary public matching funds during the primaries and full public financing during the general election. The idea behind the matching funds was to reduce potentially corrosive fundraising pressures during the late stages of the campaign and encourage small donations in the early going.

No one disputes that the new disclosure requirements dramatically opened up the political process, and the contribution limits prevented the kind of huge donations to candidates that had badly stained the presidential election of 1972. Indeed, for many years, presidential campaigns seemed relatively free of the taint of scandal.

But the authority of this new regulatory system was soon undermined. In 1976, in a landmark case, Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court framed campaign spending as a First Amendment, free-speech issue. In other words, wealthy individuals can spend as much of their own money as they want on their own campaigns. At the same time, the controversial decision recognized the importance of “the primary purpose” of the 1974 reform law, “to limit the actuality and appearance of corruption, resulting from large individual financial contributions.” The Court also held that while advertisements expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate for federal office could be regulated, advertisements about issues could not be restricted under the Constitution.

Separately, it soon became obvious that the FEC was incapable of independently regulating the politicians and the political industry. The agency became an easy mark for the aggressive tactics of party lawyers, accountants, and candidates. For example, because of several FEC advisory opinions, approved without hearings or public comment, beginning in the 1980s, the two major political parties were permitted to raise back-door, unlimited contributions known as “soft money.” In 1995-96 the two parties raised $262 million in soft money — three times the 1991-92 total. It was mostly raised through large contributions from corporations and labor unions, which are prohibited from making direct contributions to federal candidates and committees.

What is the significance of all this? The post-Watergate reforms have been eroded and trivialized, with debilitating repercussions. Today’s unvarnished political realities are:

1. Politicians and their parties can collect and spend as much money as they want.
It’s not only soft money that’s exploding. In 1995-96, 29 organizations spent $135 million to $150 million on “issue-advocacy” advertising in the presidential and congressional elections; in 1997-98, 77 groups spent roughly $300 million. Those soft-money and issue-ad numbers are expected to go through the roof in 2000. Mel Sembler, the finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, plans to raise a special, new $30 million fund “to support the most aggressive issue-advocacy program in GOP history.”

2. Candidates and their campaigns are raising and spending secret money.
Presidential candidates this time around have raised millions of dollars in nonfederal accounts that aren’t subject to public disclosure requirements. Their other techniques for hiding money include creating nonprofit organizations. These undisclosed revenue streams render the traditional reporting system a relic.

3. The enforcement of election laws is almost always too little, too late.
After the biggest political scandal since Watergate, not a single White House or Democratic National Committee official was indicted. The FEC is completely captive to the politicians, and would be regarded as a national embarrassment if anyone cared. A case in point: After the 1996 election scandal, even though FEC auditors and FBI agents found that the Clinton and Dole campaigns had misspent tens of millions of dollars, the FEC’s six commissioners — three Democrats and three Republicans — ultimately declined to impose fines or other sanctions on either side.

4. Political accountability itself is in danger of becoming a lost virtue.
With voter participation and trust at historic lows, the American people have come to expect and accept the worst from their politicians. Public interest and news media interest in politics generally have declined; so has the inclination of citizens to get involved in political causes. Increasingly, the disengagement is making government the exclusive province of vested economic interests and the politicians they support. Politicians do not take responsibility for this reality, nor are they asked to. And as long as no one is marching in the streets, prodigious amounts of money will be sloshing through the system, sometimes secretly, sometimes illegally, sometimes directly influencing life-and-death public policy decisions. We also will continue to have mock sincerity and epidemic equivocation by our elected officials.

All in all, the potential for corruption is enormous, and the immediate prospects for reform are not auspicious. It is against this sobering backdrop that we have produced The Buying of the President 2000. We present not only chapters about the major candidates, but also the fascinating milieu in which they exist, the political parties. Ironically, as historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has observed, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution contained no mention of political parties. And yet throughout the twentieth century no one has been elected president from outside the Democratic and Republican parties. The candidates’ ideas, organizations, and campaign finances are deeply enmeshed in the culture and daily operations of their respective political parties. We examine some of the practical, grubby realities of the two major parties in Washington, which act as legal conduits between policy-makers and the most powerful economic interests affected by their decisions. These special interests open the spigots of cash flowing to the party and its leading members holding public office. And they facilitate access to power by the captains of industry and labor, who have paid handsomely and expect special consideration. Private corporations with public stature and function, these quasi-public institutions are themselves as deeply mired in high-powered influence-peddling in Washington as any lobbying firm. It is long past time that we correct our vision of these American icons.

President Harry Truman once said, “I never give them hell — I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.” Over the years at the Center for Public Integrity, we have earned the enmity of a wide array of entrenched interests, and we were once dubbed “the scourge of lobbyists” by National Journal.

The Buying of the President in 1996 was the first book to delineate the special-interest sponsors of White House aspirants and to be published before the primaries and caucuses. When our 1996 Under the Influence study about campaign advisers revealed that Pat Buchanan’s co-chairman, Larry Pratt, was helping hate groups such as Aryan Nation — he was removed from the campaign within hours of our news conference — we received angry calls and letters from extremists around the nation. An issue of the Center’s investigative newsletter, The Public i, titled “Fat Cat Hotel,” detailed the names of 75 Democratic Party donors and fundraisers who’d stayed overnight in the Lincoln Bedroom and other upstairs rooms at the Clinton White House. And these were just three of the six investigative reports issued by the Center in 1996. Two years later, we directed our attention to Capitol Hill, in The Buying of the Congress. A spokesperson for Newt Gingrich, then the speaker of the House, called our book “ridiculous” before it had even been released.

It might not surprise you, then, that we are not part of the Washington power circuit, or invited to dinners at the White House, regardless of occupant. Chances are, neither are you. But by reading The Buying of the President 2000, you will at least get a better idea about who is coziest with the next leader of the free world — and why.