The Buying of the President 2000
Dan Quayle
On January 17, 1992, Dan Quayle spotted something from his limousine. A Burger King restaurant in Norco, California — about 65 miles east of Los Angeles — had a NOW HIRING sign in its window. Quayle ordered his motorcade to pull over and, reporters in tow, went inside.
“I want to show you an optimistic sign that things are beginning to turn around,” Quayle told the journalists traveling with him. At the time, the nation’s economy was still in a slump; the unemployment rate had reached 7.1 percent the month before, and jobless claims had soared in the month of January. Some 2.1 million people had lost their jobs as a result of the recession. In the midst of the bleak news, Quayle seized on the help-wanted sign as a harbinger of good times to come.
Terie Roeder, the manager of the restaurant, told reporters that the jobs were part-time and paid $4.25 an hour. “Can they live on it?” she said in response to a question about the wage. “No. It’s hard to find people who actually want to show up.”
Quayle insisted that the wage and the hours didn’t matter. “You have a part-time job, you have a job,” he said. “That’s better than no job at all.”
A year later Quayle himself joined the ranks of the unemployed when he and his boss, President George Bush, lost to Bill Clinton and Albert Gore, Jr. It wasn’t too long before the former vice president was looking for entry-level part-time jobs himself. He found them — as a director of and a consultant to a half-dozen corporations. And they all paid a bit more than $4.25 an hour.
In August 1993, Quayle was hired as a consultant by Black Beauty Resources, Inc., a coal company based in Evansville, Indiana. By 1998, according to his financial disclosure form, Black Beauty was paying the former vice president nearly $120,000 a year. It would take the Burger King employee in Norco, California, working 20 hours a week and earning $4.25 an hour, more than 27 years to earn as much money.
In September 1993, Quayle joined the board of directors of American Standard Companies, Inc., a diversified manufacturing company based in Piscataway, New Jersey, that’s best known for its plumbing fixtures. The company set up an account to buy $100,000 in American Standard stock for the former vice president. That’s equivalent to more than 22 years of labor for the part-time fast-food worker.
Quayle’s job hunt didn’t end in 1993. In March 1998 he joined the board of directors of FirstPlus Financial Group, Inc., a diversified consumer-lending company based in Dallas. He was paid $27,350 for his services over the next nine months — six years of earnings for the Burger King worker.
Quayle, of course, did have some corporate experience. He’d spent most of his career in Washington — eight years in the Senate and another four as vice president — catering to the whims of big businesses. And he also had some familiarity with the companies he went to work for. The three companies have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into his various political committees over the years.
But in the end — which for Quayle came early — the corporate support wasn’t enough to overcome George W. Bush’s seemingly insurmountable lead. “There’s a time to stay and there’s a time to fold,” he said on September 27, 1999, in announcing his decision to bow out of the presidential race. “I was facing a campaign where the front-runner would have up to $100 million to spend.”
Quayle was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1947. He was named after his father’s closest friend, an Army captain killed in World War II, James Danforth. His maternal grandfather, Eugene C. Pulliam, owned The Indianapolis Star and News, The Arizona Republic, and The Phoenix Gazette. Quayle graduated from Huntington High School in 1965, and received a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, in 1969. That same year, he began six years of service in the Indiana Army National Guard.
Quayle attended Indiana University’s law school, where he met Marilyn Tucker in 1972; they married 10 weeks after their first date. Before he graduated from law school in 1974, Quayle was the chief investigator for the Consumer Protection Division of the Indiana Attorney General’s Office. He later served as an administrative assistant to Governor Edgar Whitcomb, a Republican, and in the Indiana Department of Revenue. He then went to work for his father, who was the publisher of The Huntington Herald-Press.
His father was also instrumental in Quayle’s entrance into politics. In the run-up to the 1976 elections, officials of the Indiana Republican Party were desperately seeking a strong candidate from the state’s Fourth Congressional District to take on a well-entrenched incumbent Democrat. The search was anything but easy. It was the first presidential election since Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace in August 1974; in mid-term elections that year, Democrats rode a wave of popular disgust with Republicans to a landslide. The incumbent in Indiana’s Fourth Congressional District, Ed Roush, had a 16-year hold on the seat and in previous elections had defeated the most experienced and popular Republicans the region had to offer. No one wanted to run.
A small group of Republicans in the state decided that the party needed a fresh face to run for the seat. Dan Quayle’s name was mentioned. By his father. He was handpicked for the job.
In March 1976, Orvas Beers, the Republican county chairman in Fort Wayne, Indiana, asked Dan Quayle to lunch. After some small talk, Beers got down to business. He said that he and a few of his friends wanted Quayle to run for Congress. Quayle, who was then just 29 years old, was a bit taken aback. He had no experience in politics. He hadn’t thought seriously about running for anything beyond the state legislature. But he took an instant liking to the idea, and he told Beers that he would consider a run under certain conditions. First, he said, the county chairman would have to keep other Republicans out of the race. The second condition betrayed Quayle’s keen appreciation for what it takes to win elections. “Look me in the eye,” Quayle said to Beers, “and guarantee me the money.”
That was no trouble for Beers. Two of the men who had handpicked Quayle were, like his father, among the business elite of Indiana. James Loomis was president of Magnavox Government and Industrial Electronics Company, a defense contractor that within a dozen years would become Fort Wayne’s largest employer. The other was Lester Gerig, the president of Mutual Security Life Insurance Company and head of the local chamber of commerce.
Gerig wanted to know Quayle’s position on 15 pieces of legislation pending in Congress. According to Gerig, Quayle told him what he wanted to hear, and Quayle got his endorsement. “The business community,” Gerig later said of the young politician, “never had any representative that was more knowledgeable or did more for it.”
During the campaign, Quayle succeeded in showing the business community that he was indeed its best friend. In return, he received the campaign cash that helped him win the election. Incumbents normally have an enormous fundraising edge over challengers, but by Election Day 1976, just eight months after the lunch that got him into the race, Quayle had raised $130,000 — twice as much as Roush had raised. Quayle went on to unseat the Democrat in a victory no one expected.
Ever since that election, Quayle has enjoyed particularly cozy relationships with corporations, both within and outside of Indiana, and his political accounts have swelled with their contributions. After four years in the House of Representatives, Quayle used his alliances with business to help him upset Senator Birch Bayh.
Quayle’s record in the Senate proved Gerig’s faith in him. He did as much or more for the business community as anyone else in Congress. In 1987 he led the opposition to a bill that would have given workers advance notice of plant closings. Manufacturers vehemently opposed the measure, which was aimed at giving employees a few months to look for other work before management padlocked the factory doors. The plant-closings bill eventually passed, but not before Quayle proposed a weaker version, which he got the president of the Senate, George Bush, to back. That same year, Quayle also fought against legislation that would have required employers to inform workers who were exposed to toxic substances of the risks they ran from such exposure. The bill died in the Senate.
In 1988, George Bush surprised much of the political establishment by selecting Dan Quayle as his running mate. Speculation that he had chosen the junior senator from Indiana more for his good looks than for his conservative credentials and his accomplishments gained steam after Quayle bumbled through his early press appearances. Once thought of as a political wunderkind, he quickly gained a reputation for making embarrassing gaffes.
While late night comedians and political cartoonists had a field day with the vice president, Quayle was seriously at work in Washington doing what he had always done: taking care of the interests of business. He headed the President’s Council on Competitiveness, a roundtable of Bush administration officials that, under Quayle, gained a stranglehold over all proposed new federal regulations. The council, which met in secret and claimed to be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, provided businesses with regulatory relief and other lucrative favors.
In 1992, Quayle’s group recommended eliminating many of the recoupment fees levied on defense contractors. The fees; which were more or less a tax on arms exports, were designed to recoup the research and development costs of new weapons systems borne by taxpayers. On June 19, 1992, President Bush adopted Quayle’s recommendation, saving the defense industry nearly $75 million a year.
That same year, the council recommended redefining wetlands to open up over a third of the protected ecosystems to agricultural and industrial use. Its recommendation ultimately was rejected. But it also won a battle with the Environmental Protection Agency, rewriting rules on air pollution to allow companies, without prior announcement, to increase the amount of emissions they pump into the atmosphere. When airlines complained about proposed federal regulations that would have required quieter jets to be in use by 2000, Quayle intervened to get the Federal Aviation Administration to relax the timetable.
The council was run largely by its staff, which was led by Allan Hubbard, a businessman from Indiana who is now the president of E&A Industries, Inc., a conglomerate that owns plastics and chemical companies. (In 1999, Hubbard signed on to George W. Bush’s campaign as a fundraiser and adviser.) Quayle gave Hubbard ethics waivers that allowed him to oversee the council’s work while he maintained his financial interest in World Wide Chemicals, Inc., another Indiana-based chemical company. Hubbard owned more than half the company’s stock, valued at more than $1 million. During Hubbard’s tenure, the Council for Competitiveness recommended more than a hundred changes to the Clean Air Act regulations then being written by the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1992, Representative John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, accused Hubbard of a conflict of interest. By that time, Hubbard had left the council and gone to work as Vice President Quayle’s chief of staff; he promised to put his World Wide Chemical stock in a blind trust.
Quayle’s effective use of the Council for Competitiveness enhanced his reputation in corporate America as a man who could get things done. Richard Rahn, who was the chief economist of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was typical in his praise of the vice president. “Quayle has gotten into the deregulation battle more substantively than anyone else,” he told a reporter for The Washington Post in a 1992 interview. “He has done his homework. He’s forceful. And he’s made a difference in the eyes of American business.”
Quayle, who was still trying to dispel his image as an intellectual lightweight, preferred nonetheless to have the accolades from big business — and the favors he did to earn them — remain in obscurity. Of the Council for Competitiveness’s work, he told The Washington Post, “We’ve had sometimes more visibility than I really want.”
Some of that visibility came from Congress, which launched no fewer than seven investigations into the council’s activities. When Bush and Quayle lost the 1992 election, Congress suspended the probes.
When Quayle left Washington in 1993, his political prospects seemed dim. But less than a year after Americans turned him out of office, Quayle quietly began paving the way for a presidential run. He joined the board of trustees of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank headquartered in Indianapolis. He wrote a pair of books that stressed the family values theme he first enunciated in his “Murphy Brown” speech, in which he criticized Hollywood’s glorification of single motherhood. He made speeches and attended Republican Party events. He stumped for other candidates. But most important, he raised money.
In 1995, Quayle opted out of the 1996 presidential race, citing Robert Dole’s ability to lock up big-money donors as a major factor in his decision. Dole rewarded Quayle for his early endorsement by passing on to him the political action committee, Campaign America, that the Kansas Senator had formed in 1978. Quayle got control of a PAC with $1.7 million in the bank, an extensive mailing list of donors, and a head start on the 2000 money race.
During the 1996 campaign, and again in 1998, Quayle was free to fly around the country on Campaign America’s checkbook. He attended picnics, fundraisers, and campaign events for other candidates. Republican congressional candidates got to appear with the former vice president, and the former vice president got to meet and greet future Republican supporters, and perhaps more important, fundraisers and donors. Thanks to his business career, Quayle already knew quite a few of them.
On March 19, 1999, Dan Quayle addressed the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. He outlined for the first time the foreign policy views that were central to his campaign. China was high on his agenda. “President Clinton has consistently supported granting China most-favored-nation status, no matter how egregious the human rights abuses documented by his own State Department,” Quayle charged. He also argued that the Bush administration’s emphasis on trade had been flawed. “I think it was a worthy objective, but upon reflection it is clear to me that the Chinese took advantage of that opportunity.”
The Chinese weren’t the only ones. Fortune 500 companies ranging from manufacturers of dishwashers and jumbo jets to insurance companies and movie producers were all eager to cash in on what they saw as the world’s next big market. The late Ronald Brown, who, as the secretary of Commerce in the early years of the Clinton administration, was notorious for selling seats on trade missions to corporate donors, took a group to China in 1994 and hailed the $5 billion in deals that resulted from his trip. Brown got American executives in the door and in touch with the right decision-makers in the Chinese government. It’s a trick that Quayle learned well.
On September 28, 1998, Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese wire service, reported the following item: “Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji met here this afternoon with former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle and Emmanuel Kampouris, chairman of the board of American Standard Corporation, and their party. They exchanged views on Sino-U.S. relations and other issues of common interest. The American visitors have come to visit China as guests of the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs.”
The Chinese news agency got the name slightly garbled; Kampouris is the chairman of American Standard Companies, Inc., the same firm that put Quayle on its board of directors in September 1993. American Standard manufactures everything from ceramic toilets and sinks to air conditioners, heaters, and truck brakes. Kampouris took the reins of the company in 1989, when American Standard was struggling with a load of debt that it had taken on soon after going private in a leveraged buyout the year before.
Rather than sell off profitable divisions to get out of debt, Kampouris expanded American Standard’s global reach, taking advantage of cheap overseas labor to increase the company’s profit margins. China, with its 1.2 billion consumers, is a natural market for the company’s toilets and other plumbing fixtures. It operates seven factories there, six of them in joint ventures with Chinese companies. “Three companies are minting money, three have good earnings performance, and one is having a slight struggle,” Horace Whittlesey, American Standard’s general manager in China, told London’s Financial Times in March 1998.
While the Asian financial crisis and China’s endemic corruption and sluggish progress toward a market economy have soured many companies that joined the Chinese gold rush in the early 1990s, American Standard has prospered there. “Our business grew by 60 percent last year,” Whittlesey told the Financial Times. “If we grow by 60 percent again as we expect this year, then we’re gonna be as happy as pigs in — well, you know.”
Quayle had his own reasons to be happy. In 1998, the same year Quayle introduced Kampouris to the Chinese premier, the chairman of American Standard gave $100,000 in soft money to Quayle’s Campaign America. In all, members of the Kampouris family and executives of American Standard (along with their spouses) made at least $139,000 in political contributions to Quayle in 1998 and 1999, making them his No. 3 career patron.
Quayle also personally profited from his association with Kampouris and American Standard. In addition to the initial $100,000 in stock the company gave him when he joined the board of directors, Quayle was paid $67,500 in director’s fees in 1998 alone. His financial disclosure form lists holdings of American Standard stock valued at $500,000 to $1 million. The company has also been good to his family: Quayle’s son Tucker works as its assistant director of marketing and sales in China.
The relationship has also been beneficial to Kampouris, who was introduced to Zhu Rongji thanks to Quayle. There is no record of what was discussed at their meeting, but considering that China will soon outstrip even the United States as a market for the company’s wares, it’s unlikely that Quayle repeated the criticisms he’s often made of the Clinton administration’s policy of fostering trade with the Communist nation.
Dan Quayle loves golf. In 1992, after touting the turnaround of the economy on the strength of a NOW HIRING sign at Burger King, he went off to play in Bob Hope’s celebrity golf tournament in Palm Springs. In 1993 he moved into a home in suburban Indianapolis that’s less than a mile from Crooked Stick Golf Club, which has hosted any number of professional golf tournaments, including the PGA Championship. And in 1998, Quayle made an early commitment to play in the Roger Staubach FirstPlus Financial Celebrity Invitational, held in Dallas, at Prestonwood Country Club.
Daniel Phillips, the chief executive officer of Dallas-based FirstPlus Financial Group, loved publicity as much as Quayle loved golf. He sponsored celebrity golf tournaments. He hired Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino and Dallas Cowboys special teamer and fan favorite Bill Bates to endorse his company. He gave lavishly to charities. He spent millions on a race car to carry the company’s logo. And he even hired a former vice president to be on FirstPlus’s board of directors, all to raise his own profile and that of his firm, a seller of second mortgages.
FirstPlus Financial marketed its second mortgages as home improvement and debt-consolidating loans, offering borrowers up to 125 percent of a home’s market value. Although FirstPlus’s loans generally have low monthly payments (because terms are typically stretched out to 25 years), the interest rates on them are much higher than the prime rate. Usually, there is a penalty for early payments. The mortgages take longer to pay off, and in the end, borrowers pay much more than they would have with an ordinary mortgage. In May 1999, the Clinton administration proposed legislation to make the higher risks of such loans clearer to the borrower.
FirstPlus Financial was a darling of Wall Street after its initial public offering in February 1996. The share price rose from an initial price of $10 to a peak of $56 in September 1997. Then, revelations that the company’s accounting methods overstated its profitability caused the share price to nosedive. By October 1998 the firm had laid off more than 2,800 employees — half its workforce — as the share price plunged by 75 percent. In March 1999, FirstPlus filed for bankruptcy. A share of the company’s stock could be had for a mere 34 cents.
It wasn’t the first bust that Phillips had presided over. The Dallas Morning News reported in early 1999 that he had been involved in another questionable company. He’d been the president of Linco, Inc., a California-based company that sold health club memberships and time-share condominiums. When it folded in 1993, creditors sued the company, claiming it had misrepresented its financial stability.
“He can go anywhere and convince people to give him money,” Jack Jennings said of Phillips. Jennings, a dentist in Stockton, California, told The Dallas Morning News that he lost more than $200,000 when Linco folded.
The newspaper also reported that some 15 different shareholder suits had been filed against FirstPlus, accusing Phillips of mismanaging the company. Phillips denied any wrongdoing. One suit cited specific allegations of Phillips’ largesse with company funds, including $450,000 on a Super Bowl party in San Diego in 1998 for FirstPlus executives, $2 million a month on Phillips’s expenses, a $5 million race car used for advertising, and $42 million for a pair of corporate jets. Among those who rode on the jets was Dan Quayle.
Quayle’s relationship with FirstPlus seems to have started with Phillips. The banker came to a fundraising event in Texas and then “became more and more eager to get involved” with Quayle’s campaign, according to Michael Anton, the former finance director of Campaign America. Phillips hosted a fundraiser for Quayle in September 1997. Craig Whitney, Quayle’s chief fundraiser (and also the chief fundraiser for Campaign America), “set up the deal” to get FirstPlus contributions to Quayle, according to Anton.
The deal worked quite well. During the high times at FirstPlus, contributions from employees of the company made FirstPlus Quayle’s No. 2 career donor. FirstPlus employees and their spouses contributed heavily from September 1997 through the end of 1998. Quayle joined the company’s board of directors in March 1998. Phillips himself gave the jaw-dropping sum of $100,000 in July. Even company spokesman Dan Marino and his wife, Claire, chipped in $5,000 apiece. The contributions totaled more than $254,000.
For his part, Quayle rented the prestige of his name and his former office to FirstPlus until October 1998. The following month, the company had two announcements: First, that Quayle was leaving the board to pursue the Republican presidential nomination, and second, that it had posted a loss of $82 million for the previous quarter.
Quayle’s No. 1 career patron is Wilshire Financial Services Group of Portland, Oregon. Like FirstPlus, Wilshire Financial is in the mortgage business; it specializes in lending to high-risk borrowers with poor credit histories. Like FirstPlus, it was led by a brash chief executive officer, Andrew Wiederhorn, who at the company’s peak oversaw 800 employees around the world. And like FirstPlus, the company ended up declaring bankruptcy after its meteoric rise.
Wilshire Financial’s problems mirrored those of FirstPlus as well. In the fall of 1998, after enjoying a profitable run, the company started losing millions, and by March 1999, it was forced into Chapter 11.
Wilshire emerged from bankruptcy in June after arranging to give stock to its two largest creditors, American Express Financial Advisors and Capital Research and Management Group, in return for a cancellation of its debts. The two creditors ended up with a 40 percent stake in the reorganized company, but lost millions in the deal. For every $1,000 of debt owed them, they got a little less than $37 worth of stock. By August 1999 that deal had improved somewhat — the company’s stock price had gone up, improving the ratio for American Express and Capital Research to $135 of stock for every $1,000 owed them by Wilshire.
Just as it was emerging from bankruptcy in June 1999, First Bank of Beverly Hills, F.S.B., a subsidiary of Wilshire, was designated a “troubled institution” by the Office of Thrift Supervision, a federal agency that oversees savings-and-loans. A year before, the agency had slapped a cease-and-desist order on the S&L because of the risky loans it was buying.
Two months after it emerged from bankruptcy, Wilshire Financial’s new board of directors — dominated by executives of American Express and Capital Financial — suspended Andrew Wiederhorn, the company’s whiz-kid founder, who’d made a multimillion-dollar fortune before he was 30. The board also suspended the company’s president, Larry Mendelsohn.
Quayle met Wiederhorn at a fundraiser. Wiederhorn was friends with several professional golfers; one of them introduced Wiederhorn to Quayle.
For Quayle, it was a valuable introduction. Around the time the company’s fortunes began to plummet, in August 1998, Wilshire Financial made a $100,000 contribution to Campaign America. The following month, the company gave Quayle another $150,000. In all, Wiederhorn and Wilshire Financial contributed $257,000 to Quayle.
The Center for Public Integrity tried to find out why Wilshire Financial made the contributions. In August 1999, after Wiederhorn had been suspended by Wilshire’s board of directors, Sheryl Seapy, who works for Morgan-Walke Associates, a media relations firm that now handles publicity for Wilshire, said, “Those contributions are of a personal nature in reference to Andrew.” She referred further inquiries to Wendy Gallamore, Wiederhorn’s personal assistant, whom the Center had contacted on several prior occasions.
Contacted again, Gallamore would say only that she could not comment at that time. “You’re welcome to check back in a month,” she added. “It’s a strange thing for me to say, but you’re welcome to. Then we can explain a little better.”
The ties between Quayle and his No. 10 patron go back far beyond his tenure as the chairman of Campaign America, or his years as vice president, or even his Senate or House careers. In 1964, William Murphy opened a government relations office in Washington for the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly and Company. Murphy was Quayle’s uncle.
Murphy may have been the drug maker’s first full-time Washington lobbyist, but he was hardly its most effective. That honor falls to his nephew, Dan Quayle.
While in Congress, Quayle backed legislation to allow U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturers to sell drugs abroad that hadn’t been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Executives of Lilly called it the most important drug-related bill of the session for the industry. It passed in 1986.
Thanks to Quayle, duty-free shopping wasn’t just limited to the international departure lounges of airports. In 1985 he and Richard Lugar, the other Republican Senator from Indiana, introduced a bill to grant three of Lilly’s factories in Indiana “special foreign trade sub-zone” status. The tax break passed. Consequently, Lilly pays no tariffs or customs duties on imported items it uses at the factories in the production of exports.
As vice president, Quayle was in an even better position to help out his corporate friends in Indianapolis. His Council for Competitiveness pushed to speed up the FDA’s process for approving new drugs, to promote biotechnology, and to limit liability lawsuits.
In 1991 the EPA proposed more-stringent emissions rules on chemical plants, oil refineries, factories, and power plants. Lilly fought the regulation. In a letter dated February 28, 1991, a lawyer for the company asked the EPA for more “operational flexibility” in complying with the regulation. On March 28, the EPA rejected the request along with a similar one from the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association. But as luck would have it, just nine days after the EPA rejected Lilly, David McIntosh, the executive director of Quayle’s council (and now a Republican member of the House), sent a list of “suggested changes” to the EPA. The list included the phrase “operational flexibility” — precisely the language that Lilly had used in its letter to the EPA.
Lilly hasn’t forgotten Quayle’s help. The company serves as an employment agency for former Quayle aides. Mark Miles, who managed Quayle’s 1980 Senate campaign, joined Lilly as its director of communications in 1982. The company’s current vice president of corporate affairs, Mitch Daniels, has a long history as a political adviser to Quayle. While Quayle’s council was removing regulations on Lilly’s pharmaceutical plants, Daniels worked both at Lilly and as an adviser to Quayle. At the time, Daniels said that he and Quayle “do not discuss the council’s activities as they affect Lilly.”
As recently as March 10, 1999, Randall Tobias, the company’s chairman emeritus, held a fundraiser for Quayle. Family patriarch Eli Lilly II and a dozen or so executives have consistently and generously supported Quayle’s campaigns over the years.
Gary Brinson, the president and managing partner of Brinson Partners, Inc., and the chairman and chief investment officer of UBS Brinson, manages the financial portfolios of corporations, public funds, endowments, foundations, central banks, and other investors. His firms are part of United Swiss Bank and are based in Chicago and New York City, with offices worldwide. He’s a recognized expert in the field of investment management, and he’s invested heavily in Quayle’s 2000 campaign. He is Quayle’s No. 4 career patron, having contributed at least $137,000, and all of it since 1997.
“My decision to give to Quayle really reflects his beliefs in managing down the size of the federal government, his emphasis on family values, and his experience,” Brinson told the Center in July 1999. “It’s a formidable challenge,” he said of Quayle’s quest for the nomination, but he added that he thought the former vice president might have a chance. “Dan’s well-positioned if problems develop on the Bush side,” he said. Nonetheless, Brinson acknowledged that the Bush juggernaut seemed unstoppable.
And, as things turned out for Quayle, it was.
Top Ten Career Patrons
$257,000
$254,451
$139,000
$137,000
$102,500
$85,250
$72,550
$71,500
$55,000
$51,499
This list is based on individual contributions to Quayle’s House campaign from 1977-1978; individual and PAC contributions to Quayle’s Senate campaigns from 1979-1992; individual and PAC contributions to Quayle’s vice presidential campaign from 1987-1990; all disclosed contributions to the vice president’s mansion fund from 1989-1990; individual and PAC contributions to Issues ‘94 and Issues ‘96; individual and PAC contributions to Campaign America from 1995-1998; all contributions to Campaign America’s Virginia account from 1997-1998; and individual and PAC contributions to Quayle’s presidential campaign through June 30, 1999.
Sources: Federal Election Commission; Center for Responsive Politics; Virginia State Board of Elections.
7. Includes contributions from Hiler family members; employees of Hiler Industries, Inc.; and employees of Accurate Castings, a Hiler Industries subsidiary.
8. Includes contributions from employees of Black Beauty Resources; Black Beauty Coal; and Ameriqual Foods, which was founded by Black Beauty Resources.
10. Includes contributions from Lilly family members; employees of Eli Lilly and Company; and employees of the Lilly Endowment.
Books
The Buying of the President 2004
- Introduction
- Equal Rights, Unequal Protection
- Private Parties
- George W. Bush - The Texas Years
- George W. Bush - The War President
- George W. Bush - The Administration
- Wesley Clark
- Howard Dean
- John Edwards
- Richard Gephardt
- Bob Graham
- John Kerry
- Dennis Kucinich
- Joe Lieberman
- Carol Moseley Braun
- Al Sharpton
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
The Buying of the President 2000
