PART 1 OF 2
PART THREE: MEDIATING VOICES
11. WHO OWNS THE DEMOCRATS?
The empty space at the center of American democracy is defined ultimately by its failed political institutions. At the highest level of politics, there is no one who now speaks reliably for the people, no one who listens patiently to their concerns or teaches them the hard facts involved in governing decisions. There is no major institution committed to mobilizing the power of citizens around their own interests and aspirations.
The principal mediating institutions of politics do still function in a formal sense, of course, but in different ways each has lost the capacity to serve as authentic connective tissue between government and citizens. In different ways, the major political parties and the news media have instead gravitated toward another source of power -- the elite interests that dominate government.
This section directly confronts the failure of those political institutions and explores why each, in its own way, falls short in its responsibility to democracy. The analysis begins with the hollow reality of the Democratic party and how economic interests that are most hostile to the party's main constituencies manage to influence the party's direction from the top down. Chapter Twelve, "Rancid Populism," examines the Republican party and how its mastery of modern communications enables it to hold power with an illusory program based on alienation and resentment.
The press fails its responsibility too and Chapter Thirteen, "Angle of Vision," explains the deep economic and social transformations that led the "news" away from the people it once spoke for and into alignment with the governing elites. The political impact of the mass-media culture, explored in Chapter Fourteen, "The Lost Generation," is more paradoxical and, in some ways, more hopeful. While television trivializes complex political action, its imagery is also relentlessly populist in its directness -- and brutally accurate in its own unsettling manner.
The empty space left by the failure of these mediating voices has been partially filled, however. It is held by the powerful political organizations called corporations. The final chapter of this section, Chapter Fifteen, "Citizen GE," illustrates the institutional reality of corporate power by examining the awesome reach and capabilities of one corporate political organization, the General Electric Company.
The distorted power relationships that dominate government and have cut out citizens are embedded in all these political institutions. At its core, the democratic problem is a problem of institutional default on a massive scale.
***
The Democratic party traces its origin, with excessive precision, to the twenty-third day of May in 1792 when Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to George Washington. His letter described political alignments that were already visible in the young Republic -- the yeomanry versus the Tory financiers. Jefferson urged President Washington to rally the people in a party that would defend democracy against the corrupt ambitions of monied interests. His text is uncannily appropriate to the politics of the late twentieth century. [1]
While historians recognize the letter as a milestone, it was Andrew Jackson, thirty years later, who mobilized the constituencies of farmers, workers and merchants into a vigorous, effective political party known forever after as the Democrats. The dual heritage is observed by party stalwarts every year at their Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners.
If Jefferson's letter is taken as the true birthday, then the party would celebrate its bicentennial in the presidential election year of 1992. When this point belatedly occurred to some staff officials at the Democratic National Committee, they began to discuss what they might make of the event. The Democratic party's perennial disorganization has always been part of its charm. If the Republicans were approaching their bicentennial, they would have already sold ads to the Fortune 500 for a souvenir program guide.
The discussion at the Democratic National Committee followed these lines: If the Democrats were to stage a two hundredth birthday spectacular, whom should they invite? Naturally, staff officials thought first of the direct-mail lists stored in computers -- the people who give money to the party more .or less regularly. Then, of course, they would include all the elected officials, state, local and national, who call themselves Democrats. Why not, someone suggested, also invite the many thousands of people who are active in party affairs -- the "regulars" who serve on county committees or tend to the mechanics of election precincts or campaign operations, the legions of people who faithfully rally around the ticket?
But, it was asked, who are these people? Where are their names and addresses? The DNC staffers searched the party's files and discovered that such lists no longer exist. The Democratic party headquarters did not know the identity of its own cadres. It no longer kept the names of the people who ostensibly connect it to the millions of other citizens who are only nominally Democrats, by virtue of registration. The DNC could not even say how many Democratic "regulars" there are.
Thirty years ago, lists of names -- county by county, ward by ward -- were the muscle of party politics and a principal source of power. Many were hacks and ward heelers, hanging on to public jobs by doing political chores, but many were also skillful organizers at the humblest level, adept at pulling people into politics by talking to them, listening to them. Political careers, from the courthouse to the national legislature, even the White House, were built on these cadres.
The old lists presumably still existed, but not at party headquarters. They were believed to be in permanent storage at the National Archives -- boxes and boxes of index cards from the 1950s and 1960s with the names and addresses of the people who, in that day, made the party real. In the age of television, big money and high-tech candidacies, the "regulars" of party politics have been rendered irrelevant.
The Democratic party, as a political organization, is no longer quite real itself. The various strands of personal communication and loyalty that once made it representative and responsive to the people are gone. It exists as a historical artifact, an organizational fiction. Its inherited status -- "the oldest political party on earth" -- is the principal basis for its influence, since any candidate who calls himself a Democrat will automatically enjoy certain legal privileges not available to unaligned opponents.
The party's preferred status in the electoral arena is no longer justified, since the Democratic party no longer performs the basic functions of a political party. It acts neither as a faithful mediator between citizens and the government nor as the forum for policy debate and resolution nor even as a structure around which political power can accumulate. It functions mainly as a mail drop for political money.
"If you go to the voter files and ask people who are registered Democrats if they are party members, they wouldn't know how to respond," Michael McCurry, communications director at the DNC, said. "They don't go to any meetings or participate at all, except maybe -- maybe -- to vote." While 42 million Americans are registered as Democrats, many of them would vigorously deny that they are "party members." Like candidates who run on the party label for convenience, voters would say their registration is a matter of historical necessity, not conviction. Since the two major parties, given their preferential status, are bound to dominate the outcome of elections, one might as well sign up as a Democrat or a Republican.
If one inquires further about the true membership of the Democratic party, a reasonable surrogate is provided by the people who contribute money regularly, sending in their checks year after year, whether for $25 or $1,000. "If you're willing to part with your hard- earned cash in exchange for a newsletter or whatever, that probably qualifies as party membership," McCurry said. "Of course, the number of people who actually go to meetings and take part in debate is much smaller."
By that yardstick, the national party of Democrats is a very small organization indeed -- roughly 100,000 people. The DNC knows the number with some precision because 100,000 is the normal response rate for its direct-mail solicitations. It sends out about 400,000 letters to the names in its computer files and usually gets money back from about one fourth. In presidential election years, the response goes up sharply -- 350,000 in 1988 -- but even that group is preciously small for a nation with 180 million adults. Amnesty International, by comparison, has 450,000 dues-paying members in the United States, whom it keeps engaged in tangible political activities such as its letter-writing campaigns.
The Republican National Committee has a much broader popular base750,000 contributors in 1989, 1.2 million during the '88 election season -- but even the GOP numbers are unimpressive for a national political party.
The IAF network of community organizations represents 400,000 families in Texas alone and counts more than 2 million in its nationwide base of organizations. The National Rifle Association, with 2.5 million dues-paying members, is larger than both major political parties combined. The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, a lobbying group for the elderly, has 10 million members (who each pay ten dollars in dues). Its larger rival, the American Association of Retired Persons, has 32 million members (who pay five dollars a year). The National Parent-Teacher Association has 6 million members. The AFL-CIO unions have 14 million members. The Roman Catholic church, the largest organization in America, has 55 million members.
America, in other words, is a nation of active joiners and givers, as it always has been, and Americans will part with their dollars rather freely if given a plausible reason to do so. They just don't give their money to political parties.
What is it that makes these other organizations different and more convincing to people? Some of the organizations promise to provide direct political representation, a voice in the larger arena on specific matters. Unlike the Democratic National Committee, most know the names of their own cadres and can turn out their troops, quickly and massively. Some of the organizations provide people with valuable services, from economic protection to spiritual solace, from informative newsletters to insurance coverage. One way or another, all of these other organizations promise to take responsibility for their adherents.
The Democratic party does not really make that promise, aside from the rhetorical flourishes in its direct-mail solicitations. Given its weakened vitality, the party would perhaps not be believed if it did. Instead, the Democratic National Committee promises to pursue a narrower goal -- winning elections for Democratic candidates. That objective no longer excites most Americans, not enough to open their checkbooks.
The most revealing fact about the Democrats' "party members" is their age. Among the DNC's 100,000 regular contributors, the average age is seventy years old. On the whole, these elderly loyalists are the remnants of the old "regulars" -- people who probably formed their attachments to the Democratic Party forty or fifty years ago, when it stood for a clear set of ideas and represented well-defined segments of the American public. "The thing that is frightening," McCurry said, "is that it's old and getting older."
Thomas "Lud" Ashley, a former liberal Democratic congressman from Toledo, Ohio, and now president of a powerful financial lobby, the Association of Bank Holding Companies, reminisced gloomily about what has been lost -- the party's mediating capacity with citizens. The American system is no longer a democracy, Ashley attests, because "democracy is based on accountability and it's not there now.
"It may be nostalgia, but, when I was elected [in 1954], we didn't count on television," the former congressman reflected. "We counted on what had existed for one hundred years -- a political organization. Toledo wasn't Chicago, but we had precinct captains and twenty- two ward chairmen and there were monthly ward meetings that you went home and talked to. They were robust, well-attended meetings -- half business, half social. The business took forty-five minutes or an hour and then it was 'let's get into the beer.'"
"What you talked about wasn't how much you'd done about getting somebody's goddamn Social Security check or getting their uncle into the Veterans Hospital. What you talked about was public policy. What people thought about things. What they wanted done. Like, are the blacks going to move into the Polish neighborhood? Or why are some federal funds going to the downtown area when they are needed in the neighborhoods? These were Polish, Hungarian, Czech communities and there was a helluva lot of interest in what was going on in eastern Europe.
"Certainly, Vietnam was a ball-breaker. I was pro-Johnson at the time and, Christ, I had my head handed to me. For the first time in twelve years in Congress, I was booed and hissed and practically driven from the hall. So I just had to look at the War from the standpoint of my constituents. That's real accountability and I responded. I had to -- if I was going to run again.
"There's no longer the necessity for that. There's no political infrastructure to go back and report to. Members go back now and report on TV. And the local press doesn't have the slightest idea of what you're doing on public policy unless you get caught in a scandal."
The modern Democratic party does provide modest mediating services to a limited number of citizens, but only in relation to the amount of money contributed. The DNC operates an elaborate hierarchy of "donor councils" for individuals and political interests who wish to buy memberships in' the party -- $1,000 for young people, who are mostly former congressional aides active as junior lobbyists; $15,000 for corporations that want to belong to the Democratic Business Council; $5,000 or more for the wealthy individuals and lobbyists who wish to serve on the National Finance Council. The Democratic Labor Council is for unions, who are still the party's most important financiers. The most gilt- edged circle is composed of the party's three hundred "trustees" -- people who give or raise $100,000 each.
In exchange, these citizens are provided social entree to the Democratic leaders in Congress, influential committee chairmen and their key staff officials. "We like to think we give very significant benefits," said Melissa Moss, one of the DNC's fund-raising officials. "We have an annual meeting where we cover very substantive issues, roundtable discussions, quarterly meetings in the Capitol with congressional leaders. What we try to do is have a flow of ideas and let them have input into the key players, People are motivated for many reasons. Obviously, there are lobbyists who want to have as much contact as possible with key members. Others are private citizens who just want to be active."
The Democratic National Committee is weak because it performs only one function that matters to other politicians: It holds a national convention every four years to nominate someone for president. Even that event has lost most of its meaning, since nominating conventions are no longer suspenseful dramas. Because of state primaries and the decline of powerful local organizations, the outcome is already decided weeks or months before the delegates arrive to cast their votes.
Still, this is the only moment when the Democratic party exists tangibly as a national organization, and the convention gives the DNC leverage over the independently constituted state parties: If the states want their delegations seated at the national convention, they must pick them according to the national party's rules, The rules are decided, ultimately, by the 404 members of the Democratic National Committee, most of whom are longtime party activists, state chairs or people closely identified with labor, racial minorities and other constituencies that still regard the DNC as an important place from which to influence the party's direction.
Most of the state-party structures, though once important power centers themselves, are now as atrophied as the national organization. "A lot of state parties have devolved into dinner committees or debt-management committees or very small-bore local operations to pick judges and that sort of thing," said Paul Tully, the DNC's director of organization. A few states have stronger organizations -- Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, New York -- but none is what it used to be.
The power of the state parties was gradually enfeebled by the same forces that weakened the national party -- social changes that broke up the old neighborhoods and new electoral techniques that enabled individual candidates to invent their own self-centered political parties. The influence of television, among other agents of social change, obliterated the ability of the party "regulars" to mobilize voters and, in that sense, liberated politics from the control of the old machines.
But, in exchange, television politics requires huge amounts of money. Thus, a candidate who knows how to get his own money is free to design his own political agenda, however vacuous, and sell it to the voters, however deceitfully, and enter public office without any obligations to the permanent political structures -- local, state or national parties.
Every state as a result now has "networks" of money and activists assembled around individual politicians -- senators or governors who reached public office largely on their own. New Jersey has a Bill Bradley network for the senator. In Texas, there is a Lloyd Bentsen network. In Virginia, there is a Chuck Robb network. These personal affiliations are much more potent than the formal party organizations and cooperate with the party only if it serves their leaders. For the last few years, under DNC Chairman Ronald H. Brown, organizer Paul Tully has been working on fostering a higher level of mutual enterprise -- encouraging the states to build cooperative campaign machinery that works for the whole ticket.
"We act as a cajoler, seducer, nudge, donor," Tully said. "The old DNC was tied to an age when the old urban organizations were the center of things, with close ties to the AFL- IO. The DNC was the traffic cop among the big fiefdoms, rather than an organization that created its own agenda. It did what we call 'glue politics' or somebody else might call 'grease politics.' Even in a much more homogeneous party like the Republican party, there's a constant adjusting process that goes on, among personalities and so forth. But by necessity, that's inward looking. That's not looking at voters and elections and the problems of the country."
If the national committee functioned as an outward-looking agent, trying to connect with voters and their problems, it would probably be more reform-minded (and liberal) than the Democratic party reflected in Congress. Many of the DNC's members came of age in the 1960s and entered political activism through civil rights or the antiwar movement or the presidential campaigns of Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. They started out, like Tully, as insurgents against the old order. If they had the power to do so, the membership of the Democratic National Committee would likely commit the party to a much more aggressive agenda than the one the public now hears from congressional Democrats.
But they do not have the power. The DNC, because it does not attempt to connect with people in any meaningful way, is utterly dependent on the politics of money. The party headquarters is located on the top floor of the Democratic party's building on Ivy Court, a few blocks from the Capitol, but it is not the most important entity in the building. Downstairs are the congressional campaign committees, one for the Senate and one for the House. Both raise far more money and are directly connected to real power -- the incumbent members of Congress. Why should a lobbyist dump a lot of money on the national committee, when he can give it straight-out to the people who will decide his issues?
"The congressional party is the only lifeline we've got to money and legitimacy," Mike McCurry explained. "The DNC -- the party as a party -- does not have an independent base it can rely on. So whatever we do on substantive issues is done with a very close eye to what the reaction of the congressional leadership will be. Because they can shut us down very quickly." [2]
In fact, when DNC Chairman Ron Brown intruded on some issues in a way that was offensive to the Democratic leaders in Congress, he was told, rather harshly, to back off. Brown declared his strong opposition to the Republican proposal for cutting the capital- gains tax -- a perfectly orthodox position for the party of working people -- and Representative Daniel Rostenkowski, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, reacted angrily. Rosty stayed away from the DNC's fund-raising dinner, a nasty signal that communicated his disapproval to every tax lobbyist in town. Brown was, likewise, rebuked by the party's Senate majority leader, Senator George Mitchell, and Senator Bentsen, chairman of the Finance Committee, when the DNC aggressively embraced another idea that might appeal to average voters -- cutting the regressive payroll tax for Social Security.
Everyone understands the power relationships: The congressional leaders control access to the money because of their intimate relationships with lobbyists and interests. If the Democratic party began to act like a real political party, the money would be cut off.
"A DNC chairman who gets a little too far out front," McCurry said, "can get slapped around."
***
When political polls ask voters to describe the Democratic party, the most frequent answer is "the party of average working people. " That used to be the overwhelming response, expressed by 50 percent of the electorate, but according to McCurry, this is now an answer given by only 13 percent. Still, it remains the single strongest element in the party's public identity.
The Democrats might more accurately be described now as "the party of Washington lawyers" -- lawyers who serve as the connective tissue within the party's upper reaches. They are the party establishment, to the extent anyone is, that has replaced the old networks of state and local political bosses. But these lawyers have no constituencies of their own and, indeed, must answer to no one, other than their clients.
Democratic lawyers who have reached this plateau are mostly veterans of past administrations or old presidential campaigns, though some served as aides to key congressional leaders. They move easily in and out of the various power centers in the Democratic Congress, dispensing political advice on the direction of the party and specific issues and also distributing that important commodity -- campaign money. Many major law firms have formed their own political action committees, so that the various strands -- party strategy, issues, money -- conveniently come together in one location. These lawyers speak, naturally enough, with a mixture of motives -- for the good of the party, presumably, but also for the benefit of the clients who are paying them.
Thomas "Lud" Ashley, the former Ohio congressman, speaks of this realm with some contempt, though he functions comfortably within it himself. Ashley served twenty-five years in the House, in the time when local political organizations still had vitality and elected representatives were compelled to listen to them. That system of accountability, he observed, has disappeared and the well-connected law firms have become an unsatisfying substitute.
"Tommy Boggs practically invents a fundraiser for someone and then he invites the member of Congress to attend," Ashley said. "There are half a dozen law firms in town that do that -- raise money and lobby. If you ask who is the Democratic party, it's those law firms. Either they go to the members and offer to raise money or the member goes to them and says, 'I'd appreciate it if you will handle my Washington fund raising,' and the collection is all taken care of for the member.
"You put the money out and you collect at the other end. You have access and more than that. Access is really a cowardly word because the legislation is the bottom line. Believe me, the money is not directed at access. It's directed at the bottom line."
Has the party of Jefferson and Jackson been reduced to the political machinations of six Washington law firms? Not quite, but Ashley's point is only modestly exaggerated. When I asked other old hands in Washington to take a stab at naming "the six law firms" who form the establishment of the Democratic party, none of them hesitated or argued with the premise. They had only marginal disagreements about which firms ought to be included.
The ubiquitous Robert Strauss of Akin, Gump, a Texan who was party chairman in the mid-1970s and U.S. trade representative in the Carter administration, was on everyone's list. The news media dubbed him "Mr. Democrat" and often seek his thoughts on party affairs, though Strauss is closer to the Republicans in the White House and to Republican corporate interests than to any bread-and-butter Democratic constituencies. His firm represents everything from Drexel Burnham Lambert to the Motion Picture Association of America, from McDonnell Douglas to AT&T. When George Bush appointed him ambassador to Moscow in 1991, it was widely understood that Strauss would be busy arranging deals for American business to develop markets and resources inside the newly liberated republics.
Others on the list of Democratic influentials would include Tommy Boggs, son of the late House floor leader, and his firm of Patton, Boggs and Blow (Ron Brown, the party chairman, is a lawyer-lobbyist in Patton, Boggs); Harry C. McPherson, Berl Bernhard and Lloyd C. Hand of Verner, Liipfert, law partners who served in government during the Kennedy-Johnson era; J. D. Williams, former Senate aide from the early 1960s, and his firm of Williams and Jensen; Charles T. Manatt, a Californian appointed national chairman by Jimmy Carter, and the Los Angeles-based firm of Manatt, Phelps; Patrick J. O'Connor, a former party treasurer and "money guy" for Hubert Humphrey, and the Minneapolis- based firm of O'Connor and Hannan.
To be less arbitrary, the list could be expanded to include selected influentials from other law firms -- Stuart E. Eizenstat, who was Carter's domestic policy advisor, or Joseph A. Califano. Jr., who was Lyndon Johnson's, or Richard Moe, who was Vice-President Walter Mondale's chief of staff, and some others. Older lawyers like Lloyd N. Cutler or Clark Clifford have been influential insiders for so many years that they have acquired the patina of statesmen, although the elderly Clifford looked more like a statesman-fixer, thanks to the BCCI banking scandal.
"Those guys really are the establishment," Mike McCurry said, "and the establishment argument is: Don't rock the boat, stay in the mainstream where everything flows smoothly."
Their accumulating political influence is largely a matter of default -- reflecting the decline of other structures within the Democratic party. Stuart Eizenstat, the former Carter aide, explained:
"If you ask me where the power centers are in the party, my answer is there aren't any. They don't exist. There's an utter vacuum of power. The New Deal coalition no longer exists. All that's left are small pieces -- a small Jewish piece, the black piece and small intellectual-labor pieces."
Ambidextrous lawyers try to fill the breach. Eizenstat, for instance, lobbies for clients and also works energetically in the role of party advisor. Among others, his Atlanta-based firm, Powell Goldstein, represents high-tech companies, housing developers and the major banks (including Lud Ashley's trade association). Eizenstat sees the political counseling as his conscientious duty to the party, not as a means of enhancing his influence, but the two roles inevitably enhance each other.
"I've spent the last two days calling as many leadership people as I could, advising them on how to handle the budget summit," Eizenstat said. "I do my piece and others do theirs, but it's extremely diffuse. I'm constantly asked privately to come to the Hill and work on things. I worked on [George] Mitchell's maiden speech as majority leader. I worked on [House Speaker Tom] Foley's state of the union response. Dick Gephardt [House majority leader] sends me drafts of his speeches."
While he is on the phone with the key players, Eizenstat sometimes does bring up other matters -- the particular political interests of his clients. "I had to make some calls for high-tech clients and get a sense of what impact the budget process will have on them," he said. "I said, as I always do, that I'm calling on behalf of such-and-such client. Then I say: I want to take my lobbyist hat off and say, 'Here's where we ought to stand as a party on this budget situation.' I don't feel any qualms about doing that."
Eizenstat is perhaps more sensitive than most to the potential for conflict, but he does not regard this as a problem for the Democratic party. "I've felt I could take my client hat off at any time and give my unvarnished views," he said. "You'd be hard-pressed to find a relationship between my advice to the Democratic party and my client list."
Eizenstat's client list, nonetheless, does sometimes put him on the opposite side of issues that matter greatly to important Democratic constituencies. When organized labor was pushing for a workers' right-to-know law on toxic chemicals, Eizenstat lobbied for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), trying to weaken the measure. "That did raise some hackles with the AFL-CIO," he conceded. "I didn't oppose the bill, I tried to improve the bill." [3]
When Congress enacted the new clean-air legislation aimed at acid rain, Eizenstat represented an Indiana public-utility company, one of the sources of the pollution. The company, Public Service Indiana, liked his work so much that it made him a corporate director. "Now we've got a good one-two punch on the board of directors," a PSI official said, "good Republican clout and great Democratic clout." [4]
When public-interest reform groups urged Democratic senators to stop the White House's secret manipulations of regulations at OMB, Eizenstat lobbied to kill the measure. He represented a business coalition including aerospace, electronics, construction, computers, the NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. When the largest commercial banks pushed for further financial deregulation, Eizenstat lobbied on their behalf. His firm's banking clients include Chase Manhattan, Citizens & Southern of Atlanta and the Association of Bank Holding Companies, the trade group for the major multinational banks.
Eizenstat's client list is typical of the influential Democratic lawyers, though he is perhaps more punctilious than some others about avoiding the more flagrant intraparty conflicts. It is quite routine for these important Democratic advisors to represent Republican corporate interests on economic issues in opposition to Democratic constituencies. Except for a few labor-union accounts, these lawyers do not speak for the "average working stiff" because they have been hired by his boss.
Tommy Boggs made his reputation as an effective lobbyist in the late 1970s when he persuaded Congress to provide a loan-guarantee bailout for Chrysler, a cause pushed by the United Auto Workers as well as the company. A decade later, Boggs was on the other side -- representing Japanese auto imports. The Automobile Import Dealers Association successfully hammered Chrysler and the UAW on trade issues and its Autopac pumped $2.6 million into 1988 congressional races, money that Boggs helped direct to the right places. "We basically pick our customers," Boggs explained, "by taking the first one who comes in the door." [5]
When the United Mine Workers confronted Pittston Coal in its 1988 showdown strike over health benefits, J. D. Williams of Williams and Jensen championed the company side. The Pittston strike was pivotal in the coal industry because the company had walked away from the industrywide contract obligations with the UMW and, if Pittston won, other companies would likely follow. Williams and Jensen, flanked by influential Republican lobbyists, became a clearinghouse for the coal industry, whose ultimate objective was to strip retired coal miners of guaranteed health benefits. Williams and Jensen financed an ostensibly objective study by an independent research institute to attack the soundness of the mine union's pension fund. As J. D. Williams once joked to an audience of fellow lobbyists: "If I get desperate enough, I can usually argue a case on the merits." [6]
When many active party members at the grassroots were campaigning against human-rights abuses in Central America, the Democratic firm of O'Connor and Hannan was doing political public relations for ARENA, the right-wing party implicated in the "death squads" of El Salvador. The firm's lobbying was designed to keep foreign aid flowing to the right- wing government, and it succeeded, despite the murder of six Jesuit priests by the Salvadoran military. Local Democrats. on the Minneapolis City Council were sufficiently offended by the connections to cancel the city's legal contract with O'Connor and Hannan. [7]
Bob Strauss, because his firm is so large and diverse, is often in a position where he seems to be counseling both sides in the political debate. As a high-minded statesman, "Mr. Democrat," Strauss played the advocate's role for raising taxes and cutting federal benefit programs and coaxed the two parties to come together for their grand budget summit. But, while Strauss played statesman, his law firm was busy lobbying specific tax issues on behalf of selected industries, from alcoholic beverages to mutual insurance companies. Indeed, while Strauss served on the National Economic Commission, two of his own clients, AT&T and Pepsico, filed comments with the same blue-ribbon group. The law firm dismissed any possibility of conflicting loyalties. "Strauss is clearly doing this as a public servant," his partner, Joel Jankowsky, explained. [8]