The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine - Hardcover

Continetti, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 038551672X ISBN 13: 9780385516723

Verlag: Doubleday, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

When the Republican Party took over Congress in 1995, it promised to reduce the size of the federal government, eliminate the corruption and excesses of the Democrats, and change the way Washington works. Instead, as Matthew Continetti reports in this unsparing exposé, the Republican majority has overseen the largest expansion of federal power since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and established close and scandalous ties with special interest groups and corporate lobbies.

CAN THIS PARTY BE SAVED? portrays the rise of the new breed of Republicans running Washington today. It tells the full stories of the names splashed in the headlines: Tom DeLay, who clawed his way from the back benches of Congress to emerge as the symbol of the GOP’s unholy alliance with corporate America; and Grover Norquist, the antitax activist who engineered the Republican takeover of the lobbying industry. It reveals, too, how Newt Gingrich, once the conservative movement’s greatest spokesperson and visionary, sacrificed idealism for wealth and influence.

This year’s midterm elections will be a testing ground for the American voter. CAN THIS PARTY BE SAVED? provides vital information for readers across the political spectrum, from conservatives fighting to revitalize Gingrich’s revolutionary vision to liberals battling for a stronger voice in Congress.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MATTHEW CONTINETTI is a reporter for The Weekly Standard and lives in Washington, D.C.

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PROLOGUE
THE DECEMBER REVOLUTION

TOM DELAY AND THE RISE OF THE K STREET CONSERVATIVES

This is a crime story.

It begins in October 1993, more than a year before Republicans took over Capitol Hill, when Illinois Republican Bob Michel, the House minority leader, announced that he would retire at the end of his term. Michel was eighty years old. He was first elected to Congress in 1956. His face was streaked with wrinkles, he wore thick glasses with lenses the size of car windshields, and he had little hair. He looked like a relic.

In a way, he was a relic. Michel’s career almost perfectly traced the decline of the Republican congressional majority. By the time Michel retired from Congress, the last year Republicans had controlled the House of Representatives was in 1954. That was two years before he had been first elected to represent Illinois’s 18th District. Michel had come to Congress just when his party was on the way down.

Yet, as the party declined, Michel rose through the ranks. He became minority whip in 1975, and minority leader in 1981. In both jobs he shepherded Republican legislation through the House as best he could. He was often referred to as an “institutionalist”– someone who exploited the rules and regulations of the House for tactical gain. But more often than not conservatives referred to him as an “accommodationist”–someone with no sense of overall strategy who was all too eager to make deals with the House Democratic leadership.

Michel was soft, conservatives grumbled. He was afraid to take a stand against the Democrats, who, after decades in power, had grown decadent and corrupt. And Michel knew, too, that the younger a Republican House member was, the more he was itching for a fight with the opposition. As Republican representation in the House had shrunk, it had also become more conservative–far more conservative than Michel. At the press conference announcing his retirement Michel admitted he was “much more comfortable” in the Washington that existed “when I first came to Congress.”(1)

One of Michel’s harshest critics–and the frontrunner to replace him–was Newt Gingrich, who had represented Georgia’s 11th District since 1979, and who had been elected minority whip in 1989, after Dick Cheney left that post to serve as President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense. Gingrich was Michel’s opposite in almost every way. He was fiercely ideological, tirelessly combat­ive, and endlessly inventive. Before he entered electoral politics, Gingrich had been a history professor, and so his mind, he said, was attuned to the faint vibrations that signaled the rise, decline, and renascence of civilizations.
Also, unlike Michel, whose midwestern Republicanism had its roots in 1950s budget-cutting and isolationism, Gingrich was a true Reaganite. He was a supply-sider who thought that lower marginal tax rates would spur economic growth and increase tax revenues. He believed in American power, a strong national defense, and standing up to the tyrannical Soviet Union. And though his conser­vatism was not religious, he was nonetheless a cultural warrior, and thought that a libertine Boomer elite, reared in the student revolts of the 1960s, governed the country from the coasts in an increas­ingly out-of-touch manner.

Gingrich was also famous. His political celebrity had been grow­ing for some time. He had first gained prominence in the early 1980s, when he used after-hours “special orders” speeches, broadcast live on the C-SPAN television network, to harangue the House Democratic leadership. He led ethics crusades against Democratic Speakers Tom Foley and Jim Wright. He argued that the Democratic Congress was plagued by scandal–scandals at the House bank, scandals at the House post office, scandals at the highest reaches of congressional power–and that only a thoroughgoing purge would set things right. He tried to combine the wisdom of a public intellectual with the guile of a public official. A simple conversation with Gingrich would be inevitably laced with references to Napoleon, science fiction, Churchill, the futurist authors Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Franklin Roo­sevelt, and Peter Drucker. He preached a transformative politics that would break the old systems of the past and help move America for­ward into the Information Age. Gingrich was the first example of the paradoxical species that would eventually proliferate throughout Washington: the progressive conservative.

He was an ideologue. But Gingrich could also be incredibly charming, at least to Washington conservatives, who swooned whenever the minority whip gave a speech about rescuing American civilization from liberal elites, unleashing the dynamism of the American economy through tax cuts and deregulation, and chang­ing the culture of Washington so that power rested with the Ameri­can people, not special interests. And all of Gingrich’s speeches and articles, delivered at conservative think tanks and retreats and reprinted in the pages of the small conservative magazines, had one thing in common: They would usually end with assurances that one day, perhaps sooner than people thought, there would be a congres­sional Republican majority.

But this would not happen, Gingrich argued, as long as someone like Bob Michel ran the House Republican caucus. It came as no surprise, then, that within hours of Michel’s announcement on October 4, 1993, Gingrich had, in turn, announced his candidacy for minority leader. It was no contest. As minority whip, Gingrich had already rallied a majority of the conference to vote for him– more than a year before the Republicans would hold leadership elections in December 1994. Michel allies were left in the dark. A new power was rising in the Republican party, one that was uncom­promising, loud, and visionary.
The problem was, the actual rising power wasn’t Gingrich. In fact, Gingrich’s rise was so stunning, his personality so polarizing, his visage so ubiquitous, that his quick elevation to minority-leader-in-waiting obscured another fissure in the House Republican lead­ership. That fissure was opened by the race to replace Gingrich as minority whip. And the man who won that race, which began the same day Gingrich locked up the post of minority leader, was ulti­mately to have more power on Capitol Hill than Newt Gingrich ever dreamed of having.

It is in the nature of revolutions that they consume their most passionate advocates. The vanguard’s ideals are replaced by the fac-tion’s brass knuckles. The chain of events that Robespierre set in motion led to his death by guillotine in 1794. Trotsky fled from Stalin and met his fate with an ice pick to the head in Mexico in 1940. The dynamics of political revolutions in a constitutional republic such as the United States are nonviolent, but the parallels between political insurgencies remain. One group comes to power pledging reform; the reformers’ newfound power attracts a troop of opportunists and hangers-on; the opportunists eat away at the reformist impulse from within. Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revo­lution would turn out to be no different.

Three candidates ran to replace Gingrich as minority whip, yet only two really mattered. (Florida representative Bill McCollum always trailed the others.) In one corner was Gingrich’s longtime ally Robert Walker, the fifty-one-year-old congressman from Penn-sylvania’s 16th District. Walker had been Gingrich’s chief deputy whip–responsible for “whipping up” support on key votes–since 1989. He had the requisite experience, and he was committed to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Doubleday
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 038551672X
• ISBN 13: 9780385516723
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 273
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Doubleday; https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar