Deconstructing Abramoff's Partisanship
By Robert Schlesinger
huffingtonpost.com
01.17.2006
The editors of The New Republic in this week's issue blast apart the Jack Abramoff bipartisan myth.
You know the myth: The fact that Abramoff gave money to both parties somehow indicates that he an operator sans party, "an equal money dispenser," as the president put it.
"The hilarity of this is that, before he became a figure of disgrace, nobody who knew the faintest thing about Abramoff wondered about his partisan affiliation," the editors write, noting that Abramoff was a Bush "pioneer," meaning that he raised $100,000 for the Bush reelection campaign (hmmm, if he was an equal money dispenser, did he also raise $100,000 for the Kerry campaign?).
There are two egregious errors with this spin, TNR's eds point out:
The first involves lumping all Abramoff connections into the same category. Abramoff's clients made many campaign donations to many members of Congress from both parties, but this isn't really the issue. Most of these donations are scandalous only to the degree that any political donations are scandalous. No, the real issue is which members received donations from Abramoff's clients at his behest or accepted direct personal benefits--including lavish trips or make-work jobs for their wives--from him. This list is almost entirely Republican.
The second, and larger, conceptual error has been a failure to place Abramoff within the context of the Republican Party's takeover of K Street. The GOP domestic agenda has evolved to the point where it is almost completely indistinguishable from the accumulated whims of its funding base. Republicans explicitly wanted to destroy the old bipartisan arrangement, whereby lobbies cultivated ties with both parties, and replace it with one in which lobbies gave their exclusive loyalty to Republicans. GOP leaders called this effort the "K Street Project," and they cajoled and threatened lobbying firms to hire and donate only to them. Abramoff was the poster boy for the new breed of lobbyist/activist, loyal to his clients and his party. (Of course, in reality, it turned out Abramoff was loyal only to himself.) The implicit, and sometimes explicit, terms of this arrangement held that the riches lobbyists bestowed upon Republicans would be returned manifold in the form of favorable legislation. As a result of the success of the K Street Project, the lines separating lobbyists from GOP leadership all but disappeared. Abramoff thrived precisely because he recognized something that the Washington press corps still seems unable to: that the Republican Party's alliance with K Street made it deeply and thoroughly corruptible. |
