Authors: Hedrick Smith
Actually, the way political poker is now played, having a PAC or buying a ticket to a $250 or $1,000-a-head fund-raiser, is just the price of admission for a lobbyist—the ante for the first deal. A hustling lobbyist must sweeten the kitty by joining the “steering committee” for a candidate, which means sponsoring and pushing that candidate, selling tickets to his fund-raisers to others. Veteran lobbyists help each other out by trading tickets to fund-raisers. Tommy Boggs, the well-known lawyer, holds something of a record—serving on more than fifty steering committees. But for big stakes, a lobbyist must play host to fund-raising dinners at home, personally raising cash donations.
“The small dinner is a big deal now—thirty to forty people, mostly Washington types,” explained a lobbyist with long congressional experience. “Some people call it ‘face time’ because they get to meet face to face with political big names. You see, it’s not just our PACs that the senators and congressmen want; we are expected to go out and raise money ourselves.”
Then he paused and burst out: “I
hate
fund-raising. I do not go to dinners or cocktail parties. But our trade association will probably do $400,000 in contributions this election cycle, through our PAC and through other activities. I will raise probably ten to fifteen thousand dollars personally for people who don’t take PAC contributions. It’s like a stoop labor. It’s arduous and unpleasant.”
“In effect,” he explained, “the large firms and trade associations are the
investment bankers of the campaign world
[emphasis added]. You can’t separate that from the business of lobbying. Except that unlike a banker, you can’t get a signed note for your money. It’s a more negative thing. The incumbents tell you, ‘If you don’t do this, you’d better look out.’ It’s particularly bad in the Senate. They are strongarming
contributors. ‘You’d better cough up or the next time your item comes up before our committee, we won’t be for it.’ So you’ve got to go out and beat the drum for them. Beat the drum or you’ve had it. You can’t make your case. You can’t get support. A big-state Republican senator from the Northeast sent us word through an intermediary, ‘Your guys in Washington don’t participate.’ That’s the euphemism of choice,
participate
. A Democratic senator from the Far West put it to me himself. I went to talk to him about a very important bill and he said, ‘But you haven’t participated.’ That’s what’s getting scary.”
Other lobbyists complain of virtual shakedowns by politicians. One lobbyist told me that a business partner telephoned for an appointment with a Republican congressman, but the congressman’s administrative assistant replied: “We’re sorry, we’re not going to have a meeting with you. We looked at our contribution list and you haven’t given to any of our campaigns.” And a Democratic staffer told me of a close and heated debate in the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in 1985 over whether to shift some funding from F-16 fighters made by General Dynamics to F-20 fighters made by Northrop. The shift of one vote would tip the balance. According to this staff aide, one committee Democrat proposed: “Let’s set this aside for a day. I’m going to take bids from both contractors tonight.”
What Does PAC Money Buy?
Most lobbyists and legislators are smart enough to use language vague enough to deny illegal vote buying. “There are still conventions observed,” I was told by an experienced lobbyist. “You never talk about political money in the same conversation as you discuss a legislative issue. I will not do that, because I remember Senator Brewster. Remember the case?
*
There was nothing explicit,” my lobbyist friend went on. “It was implicit. But the legal point was that the nature of the exchange was such that there was a relationship between the campaign contribution and Brewster’s actions.”
Bob Strauss, Tommy Boggs, Chads Walker, Anne Wexler, and other lobbyists contend that political donations merely get access: the return phone call, an office drop-in, or a quiet dinner with a client, the chance to make your case. That can be crucial, especially if the other side lacks equal access. “Access is important precisely because
there is
no equal access
,” emphasized David Cohen, former head of Common Cause. “It’s unequal access because there’s a limited amount of time for members to consider anything. Access is important because it’s what comes up on a legislator’s screen that influences him.”
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Strauss voiced the conventional wisdom when he insisted to me that helping raise $10,000 for a senator’s primary and general election campaigns “won’t buy his vote and shouldn’t.” But like many others, he is worried that “we will have a major financial scandal growing out of fund-raising in this town—not a Watergate but one level below it. I’m talking about—yes, some guy saying that, well, congressman or senator so-and-so told me that if we go out and raise $100,000 for him, that he’d vote for us.”
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Most politicians handle the entire question with kid gloves. Very few will discuss it candidly for direct quotation, unless they are retired or about to retire. But a lot allude to the obvious. Senator Robert Dole once remarked that “when these political action committees give money, they expect something in return other than good government.” Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, pokes fun at the pretense that big donations do not have political strings. “We are the only human beings in the world,” teased Frank, “who are expected to take thousands of dollars from perfect strangers on important matters and not be affected by it.” Dick Boiling, a liberal reformer who spent seventeen terms in the House, confessed to me that “even a guy like me will be conscious of the fellow that gives him $5,000—all you have to be is
conscious
.”
Senator Tom Eagleton, another Missouri Democrat, was more honest, talking shortly before his retirement in 1987. With the very process of cultivating special interest lobbies, he said, “you begin to lose your sense of independence.” When I suggested that officeholders probably felt psychologically beholden, he replied: “The nicest word is
predisposed
.” The money clearly works on a politician’s innards. It creates a sense of obligation that canny lobbyists know how to activate. Here’s how Eagleton, deeply troubled, described it:
“I’ve never had—and perhaps other senators have—a guy come into this office or over the phone say, ‘Tom, such-and-such vote’s coming up next week. You remember I gave X in your last campaign, and I’m certainly expecting you to vote that way.’ I’ve never had anything that direct, blunt, or obscene. However, let’s change the phraseology to this: ‘Tom, this is so-and-so. You know next week an important vote’s coming up on such-and-such. I just want to remind you, Tom, I feel
very strongly about that issue. Okay, my friend, good to hear from you.’ Now, a senator receives ‘gentle’ calls of that sort.”
In Eagleton’s view, an unspoken bargain is implicit when the contribution is made, because both politician and lobbyist know the lobbyist’s legislative interests, and by taking the contribution the politician tacitly agrees to give support.
Eagleton was backed for eighteen years by organized labor and always had a strong prolabor voting record. But he admitted having trouble sometimes meshing his conscience with labor’s priorities. “If one receives, as I did in my last election in 1980, over $100,000 from labor PACs, and then if one were contemplating running for reelection in 1986—which I did not—then when a labor vote is coming up, I’d have to weigh the legitimacy and the merits of that particular vote versus a funding source that I might be looking forward to in the future. It so happens that my philosophical views tie in very closely with the AFL-CIO on a whole range of domestic social issues. But nonetheless, a vote or two or three might come along and I’d say, ‘I can’t make up my mind on this issue,’ and my staff would tell me, ‘Well, let us remind you that labor’s keenly interested in this issue and we’re looking forward to labor’s support next time.’ ”
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In 1978, for example, organized labor was pushing a law to make union organizing easier. Eagleton thought one provision—allowing union officials to do organizing on the work floor of plants—was “dead wrong.” The law was blocked by a filibuster, but Eagleton was prepared to vote against that provision. “I wonder,” he added honestly, “if I were heavily dependent for my next reelection on huge amounts of labor money, would that maybe have tilted my judgment?”
Moreover, Eagleton made the point that some lobbies allow leeway and others do not. Organized labor has perhaps twenty votes on their hit list every year, and voting against them two or three times is tolerated. “Suppose you are heavily financed by the tobacco lobby,” he suggested. “There’s only one tobacco vote a year. That’s on price supports for tobacco: Yes or no. Now if you’re running for the Senate, say the first time, you almost have to make up your mind right then and there where you are on the tobacco issue. If you’re from a tobacco state like North Carolina or Kentucky, you’re for tobacco. But suppose you’re from Missouri. We have one county that has about eight tobacco farms. So I’m running for the Senate, and someone says, ‘Would you like a contribution from the American Tobacco Growers Association, from their PAC?’ Right then and there, if I take $1,000, I have to make up my mind, and I am committed one way or the other. It’s
not cricket to say I’m going to take the financial support of the tobacco association and not vote with them.”
Obviously, as Eagleton implied, interest groups keep report cards and use them in making campaign contributions. But also, as Eagleton indicated in his remarks about his philosophical affinity for organized labor, PACs usually reinforce political ties rather than creating them. Labor PACs gravitate to prolabor members, corporate PACs to probusiness types, farm associations to their allies, and so on. In effect, most votes do not have to be bought; mutual interest is already there. PAC donations reinforce original attitudes, though as Eagleton said, there are always votes at the margin where a PAC relationship impinges on a member’s independence. Finally, it is not the splashy-headline votes on the budget or the MX missile, where PAC leverage occurs. It is on special interest laws, such as a tobacco subsidy, a cargo-preference bill, or a tax break to a special industry, of little interest to most voters, that the PAC connection has its payoff.
Eagleton took issue with those who say a senator cannot be swung by $5,000 from one PAC because there are so many competing PACs. High costs make every $5,000 even more important. “If it costs $500,000 to run, and you lose a major contributor, or a major group of contributors, then there are ways of filling that void,” he said. “But if it costs $4 million to run, and you lose some major contributors, then it’s tougher to fill that void and get up to that $4 million level.”
Eagleton makes the additional point—confirmed by ample experience—that PACs run in herds, not singly. They “target” and “bundle” their money, giving it a multiplier effect. “Instead of just indiscriminately putting $1,000 here and $2,000 there,” Eagleton explained, “the corporate PACs get together, go over the races, and decide which ones are certain winners that don’t need any money, which ones are certain losers where it would be a poor investment. And then decide which races are the ones that they should bomb, like a bombing raid on Dresden.”
The guidance comes primarily from John Perkins, the Director of COPE, the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education, working with other top labor political strategists to swing big labor’s money one way or another. On the corporate side, the guidance comes mainly from Bernadette Budde, vice president of the Business-Industry PAC; she has a similar network of big corporate PAC strategists pooling advice. In effect, there are PAC conglomerates or confederations. Some are industry by industry: oil-and-gas-industry PACs get political guidance from the American Petroleum Institute; pro-Israel PACs from AIPAC;
the same with the insurance industry, the real estate industry, and so on.
Overall corporate PAC guidance used to come from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but the Chamber lost credibility after endorsing one hundred candidates—all Republicans—in the 1982 election.
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The corporate PAC tilt was so pro-Republican in the 1978, 1980, and 1982 elections that Tony Coelho, then head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, made a brass-knuckled pitch to the business PACs in 1981. He told them bluntly: “Look, if your shot was to beat us in ’80 and you didn’t, you’re not going to beat us in ’82, and we’re going to stay in the majority. And it doesn’t make any sense that you people treat us as the enemy. If you want to explain your problems to us, let’s have an open dialogue.”
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In short, don’t be blindly partisan and then expect good treatment afterward. Coelho’s message struck home. In the 1984 and 1986 campaigns, corporate PACs were less partisan, supporting incumbents from both parties.
Bundling, as it is called by power-game insiders is another way through which organized campaign financing gains influence. Bundling is the practice by which a central PAC in some industry will appeal to individual executives in its field for contributions to individual senators or congressmen. The PAC acts as the collection point for private checks, but since those funds are not its own, these contributions do not count against its $5,000 legal limit. The PAC puts these checks together in a “bundle,” delivers them to the politician, and reaps the political credit for raising the money.
In 1985, AlignPAC, the central PAC of the insurance industry, bundled $215,000 in individual contributions for Senator Bob Packwood of Oregon, chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee. This was on top of $129,326 contributed directly to Packwood by PACs of individual insurance companies in 1985. There was good reason, for Packwood was a champion of retaining the tax-exempt status of important fringe benefits such as health insurance, life insurance, and pensions. In fairness, Packwood’s views did not need to be bought. He was a firm believer in this approach—as opposed to government health insurance. The insurance was going all-out to protect Packwood well before his 1986 reelection. The strategy worked; as one of the best-funded incumbents, Packwood was not seriously threatened in 1986. The PAC tactic was a political insurance policy.