Authors: Mike Lofgren
For the answer, follow the money. While the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has long been a highly influential political force,
*
the
Citizens United
decision greatly magnified the effect of individual donors. In 2012, Adelson's cash infusions kept Newt Gingrich alive as a Republican candidate far longer than would otherwise have been the case, and for 2016, Adelson has vowed to double the $150 million he spent in the previous election cycle.
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The transaction cost of getting $300 million from one donor is of course far less than collecting the same sum from a myriad of small contributors, so it is easy to understand why Republican candidates should react as they do when Adelson issues a request. The fact that his sole political interests are his casinos and the Likud Party gives his recipients a short and easy-to-remember checklist.
Adelson, who has advocated attacking Iran with nuclear weapons, has been accompanied in this endeavor by Paul Singer, a hedge fund CEO who specializes in deliberately buying distressed or defaulted bonds at a steep discount and then successfully suing for full repayment in a friendly court, and who has lately advised his clients to short U.S. Treasuries.
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Singer has been a heavy funder of the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, the Israel Project, and was the biggest single donor to Mitt Romney's super PAC Restore Our Future in 2012. After Netanyahu's speech to Congress, the
New York Times
found that heavy contributions to Republicans by rich, hawkish donors like Adelson and Singer have fueled a trend toward stronger support for Israel in the GOP.
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At least one lawmaker has been less pusillanimous than Graham in discussing the cash nexus between donors and politicians. Representative Vance McAllister, a Louisiana Republican, openly told an audience at the University of Louisiana's Monroe campus that members of Congress expect to receive campaign contributions for voting the right way on bills. “Money controls Washington,” he told the group. McAllister claimed that fellow members often see their job as a “steady cycle of voting for fundraising and money instead of voting for what is right.” Referring to a pending bill, he said a colleague, whom he didn't name, told him in the House Chamber that if he voted no on the bill, he would receive a
contribution from the Heritage Foundation (the freshman McAllister apparently confused the organization with Heritage Action, which can legally make donations; Heritage Foundation, its parent organization, is barred from making contributions).
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McAllister was defeated in his party's 2014 primary; his kind of candor is seldom rewarded.
Graham and McAllister are Republicans, but this kind of behavior is found on both sides of the aisle. Steve, a lobbyist of my acquaintance, told me that during the writing of the Senate bill to repair the damage on the East Coast from the October 2012 superstorm Sandy, lobbyists were vying to insert their special projects into the legislation. He said it was a virtual auction: if you contributed to Democratic senator Charles Schumer of New York, a member of the Senate leadership, it would greatly improve the odds of getting your provision accepted.
There are other methods for wealthy interests to purchase the obedience of public officials than just giving money to their campaigns. As the controversy over Hillary Clinton's well-compensated orations has made clear, speechmaking by former officeholders is a major racket and a significant growth industry. In the year prior to Clinton's declaring her candidacy, companies like Fidelity, KKR, and Goldman Sachs were putting money directly in her pocket at an average of $200,000 per speech.
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Hillary's husband, Bill, has been a trailblazer in making public office pay off during retirement, rendering the image of Harry Truman pottering around his house at Independence, or of Ike sitting in his rocker at Gettysburg, as obsolete as the Paleolithic Age. The
Washington Post
reported that since leaving the presidency, Clinton has made $105 million in speaking fees, or “honoraria,” as the industry chastely calls them. The bulk has come from corporate interests and particularly the financial services industry, suggesting that it might be considered a form of deferred compensation for services rendered in enacting legislation like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and repealing noisome impediments like the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking.
Former Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke, who deluged banks with money at near-zero interest rates (with which they built up cash reserves or purchased higher-yield securities abroad rather than lending to consumers or businesses), has been the recipient of considerable corporate gratitude during his retirement. Like Hillary, he commands around $200,000 per speech. In a normal world, one might have thought that the views of these people would have been more interesting, or at least more significant, when they were actually holding public office and their actions directly affected national policy. At that time their golden words would have been free to the listener. It is difficult to imagine Goldman Sachs investing so much simply for the privilege of listening to Hillary's shopworn platitudes about hard choices.
A lot of money is changing hands, both in campaign fund-raising and honoraria to government personnel whose “distinguished” careers set them up for a payday beyond imagining for most Americans. But that still leaves questions: is that money always synonymous with power, and where does the real power lie? We know that in many respects, particularly in national security affairs, Congress's constitutional powers are moribund, if only because it chooses not to act. Where did those powers go? In 1973, as the Watergate crisis gathered into a storm cloud and President Nixon's crimes and misdemeanors became all too evident, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote a critique of executive overreach called
The
Imperial Presidency
.
Schlesinger argued that since the beginning of the Republic, and with increasing speed and intensity during the cold war, presidents have seized constitutionally unsanctioned power unto themselves, particularly in national security matters. His argument was persuasive, as far as it went: there is no question that the notion of checks and balances envisioned by the founders is all but dead in national security matters, and that on the surface the president appears to be decisively dominant in these fields. From a twenty-first-century perspective, however, there are problems with Schlesinger's thesis.
The first is the author's partisanship. Schlesinger had been a fixture
of Democratic salons and kitchen cabinets back to the time of Harry Truman. Somehow, at the time of the events about which he wrote later, he never summoned the outrage to critique in such scathing fashion Truman's decision on war in Korea without a congressional declaration, Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco, or Johnson's obsession with Vietnam. It was Nixon who moved him to write his searing condemnation of presidential overreach; and when another Democratic president, Bill Clinton, in the face of a rare rejection of an authorization for the use of force by the House of Representatives in 1999 during the president's bombing campaign against Serbia, nevertheless continued with the military action, Schlesinger did not make a sound.
But an objection more fundamental than that of partisan bias remains. If most of the American government's power flows to the presidency, creating a regime Schlesinger called a plebiscitary presidency (one in which the supreme leader is popularly elected but has all or virtually all the power while in office), why do Americans in season and out keep electing presidents who behave imperially, authorizing unconstitutional surveillance and embroiling the nation in one foreign conflict after another? Have we become so blind or masochistic as to believe that these are desirable policies, or are there perhaps institutional pressures that impel a president, any president, to act in certain ways, ways often directly opposed to the platform that he campaigned on in order to convince voters to elect him? A look at the last several presidencies shows a pattern that suggests the presidency may not be so imperial after all.
What I Saw at the Reagan Revolution
When I began working in government, Ronald Reagan was in his first term as president. He was not yet the sainted dream figure of the GOPâwitness the successful movement during the 1990s to name airports and buildings after him, and even Grover Norquist's goofy campaign to get Reagan's likeness on the dime and carved into Mount Rushmore. He was, by many accounts, fast becoming the archetype of the successful modern presidency.
This assessment was bipartisan. When campaigning in 2008, which former president did Barack Obama identify as one he was keen to emulate? Would he pick any of the traditional standard-bearers in the Democratic pantheon: FDR, Truman, or Kennedy? Not at all: “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and a way that Bill Clinton did not.” And how did he do this? According to Obama, Reagan appealed to a popular demand for sunny days, satisfying voters who insisted: “We want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”
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This attitude was in evidence during my days on the House Budget Committee. In the mid-1990s, the standard narrative for justifying ever-increasing defense spending in the annual budget resolution would invariably invoke the nostrum that “Ronald Reagan won the cold war.” No one has ever suggested that Lincoln won the Civil War in the single-handed manner of Muhammad Ali knocking out George Foreman, but by then the sanctification of Reagan was well under way. In GOP circles these days there is a cult of Reagan, and his presidential library is now a kind of Lourdes for true believers.
But was he really so remarkable? This was not the universal assessment of the fortieth president when he was in office, even from his own inner circle. Thanks to the memoirs of insiders such as Larry Speakes, his presidential press secretary, and Donald Regan, his treasury secretary and chief of staff, we know that his was a remarkably stage-managed presidency. Speakes told us he made up quotes to make his boss sound more incisive and in charge, and Donald Regan boggled at the president's passive acceptance of his subordinates' maneuvers. “I did not know what to make of his passivity,” he wrote in his memoir after one notable personnel shake-up. “He seemed to be absorbing a fait accompli rather than making a decision. One might have thought that the matter had already been settled by some absent party.”
Even Republicans would from time to time consider whether Reagan was fully in charge of his own administration. In the mid-1980s, at the
height of the debate over procurement scandals and defense reform, Congressman John Kasich, my boss, was one of several members of Congress invited to the White House to hear the president's views. I never did learn exactly what transpired, but Kasich returned to his office in a bad mood, heatedly said, “Reagan is senile,” and disappeared into his office.
Reagan's defense in the defining scandal of his presidency, the Iran-Contra affair, hinged on the public's willingness to believe that his underlings could have concocted and executed an egregious crime right under his nose without his having an inkling of it. The public bought it without a blink: it fit a character assessment that was widely accepted. A colleague told me Speaker Tip O'Neill described congressional meetings with Reagan as encounters with an actor on a set reading his lines and hitting his mark. “He came into the room, read from note cards, and tuned out,” Tip said. No doubt Reagan's publicists would have described this behavior as focusing on the Big Picture, or choosing to remain above the fray. Some have retrospectively come to see Reagan's presidency as transformational in a more ominous sense: “Reagan was the Trojan horse in which a regiment of eager strategists hid, peering through its eye-holes as they wheeled it surreptitiously into the White House,” wrote Meagan Day. “The people at the helm had their sights set on a total overhaul of the relationship between state, government and capital. They were activists, people with a vision, steeped in emergent neoliberal economic theory and intent on revising the agenda.”
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Secret agencies, clandestine programs, and hidden agendas have been a fact of life since the Manhattan Project. What was new in the Reagan administration was the rise of the expertly choreographed presidency that eased the chief executive out of the messy business of formulating policy and into the realm of the ceremonial. During Watergate, there was no question where culpability and accountability lay. No one was in doubt that Nixon was in chargeâthat is why his denials rang so hollow. Iran-Contra was far more ambiguous. Who was really running the show? Was it Reagan or a rogue colonel in the West Wing? The Keystone Cops aspect of the affair (we remember National Security Adviser
Bud McFarlane flying to Tehran with a cake and a Bible) may have obscured the larger truth that Iran-Contra was a conspiracy to subvert the Constitution.
Reagan may not have been much on policy, but when it came to the ceremonial presidency, he set the gold standard. His time in office coincided with the final triumph of presidential campaign packaging, where an artfully staged and likable persona is deemed more electable than a candidate who has mastered policy issues but does not possess a relatable backstory. It was in the 1980s that the focus groupâan opinion survey that began during World War II as a way to gauge the effectiveness of propaganda filmsâcame into its own in political campaigns. A new emphasis was put on subliminal and emotional reactions to candidates at the expense of any rational evaluation of their policy positions.
Most succeeding presidents have been more hands-on than Reagan (we trust their schedules were not set by astrologers), but the template has remained: in every instance their campaign was less about policy or competence (presidential candidate Michael Dukakis ran on a platform of “competence” in 1988 and got walloped at the polls) than a character narrative voters could identify with. All the messy stuff about which government programs would have to be cut to achieve deficit reduction and what, beyond a few sonorous slogans, our Middle East policy ought to be, would be left to the scriptwriters and the set dressers.