Americans may be tired of politics, but you’d never know it from the sales of a book released last month called The Buying of the President.
Compiled by the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based non-profit group, the modest-looking paperback promises to expose the identities of the businessmen, lobbyists, and cronies who finance presidential campaigns. ” Based on data carefully culled from mountains of public records,” touts the cover, “The Buying of the President is an incisive, unbiased guide to the real power behind the candidates.” In less than a month, the book went into its second printing, with 45,000 copies now in circulation. Not bad for what is essentially a collection of rewritten Federal Election Commission reports.
Not that the book isn’t brimming with interesting, if sometimes insignificant, facts. Who would have guessed, for instance, that Alan Keyes’s fifth largest “career patron” is an insurance broker from Chevy Chase, Maryland? Or that Kentucky Fried Chicken has made contributions to the Rainbow Coalition? Financial disclosure forms can yield choice nuggets to those who make the effort to wade through them. Clearly, the editors at the Center for Public Integrity have done some wading.
Unfortunately, they didn’t stop there. Not satisfied with being a mere conduit for useful information about political candidates, employees of the ” nonpartisan “watchdog” research group” tried their hand at political analysis. Like much the center has produced in recent years, the results are sometimes silly, sometimes important, but rarely do they qualify as objective.
Founded in 1989 by a former television producer named Charles Lewis, the Center for Public Integrity has dedicated itself to nothing less than ” [confronting] this national crisis of confidence in the political process.” In practice this has meant bringing the misdeeds of politicians to public attention, mostly by combing through public documents, then publishing the findings. Over the past six years, the group has produced more than a dozen reports on topics ranging from conflicts of interest at the National Forest Service to the failures of the Superfund program — subjects that other media frequently find too dull or complex to tackle. The center also offers its services, as well as its sizable storehouse of information from the FEC, to journalists working on political stories. Reporters can call the center and quickly find out how much money Bob Dole has received during his career from, say, California wineries. (Quite a bit, it turns out.)
Much of what the center does falls within the tradition of high-minded political reform, so it’s not surprising that an avalanche of good publicity has followed. Lewis is regularly invited to appear on news programs and op-ed pages as an expert on political ethics. Media luminaries such as Ben Bradlee and Diane Sawyer have been quick to cite the center as a beacon of honesty in American journalism. “Ethics must be reintroduced to public service to restore people’s faith in government,” wrote former anchorman Walter Cronkite in a letter reprinted in the center’s promotional literature. “Without such faith, democracy cannot flourish. Your ambitious agenda is filling a desperate need.”
Ambitious, indeed. And that is part of the problem. In its latest book, for example, the center has chosen to introduce each presidential candidate’s financial history with an essay describing highlights of his political career. The center’s editors clearly are better accountants than biographers, and the sketches often degenerate into psychobabble. Phil Gramm, we are told, is ” an elusive, enigmatic figure, full of contradictions and surprises” — presumably in contrast to most other politicians. Pat Buchanan’s “strongly held beliefs,” we learn in another place, “can be traced back to his conservative upbringing. William and Elizabeth Buchanan were strict parents and their nine children were brought up in accordance with their Catholic faith.” As for front-runner Bob Dole, an erstwhile friend is quoted as saying, “He was obsessed by money and power. There are a lot of personality traits in Dole that parallel Nixon.”
As psychoanalysis, these may or may not be accurate assessments. Either way, it is disconcerting to find them in a book ostensibly concerned with bringing objective financial facts to the public.
But it isn’t just the motivations of individual candidates that the center seeks to explain. It aims to lay bare the nation’s whole “brutal, victimizing political process,” as Charles Lewis puts it in the introduction to The Buying of the Presidency. According to Lewis, the “garishhess of money in politics has reached new levels of audacity, and all within the law.” Needless to say, this development poses serious problems for American politics — indeed, for the future of the Republic itself. Lewis explains: “midst Washington’s mercenary culture, in which wealthy private interests play an increasingly crucial role, the impression is unmistakable and indelible that our government-theoretically of the people, by the people, and for the people — is actually being sold to the highest bidden”
This appears to be the center’s animating belief — that rich people are covertly, and for their own nefarious gain, running the country. To make his point, Lewis frequently quotes William Greider, who argues that the enormous influence of lobbyists has created a “mock democracy — a system that has all the trappings of a free and open political discourse but is shaped and guided at a very deep level by the resources of the most powerful interests.”
The rest of us, by implication, have no control over the process at all. So it’s no wonder, as Lewis asserts in the book, that the “American people are growing more and more economically insecure and politically reactive, increasingly disempowered and disenfranchised.”
It’s an arresting thesis. But is it true? Is the political process really less democratic than it once was? Less democratic than it was in 1960, when John Kennedy colluded with Chicago mayor Richard Daley to rig the presidential election? Less democratic than it was during Teapot Dome?
Of course not. American politics — like the rest of the culture — has become radically more democratic, more slavishly responsive to the desires of ordinary people, than ever before. The majority of Americans couldn’t even vote until 1920. Now they can’t get pollsters to stop calling during dinner.
But that may be taking Lewis’s complaint too seriously. Judging by some of his public statements, the head of the Center for Public Integrity doesn’t seem concerned by the influence of all special interest groups, just the usual ones. When it was revealed that Sen. Phil Gramm had received extensive contributions from the National Rifle Association, Lewis took to the Washington Post’s op-ed page to fret over the power of “gun zealots” in American politics. Lewis didn’t seem nearly as agitated about the corrupting influence of special interests a few years earlier, however, when a reporter asked him about Rep. John Dingell’s ties to the automobile lobby. Sure, Dingell had worked to defeat mandatory fuel effciency standards, explained Lewis at a 1991 press conference. But keep in mind that the liberal congressman from Michigan “does speak out on a lot of consumer issues and a lot of taxpayer waste.” And anyway, said Lewis, the auto industry executives Dingell caved in to aren’t just lobbyists, they’re “constituents.”
Lewis’s slant on politics became even more obvious — and more embarrassingly mushy — in 1994, when he wrote another Washington Post op-ed, this one concerning the fight over health care reform. Likening the president to “the tragic Cuban fisherman Santiago in Ernest Hemingway’s classic parable, The Old Man and the Sea,” Lewis declared that Clinton’s “historic health care reform” had been ripped apart in a “feeding frenzy of special interests.” Somehow, these don’t sound like the words of a politically impartial observer. And indeed they weren’t. In its literature, Lewis’s organization openly and aggressively defended the president’s health care plan from Republican attacks.
No subject seems to worry the moralists at the Center for Public Integrity more than the notion that money from special interest groups sways political discourse. Which makes it all the more interesting that, as the rest of the country was debating the merits of the soon-to-be-passed North American Free Trade Agreement, Charles Lewis co-authored a cover story on NAFTA for the Nation entitled “The Big Buy.” Over the course of 12 pages, the article detailed the sinister efforts of deep-pocketed businessmen and the Mexican government to shape the debate on NAFTA — a bill, Lewis left no doubt, that would have terrible consequences for the economy and the environment. “All this intensive lobbying by U.S. and Mexican interests,” he wrote, “is dedicated to drowning out any contrary or questioning voices in the United States.” The result: the potential passage “of a treaty that could prove harmful to a vast number of Americans.”
Almost unmentioned in the piece were the forces on the other side of the NAFTA debate — namely, the labor unions, which spent millions in an effort to defeat the bill. In an accompanying sidebar, Lewis did mention that “the United Auto Workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and the Machinists, Teamsters and others have lobbied lawmakers” by, among other innocuous things, calling attention to “worker exploitation in Mexico.”
Lewis, in other words, didn’t exactly train the spotlight of scrutiny on organized labor’s lobbying efforts. But that shouldn’t be surprising. Four out of the five unions Lewis mentioned in the above quotation have been regular contributors to Lewis’s own group. In 1993, the year the Nation piece appeared, these four unions gave a combined total of $ 17,500 to the Center for Public Integrity. (Between 1990 and 1995, labor unions of all kinds gave more than $ 200,000 to the center.)
But organized labor wasn’t the only opponent of NAFTA to fund the center’s work. Milliken and Co., a South Carolina textile company that actively lobbied against the trade bill, gave a total of $ 150,000 to the organization over several years. Needless to say, when it came time for the center to write about NAFTA, Milliken’s point of view was adequately represented. In a 1993 Center for Public Integrity report entitled “The Trading Game: Inside Lobbying for the North American Free Trade Agreement,” a lawyer for Milliken and Company named John Nash is quoted — uncritically and without any balancing comment from the report’s editors — slamming the bill: “I want somebody to make the case to me that we will enter into a [trade agreement] with a country with one-tenth our wage scale, and tell me that it is going to create jobs in the United States. I don’t see how it can.” A paid advertisement couldn’t have said it better.
To its credit, the center has been relatively forthcoming about its funding sources, providing upon request a list of its contributors going back to 1989. Alejandro Benes, the center’s managing director, denies there is anything untoward about soliciting or accepting money from an interest as entrenched as organized labor. “They were interested in us, we knew they were a source of funding and we went to them,” he says. Still, it’s hard to imagine the unions didn’t expect something in return. In articles like Lewis’s Nation cover story, they got it.
What to make of a group like the Center for Public Integrity that seems to have transformed itself from a disseminator of information into a political spinner? Charles Lewis himself may have said it best, waxing indignant one morning last June on National Public Radio about the evils of lobbyists: ” These organizations are incredibly influential, incredibly powerful, and are affecting public policy, and have special tax status, and I just think it’s arrogant and self-serving to try to kind of look down their nose and say, ” Well, not us. We do good work. How dare you question our group?'”
by Tucker Carlson
