You might think that, after several decades of plundering members’ paychecks, the greatest labor guild in the world would have a more impressive headquarters. But up here on the eighth floor, in a conference room overlooking the White House, the style is strictly tech-school baroque.
The union royalty have gathered to watch the returns, and in the crowd by a buffet table stacked with meats and melons and chicken-carcass discard bowls union president John Sweeney is congratulating himself and the American people for focusing on the Real Issues as opposed to presidential indiscretions.
But what about those indiscretions? he’s asked. What would happen to him if he were ingested by an intern and got caught? Sweeney contorts his face like a Mephistophelean Mickey Rooney and laughs until the dry-scalp detritus shakes from his rounded shoulders.
“I don’t even think about that,” he snorts. “I don’t think that’s a problem that I have to be concerned about.” And as you look around the room at the company he keeps — a motley assemblage of red-diaper grandbabies and woolhat wannabes — you can’t help believing him.
Reported by the staff of THE WEEKLY STANDARD
