John McCain had a
very good day this week. It occurred Tuesday when super-lobbyist
Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to various charges of corruption
and when, across town, the Homeland Security Department announced
it would henceforth depart from its customary procedure and award
its anti-terrorism grants on the basis of merit. Here, in a single
day, was Washington as McCain always said it was. It could make
you sick.
Abramoff, of course,
is the very personification of the Washington McCain has long
railed against. Non-elected, appointed to no government office
and unknown to all but a handful of Americans, he nonetheless
was at the center of a vast influence-peddling apparatus that
took in and distributed the sort of money that, in a more innocent
era, compelled the cartoonist Thomas Nast to render Tammany Hall's
Boss Tweed with a money bag for a head. Abramoff, as had the equally
rapacious Columbus before him, discovered Indians.
From one Mississippi
tribe, the government charged, an Abramoff associate took in nearly
$15 million, of which Abramoff got a $6.36 million kickback. From
a nearby Louisiana tribe, an Abramoff associate got $30.51 million,
of which he kicked back $11.45 million to Abramoff. The numbers
are astounding and, even more astounding, sometimes they bought
the tribes nothing at all. In one instance, Abramoff and his guys
took money from competing tribes in Texas and Louisiana, one for
reopening a casino in Texas and the other for keeping it and others
closed.
What's stunning about
Washington -- as opposed to, say, Las Vegas in the bad old Mafia
days -- is how open the whole process was. Abramoff had his own
restaurant, a place called Signatures, and supplied skyboxes for
sporting events the way old-time political bosses used to send
over coal in the wintertime. Abramoff could send a cooperative
and worthy congressman on a golfing trip to Scotland or to a day
at the beach in Florida. He liked to quote from ``The Godfather,''
but Don Corleone was a model of discretion compared to Abramoff.
The Godfather's olive oil business was a front. Abramoff skipped
that step. His fake business and his real business were one and
the same -- influence peddling.
A similar, although
inadvertent, acknowledgement of the sheer squalor of things was
on display over at Homeland Security, too. There, Secretary Michael
Chertoff announced that grants would be awarded by merit. This
was a stunning admission that, up to now, they had not been. In
other words, states like Wyoming -- not a terrorist target since
the Cheyenne were routed -- got a piece of the money, along with
such past targets as New York and Washington. Chertoff, a good
man made to play the fool by a system not of his making, said,
``We've looked at what happened over in London with the terrorist
attacks on the rail lines, and that has reinforced the idea that
we have to consider consequences, vulnerabilities and threats.''
Imagine that! Homeland security considering ``vulnerabilities
and threats.''
Back to
McCain. For years now, he has been fulminating against the system
-- the outsized role and influence of lobbyists and the parochialism
of senators and representatives who, like the ridiculous Ted Stevens
of Alaska, have turned selfishness into a matter of high principle.
But more important, McCain has tried to rein in campaign spending,
which is a root of the problem. The sad fact is that the average
member of Congress has his hat out for campaign funds most of
the time. Lobbyists know that. They go see a member and in a heartbeat
they are hit up for a donation.
It does the heart
good to note, as I must, that some of those implicated in the
Abramoff mess were among the foremost faux moralists of the Clinton
years. Two of those are former Tom DeLay aides Tony Rudy and Michael
Scanlon, both of whom went on to become satellites of Abramoff,
sharing in his largess, and now his infamy. It was Scanlon who
wrote a poetic e-mail to Rudy during the Clinton impeachment proceedings
beginning, ``God bless you Tony Rudy,'' and suggesting that instead
of mercy, Clinton be beaten ``over the head with a baseball bat.''
The bat's now in other hands.
So much needs to
be done: campaign finance reform, an ethics committee with teeth,
the insistence that lobbyists report who precisely they are lobbying
-- the name, please, not merely this entity called ``the House
of Representatives.'' But what's needed most of all is indignation
on the part of the public, a cold fury about being ripped off
and taken for granted. This, as it happens, has been the grimaced
and often solitary face of the indignant McCain. He hardly had
a mention in Wednesday's newspapers, but it was his day nonetheless.
©
2005, Washington Post Writers Group
