Tom Frank on lobbyists: they dress like dandies
[after my revolution, everyone will have fine wine & cigars!]
The New Republic - October 9, 2006
Descending into the ninth circle of Washington Hell. The Shadow Capitol by Thomas Frank
You know you’re getting close to the spectacular white office
building at 101 Constitution Avenue when you start seeing lobbyists
buzzing around like bees near a hive. With a little practice, the
lobbyists are easy to distinguish from lesser drones: They are the
ones who look like caricatures of prosperous men, dressed in a way
that is no doubt meant to suggest “affluent businessman” but in which
no proper businessman in Chicago or Kansas City would ever, in fact,
dress himself. In most of the United States, male office-wear tends
toward the drab; the lobbyist, by contrast, fancies himself Beau
Brummell. He appears to choose each element of his ensemble for its
conspicuous priciness, but to give no thought to the whole. You can
spot him in the field by his perfectly fitted thousand-dollar suits,
usually in blue; his strangely dainty shoes; his shirts, which are
often the kind that come in pink or blue with white collars and
cuffs, the latter of which display cufflinks of the large and shiny
variety; his vivid, shimmering ties, these days preferably in orange
or lavender; his perfect haircut; the tiny flag attesting to his
perfect patriotism on his perfect lapel; his perfect tan.
One of the most arresting sights in Washington, D.C., is when you
notice one of these fussily dressed and pleasant-smelling creatures
out of their element–say, dragging their Tumi luggage down a broken
sidewalk near the bus station in the 100-degree heat. But, here at
101 Con, they are right at home. They come striding into the Charlie
Palmer Steak restaurant and the air-conditioning is blasting and
their teeth are exactly right and their ties jut gamely from their
collars. The gang’s all here, a bunch of real straight shooters, and
they extend their hands to the committee chairman, and all the
handsome fellows share a laugh together as they take their seats
among scurrying waiters and huge vases of cut flowers.
You can offshore nearly any kind of job these days–ship your factory
to Mexico and send your back office to India–but your lobbyists have
to stay in Washington. The rest of the hard, old, face-to-face world
may dissolve, but lobbying remains stubbornly rooted in the
necessities of physical proximity to power and, of course, to tasty
eats. At 101 Constitution, both of these can be found in fantastic
abundance, and this has made the building a landmark for our
political times, as the Watergate was for the 1970s and the “little
green house” (where officials sold government favors in the Harding
days) was for the 1920s. 101 Con is K Street in a box, a private-
sector Pentagon where ten stories of lobbyists plot their next thrust
on behalf of the life-insurance industry, the mining industry, or the
retail hardware industry.
Form follows function, as they say, and 101 Con is admirably suited
to the task of paid persuasion. From its very design, it’s apparent
that this building was intended to reel in earmarks the way a steel
mill makes steel or a grain elevator stores wheat. To begin with, 101
Con is the closest commercial property to the Capitol building,
literally just across a traffic island from the Capitol grounds. This
means “members,” as the men and women of Congress are called, can
scoot over and back in a matter of minutes. The building’s upper
stories have an astonishing view of the Capitol dome, a quality
exploited by the prominent turret that juts toward Constitution
Avenue. This protuberance is topped by a rooftop terrace, where fund-
raising events can be held against the striking panorama (rent starts
at $10,000 a night, I was told); smaller balconies on the lower
floors permit regular tenants to hold their own parties with the same
backdrop. The tangible value of this view–namely, that it impresses
clients–is often mentioned in news stories. The intangible value, I
imagine, is that it also allows the lobbyists, like captains of
industry in old advertisements, to look out grandly over the assembly
line where their product is manufactured.
The building’s ground floor houses the very large and very luxurious
Charlie Palmer Steak restaurant, world-famous dealers in “artisan
meats” and fine wines. This latter being one of the baseline
currencies of the influence trade, the bottles are stored in an
ostentatious glass “wine cube” perched on a platform over an indoor
pond, like a Philip Johnson building in captivity. In theory, I
suppose, having the wine room elevated and transparent in this way
means that a dedicated, score-keeping fan of lobbying, if such a
thing exists, could actually determine which particular vintage was
being uncorked to advance which particular political cause.
Put the wine, the view, the steaks, and the location together with
luxury furnishings and exceptional air-conditioning and you can
fairly count on the place to swarm with Bush Pioneer- and Ranger-
level fund-raisers. Even the elevators have been designed with
lobbying in mind: “Since many of these tenants make regular trips to
lobby their powerful neighbors across the street,” their manufacturer
boasts, “we’re proud to think of the 15 custom elevators that we
fabricated for the building as the first stage in the journey toward
the creation of new laws.” All that’s missing, really, is a bullet
train to the golf course.
The architects have done their job well. 101 Con is a “trophy-class”
building with rents to prove it. The building hosts fund-raisers or
receptions of one kind or another virtually all the time when
Congress is in session; according to Roll Call, PAC fund-raisers make
up fully 25 percent of Charlie Palmer Steak’s business. I was told by
one restaurant employee that business had suffered since the Jack
Abramoff affair, with its lurid tales of sushi-crazed legislators
selling themselves for finger-sized bites of raw fish. But, according
to the most recent study conducted by Bloomberg, the restaurant
ranked second in popularity among members to the Caucus Room–a
nearby establishment where they’ve cut out the middleman: The
restaurant itself is owned by lobbyists.
As I write this, I am looking at a $20 Davidoff cigar of the kind
that a waiter at Charlie Palmer Steak insisted was Tom DeLay’s
favorite. I have propped it up on my desk as a kind of souvenir, a
reminder of how this city works. The waiter had been describing for
me a dinner party attended by the former majority leader the night
before, and he had concluded with the following explanation of the
restaurant’s (and the building’s, and DeLay’s) success: “Access is
power and power is money.” Were tobacco advertising still permitted
on television, it would make a perfect jingle for Davidoff cigars.
Translated into Latin, it might be the new national motto. In homage
to this waiter’s wisdom, let us begin our survey here, at Charlie
Palmer.
Visitors to Washington who want to see democracy in action
traditionally waste their time at the viewing galleries of the
Capitol building, where–if they are lucky–they might see one or two
legislators mumbling mechanically for the c-span cameras. It is, as
everyone knows, a big letdown–a disillusionment that is cited
whenever smart young people relate how they got to be so wise to the
world.
My advice to those visitors: Walk across the street to Charlie Palmer
Steak. This is the place for political spectatorship in the age of
Abramoff, where you can see the questions before the nation actually
being resolved–and can do it over a meal, too, saving yourself a
trip to Applebee’s later. Start with the miniature lobster corndogs,
$9, a nod to the deep-fried treats of your red-state youth (but made
with lobster, get it?), and then slyly bribe yourself with a plateful
of the domestic Kobe sirloin, $68. Wash the whole thing down with a
half-dozen Manhattans–you will need them. Look around you while you
eat: This is not the dim, windowless steakhouse of your weekend
debauches in Wichita. It is light; it is open; its polished limestone
walls are accented with Wedgwood blue; a curtain of glass showcases
the prominent, prosperous diners to the sweating world outside. See
that pond burbling in the middle of the restaurant? And the heavy
steel ingot they use to prop up your menu? It’s because of classy
touches like these that your congressman is never moving back to your
home state, regardless of what he says about “sharing your values.”
Speaking of that congressman of yours: If you’re lucky, you will see
him here. Indeed, for the price of that steak you can watch him and
his fellow members make decisions that will affect you for the rest
of your life. And, when they do, you will see that they’re making
these decisions in close consultation with non-members–people just
like you, in fact, only with better hair, better clothes, better
manners, and a better job working for far richer and more important
companies than yours.
I showed up at Charlie Palmer one evening in July, only minutes, I
was assured, after Tom DeLay had departed. I took up a post with an
advantageous view, fortified myself with a few drinks, and watched
the proceedings unfold. A parade of well-dressed VIPs poured by–top
SEC personnel, important aides, U.S. senators, numerous
representatives, former White House officials, and lobbyists of every
stripe–all of them dressed perfectly and wearing expressions of
unflappable satisfaction, if not outright hilarity. A contented-
looking fellow in a vivid yellow tie was whispered to be the aide who
made some congressman a populist. A man squeezed through the jolly
crowd wearing a weathered face and a shirt embroidered with the words
missouri corn growers association. A party rumored to be a Big Pharma
affair roared on in a private dining room just behind the bar.
Who are these special beings who pay for–and, in some cases, write– the laws that govern our lives?
To meet them, you must persuade the lobby guards at 101 Con to let
you into the building proper. (No easy feat: There are no public
viewing galleries for the work that’s done in these offices.) Take an
elevator to one of the building’s upper stories. As you stroll
around, you will notice that the offices are often decorated with
those handshake pictures that are so popular in Washingon–
photographic proof of a given lobbyist’s intimacy with politicians
and a much more useful tool in establishing one’s professional bona
fides than any college degree. You will also see model airplanes,
model motorcycles, and other carefully arranged bric-a-brac that are
normally reminders of leisure-time fun in the outside world. Here,
they are strictly business: reminders of the industry for which
legislative favors are sought. And, always, looming magnificently in
the background, is That View: the bleached dome of the U.S. Capitol.
Think of the elevator ride upward as Dante’s descent into hell, but
in reverse and with ten stops instead of nine. Let’s begin our tour
at the midway point, the fifth floor, home to (among others) the
National Mining Association (NMA), an industry group that is mainly
concerned with promoting coal and that furthers its agenda with large
campaign contributions, mainly to Republicans. In 2004, this outfit
sponsored a grassroots effort called “Mine the Vote,” in which mine-
owners introduced mine-workers to their favored candidates. (I know
of no organization at 101 Con, or anywhere in this town, dedicated to
doing the reverse.) Very plutocratic of them, but also very
effective: The program is said to have helped Bush prevail in the
once reliably Democratic state of West Virginia.
The National Mining Association spends millions on lobbying every
year. In fact, it does so much lobbying that it must hire other
lobbying firms to augment its own efforts. Back in the 1990s, one of
those outside shops was National Environmental Strategies, headed by
J. Steven Griles, a man whose best-known environmental strategy had
been to permit oil-drilling off the coast of California when he was a
government official in the 1980s. With the advent of the Bush
administration in 2001, Griles took a trip back through that
revolving door you’ve heard about and accepted a job as the number-
two at the Department of the Interior, making policy on the very
matters that had concerned him as a lobbyist. Then, in 2005, Griles
headed for the exit yet again, this time after being accused of doing
favors for Abramoff’s Indian casino clients, whose operations are
also regulated by the Interior Department. Today, he’s back in the
saddle, lobbying for the energy industry–for a time from an office
that was also on the fifth floor of 101 Con.
Until last year, the head of the NMA’s in-house lobbying operations
was one John Shelk, an expert on energy issues who got his start,
like many lobbyists, working for the congressional body charged with
overseeing those issues–in this case, the House Energy and Commerce
Committee. He later proceeded to lobby his old colleagues on behalf
of none other than Enron, which was then spending tens of millions
“spreading the gospel of deregulation,” as a Shelk profile in a trade
magazine put it. When pushing coal for the National Mining
Association, of course, Shelk claimed to have only the consumer in
mind, but the religion ultimately is unchanged from the Enron days:
“The point is for people who believe in markets to stick together,”
he says. The trade magazine also noted that Shelk’s office features
that trump card of Lobbyland–a picture of the lobbyist shaking hands
with Karl Rove.
On your way back to the elevator, try to find the office of high-tech
conglomerate Honeywell. Here, the attraction is not so much the
lobbyists themselves, but rather the high-tech lobbying machine that
the company has built, a multi-room audio-visual exhibit detailing
all the ways the company is involved in your life, from warheads to
cars to surveillance equipment. There is even a flight simulator–
reportedly popular with members who stop by to get a little
aeronautical exercise.
Now it’s on to floor six, where you can visit the offices of Van
Scoyoc Associates. The first time I heard about Van Scoyoc was when a
lobbyist friend insisted to me, in hushed tones, that the people at
this prestigious and respected D.C. firm were specialists in
earmarks–those little pet pork projects that individual legislators
like to insert into bills quietly and at the last minute. I didn’t
believe him at first. After all, these days earmarks are the very
symbol of misgovernment and corruption. They are the $200 million
“Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska; the bribery price list that Duke
Cunningham drew up for the convenience of his regular customers; the
numerous favors Montana Senator Conrad Burns allegedly did for
Abramoff. I know in the abstract that lobbyists are involved in the
process, of course. Earmarks are the juiciest quid that House members
have to sell; the lobbyists are there to furnish the quo, in the form
of wine, steak, cigars, golf weekends, campaign contributions, and
airline tickets to romantic places. But, I wondered, could it really
be so open, so unconcealed? A firm that specializes in earmarks?
That’s like putting a sign on your door that says Dealers in Graft
and Boodle.
So naïve am I. According to a recent story in The New York Times, the
buying and selling of earmarks is now so routine that even
municipalities are getting into the act, hiring lobbyists to induce
their own elected officials in Washington to do their jobs. According
to a recent article in CQ Weekly, lobbying accounts in the field of
“Budget and appropriations” (i.e., earmarks) have tripled since 1998;
it is, today, the single largest category for lobbying activity. The
number-one firm in the field: Van Scoyoc Associates, of 101
Constitution Avenue.
The firm employs a staff of 90 and claims to boast a client list of
over 300, including (according to the firm’s publicity materials) 50
universities and 20 of the nation’s largest corporations. Van Scoyoc
seems particularly proud of its success in the rapidly growing field
of academic earmarks, whereby some research project or institute is
funded directly by Congress instead of through the usual process–you
know, where scholars or bureaucrats look the proposal over and decide
whether it’s a good idea or not. One example of how this works,
according to data provided by Public Citizen: From 1998 to 2006, the
University of Alabama paid Van Scoyoc $1.5 million; over that same
period, the various officers of the firm contributed at least
$123,500 to Alabama Senator Richard Shelby (two of the firm’s vice
presidents are, in fact, former staffers of Shelby’s); and, during
those years, Shelby earmarked some $150 million for the University of
Alabama.
Every element of this chain is, of course, formally unconnected to
every other–innocent and wholesome as a newborn babe. But imagine,
for a moment, that this is exactly the racket it appears to be. That
is to say, what if the company’s officers were really able to charge
clients $1.5 million for making contributions of $123,500 (a
twelvefold increase) and if the University of Alabama turned $1.5
million in lobbying fees into $150 million in earmarks (a hundredfold
increase) and if Shelby himself pocketed $123,500 in campaign
donations just for greasing the skids when the call came from 101 Con.
Surely you know the liturgy of conservative Washington by now:
Government doesn’t work, the private sector is so much more
efficient, and so on. Still, I can’t help but marvel at how much
everyone would have saved had we just cut out the middleman and had
Shelby do his job.
Up another floor, on seven, we find the offices of the Federal Policy
Group, the lobbying arm of Clark Consulting. Though the tenants of
101 Con are people with great power over the public welfare, they are
generally not public figures. A welcome exception to this rule,
however, is the boss-man of the Federal Policy Group, Ken Kies.
Unlike most other lobbyists, Kies does interviews, writes articles,
and even appears on television. This is because he is no mere
chortling backslapper in an orange tie, but rather a bona fide expert
on a difficult subject. Kies is one of the greatest living
authorities on the U.S. tax code; over the last 20 years, Republicans
have come to him whenever they have wanted to rewrite tax law.
It turns out, however, that letting a lobbyist have a say in writing
the tax code is not a particularly good idea. Jeffrey Birnbaum tells
the story of a 1989 incident in which Kies, who had left the staff of
the House Ways and Means Committee a short time before, came back to
his old friends at the Committee seeking a tax exemption for his new
friend–an iron-ore outfit that had hired him as a lobbyist. Kies’s
pals on the Hill were not only happy to oblige, they actually let
Kies come up with a tax increase on somebody else (in this case, cell
phone users) to replace the revenue lost in the exemption that they
granted Kies’s client.
With the Republican conquest of Congress in 1994, Kies went back on
the public payroll, now as chief of staff for the Joint Committee on
Taxation, a position of such authority and prestige that articles
from the time reported him to be more popular on the corporate
lecture circuit than his nominal bosses on the committee. In 1998,
Kies was back through the revolving door for good, once again
dreaming up justifications for the very particular changes to the tax
code that his very wealthy clients wanted. “I’ve never seen a guy
who’s got an influence over the tax chairman like he has,” a tax
official told The New Republic in 2000. His employer’s website
actually lists the results: Regulations reversed, laws averted,
rulings withdrawn, corporate tax deductions retroactively allowed–
more lawmaking activity than Congress itself, almost. And it is, all
of it, for sale.
Upward once again to floor eight. Until recently, this was the home
of the American Security Council (ASC), where the visitor could wade
deep into the murky waters of the extreme right, better known today
as the responsible mainstream. The ASC was founded in 1955 by a
consortium of old-school Chicago tycoons who wanted what a 1971
account calls “a blacklist service,” or, more accurately, a master
list of all the suspected subversives, radicals, and leftists in the
land. To this end, the ASC reportedly tried to get its hands on the
files of ole Joe McCarthy.
Wherever there’s a well-funded red-hunting scheme afoot, though,
things seem to get out of hand quickly. In its early days, the ASC
was run by former FBI agents, but, before long, the group had
connections with the John Birch Society and was giving a helping hand
to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Its letterhead was
ennobled with an impressive string of retired generals and admirals,
one of whom was lampooned in Dr. Strangelove. Its focus evolved as
well–from identifying unacceptably liberal organizations and
individuals to advocating a more aggressive stance toward communist
regimes abroad, particularly the one in China. The group moved to
Washington, where its list of corporate members expanded from a few
medieval-minded Chicagoans to encompass the entire range of military
contractors. Between its generals, its arms manufacturers, and its
strategic thinkers, the ASC soon became, as a liberal author put it,
“the embodiment of the military-industrial complex.” (This was not an
unwelcome characterization, by the way. For his 1983 book, Peddlers
of Crisis, Jerry W. Sanders asked an ASC official if he disliked the
phrase. “His reply was emphatic. ‘Hell no–if our military and
industry can’t get together how are we going to defend our country?’
He added, ‘The military-industrial complex is a very healthy thing
despite the fact it’s downgraded in the press.’”)
And, of course, the ASC commenced lobbying. The international scene
has changed dramatically over the years, but the ASC’s demand on
Congress has remained obsessively consistent: Spend more on the
military. It doesn’t matter how much we are already spending, and it
doesn’t matter if Russian communism is gone or if the Sandinistas are
no longer in power or if Red China is now the number-one manufacturer
of, well, everything: We must spend more–on aircraft carriers, on
nuclear earth-penetrator weapons, on missile defense. To back all
this up, in 1970 the ASC developed what seems to have been the very
first legislative rating system, in which senators and
representatives are graded by how they vote on the various issues of
interest to an organization. It is a common technique today, used by
everyone from the Christian Coalition to the aclu, but at the time,
it was something of a novelty–bitterly resented by the liberals that
it targeted.
The ASC’s heyday came in the ’70s, when it assembled a mighty host of
organizations into a “Coalition for Peace Through Strength” to decry
Soviet military superiority and oppose the salt treaties. Then, under
the presidency of coalition member Ronald Reagan, the ASC’s every
defense-spending dream was fulfilled. Today, though, the ASC is an
aging and feeble bird in the hawks’ aerie, overshadowed by such
virile new “peddlers of crisis” as the Project for the New American
Century and the Center for Security Policy.
Still, the organization soldiers on, publishing its voting index and
shrieking eternally for more. To all appearances, it is a benign
organization now–its extremist past locked away for good.
But a curious incident a few years ago shows how persistent the old
patterns can be. It seems that one of the ASC’s confusing subsidiary
groups had Jack Abramoff on its board. This was not strange by
itself–Abramoff was a right-winger from way back who had been
involved in an ASC-organized campaign when he was head of the College
Republicans in the early ’80s. But now the roles were reversed. It
was Abramoff, not the aging red-hunters, who was doing the dirty work
for the corporate crowd–in this case, the Commonwealth of the
Northern Mariana Islands, where a handful of garment manufacturers
needed a little bit of lobbying help to keep their, shall we say,
curious labor arrangements legal. And it was the ASC that furnished
the cover for an Abramoff-organized campaign to bring lawmakers to
the islands in order to win their goodwill. Under the guise of the
subsidiary group, the ASC took two Democratic congressmen on a trip
to the islands, the expenses for which were ultimately paid by Abramoff.
It is a tragic trajectory by the standards of Washington, this tale
of one group’s decline from roaring warrior to lobbyist plaything–
from defending the beloved homeland to shilling for a low-wage hell.
But it is also a most precise metaphor for this city we live in and
for what its masters have wreaked on the country they rule.
Take the elevator on up to nine. (We’re almost there!) Here, you may
note the conference rooms where public policy is made by the private
sector, the leather upholstery and star-spangled light fixtures and
domed ceilings made of polished wood. Walk to the large, empty
triangular room with the balcony beyond and the by-now-tiresome view.
You are standing near the site of one of the most storied events in
lobbying history: Tom DeLay’s Thanksgiving fund-raiser of November
17, 2005. Those were dark days for “the Hammer”: He had been indicted
in Texas and had resigned his position as majority leader; several of
his former associates had been implicated in the Abramoff scandal,
and guilty pleas were just around the corner. But Tom DeLay would not
be intimidated. He stared the world down with those unblinking
exterminator’s eyes and conspicuously scheduled one last, great
blowout–the biggest fund-raiser of the year.
And it was a success, too. A lobbyist friend explained the rationale
to me: DeLay just might survive this episode, the participants
thought, and, if he does, I want to be his friend. So the call went
forth, and the private sector arose as one, a mighty host shoveling
the money in a colossal show of “moral support,” as one of them
described it to The Washington Post. The National Association of
Manufacturers attended, as did the Refiners and the Truckers. The
roll call of industry went on: Oil! Coal! Gas! Electricity!
Petrochemical! Wall Street! On into the night, on that delirious
ninth floor of 101 Con, they did homage to their friend and paid
their dues for the years of good government he had given them.
DeLay’s celebration of his own shamelessness was hardly the only
commemoration of GOP Washington held at 101 Con last fall. Hop back
in the elevator and make your way up to the fabulous rooftop terrace.
(Along the way, you’ll pass the tenth-floor office of Goldman Sachs,
whose chief was recently promoted to Treasury secretary.) Here, you
will find yourself at the site where, in September 2005, The Weekly
Standard feted its first decade of publication.
Like DeLay, and Republican D.C. generally, The Weekly Standard got
its start with the Gingrich revolution. (I still have a copy of
Number 1, with a warrior Newt on the cover.) Ten years later, there
was no better vantage point than the roof of 101 Con for the Standard
gang to look out over the conquered Capitol and savor all that they
had wrought. Owner Rupert Murdoch himself was on hand to acknowledge
the adulation of his courtiers (from close up, his skin and hair
appear synthetic, I am told), while Senators Bill Frist and John
McCain and former Attorney General John Ashcroft paid homage, and
Senator Joe Lieberman was spotted scurrying furtively away, as if
stalked by some future Republican self. The gala was decorated with
immense blow-ups of Weekly Standard covers over the years, many of
them proclaiming the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and the
conversation swirled around Hurricane Katrina, which had inundated
New Orleans two weeks previously. The general consensus among
partygoers, according to one of them, was that the president would
not be hurt as long as the body count stayed in the low four figures.
Lobster was served. Katherine Harris appeared oiled.
Which brings us to the strangest twist in the story of 101
Constitution: This showplace of corporate power is owned by a labor
union, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters (UBC). Before it was
built, the site was occupied by a standard-issue union headquarters,
a “marble mausoleum,” as one Carpenters official described it to me.
The Carpenters are still here, of course: They maintain offices on
the tenth floor and claim to dedicate the considerable revenue
generated by the building to their organizing efforts. Though there
are few overt signs of their presence, if you look closely there are
clues indicating the building’s provenance. From the parquet marble
floor in the lobby to the finely polished elevator doors to the
exotic wood paneling, the visitor is constantly aware of the
building’s slightly excessive craftsmanship. (Everything here was
designed, the union’s magazine says, “to go beyond just good
enough.”) If a visitor happens to forget who is responsible for all
this quality, he is reminded by an enormous mural in the lobby that
depicts a hard-hatted carpenter, naked from the waist up, taking a
break from his construction job to gaze at the Capitol dome. As
presumably the sole bit of monumental social realism executed in the
nation’s capital during the Bush years, by the way, this mural ought
to put the building on the tourist’s map all by itself.
If you’re a liberal optimist, you might see 101 Con as an ingenious
detournement of Washington’s hyper-capitalist culture, its rent
helping to strengthen the ranks of the labor movement, the very thing
the hyper-capitalist culture dreads most. Buy the senator another
slab of artisan meat, Mr. Business Lobbyist! Sip your fizzy Italian
water and go at your BlackBerry with both thumbs! Surely the joke is
on you.
Only it isn’t, really. While I myself find it gratifying to see
corporate types obliged to pay rent to a labor union, the UBC isn’t
exactly the adversarial organization that one might hope. For one
thing, it has been engaged for ten years now in a centralization
scheme that involves stripping power from its local unions–and, in
theory, from its rank-and-file members–and concentrating that power
in regional councils. The union’s president, Douglas McCarron, is
also reportedly fond of corporate-style rhetoric, exhorting his
membership to consider what their (imaginary) stockholders would
think, according to a Canadian carpenters’ newsletter, and describing
the central union’s income as “profit”–turns of phrase that sound
harmless enough to outsiders but that rub some union types the wrong
way.
Surely you have guessed what comes next: that, of all the labor
leaders in the United States, it is this particular labor leader who
has earned the friendship of George W. Bush, the most anti-labor
president since … maybe since Karl Rove’s hero, William McKinley.
McCarron has hosted Bush at the union’s Labor Day picnics; Bush has
hosted McCarron on Air Force One; McCarron was the only labor leader
to speak at Bush’s economic summit in 2002; that same year, Bush
spoke at the UBC’s political conference, where he congratulated the
union for–of course–opening its new building at 101 Constitution.
The payoff for Bush: In the 2004 election, which many unionists
perceived as the most important in their lifetimes, the Carpenters
proudly and with great fanfare endorsed nobody.
In Bush’s salute to 101 Con, he claimed to find inspiration in the
attendance of both Senator Ted Kennedy and Labor Secretary Elaine
Chao at the building’s dedication. The implied bipartisanship, the
president said, was “a good sign as to how … Washington ought to
deal with problems.” Democrats and Republicans, labor and big
business–all of them coming together under one roof in Bush’s
Washington.
But on whose terms? Who gets to party on that roof?
The architecture of 101 Constitution again supplies the answer.
Whenever I have wandered its halls, I have noticed a pattern of
segregation by class. The lobbyists eat at Charlie Palmer, with its
ranks of servile waiters; for everyone else, there is the “Capitol
Cafe” on the exact opposite side of the building, a nearly windowless
deli where the minimalism (its walls are painted cinderblock) comes
from cheapness, not a taste for subtlety. The building is also,
bizarrely, home to a Washington Gas payment center in addition to the
lobbyists’ offices, which ensures that poor and sometimes desperate
District residents can be found straying into the wrong part of the
building’s lobby. In the elevator, I once commented to a woman that
the building must be a nice place to work. “It’s nice if you’ve got
one of those offices facing the Capitol,” she shot back. “Not so nice
for the rest of us.”
What “the rest of us” look over, ironically, is the brutal concrete
shoebox of the Frances Perkins Building, in whose bowels toil the
employees of the most disrespected federal department of them all,
the Department of Labor, where the administration’s philosophy of
slam that sucker into reverse has achieved its greatest results–the
elevation of hilariously unqualified people to positions of great
authority; the shift of emphasis from protecting workers to policing
them. The two buildings are not just neighbors on Constitution
Avenue; they are opposites, physical representations of two different
visions of government. One worldview sinks and the other rises, clad
in glowing white limestone and ringing with the happy hubbub of
commercialized politics.
After visiting 101 Con one day, I head over to the Labor Department,
where I notice actual workers silently replacing the pavers in the
terrace. What kind of workers, I wonder, does the Department of Labor
hire when it needs work done on its own building? The first worker I
approach can’t say; he doesn’t speak much English. The foreman,
though, is happy to answer the question: they are nonunion, he says.
Maybe they could use a lobbyist.
Thomas Frank is the author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? He is
currently working on a book about conservative governance.