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Jewish World Review
Dec. 5, 2011
9 Kislev, 5772
The winner of the GOP campaign: Washington
By
Dana Milbank
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The first votes of the Republican primary season don’t come until next month, but we already know how it’s going to turn out: Washington will win, again.
It may be Mitt Romney or it may be Newt Gingrich, but from the point of view of this town, it doesn’t matter: Neither poses a threat to our way of life. Our hometown industry — a commission-based economy in which the local citizenry helps the powerful get what they want from a too-big government — will survive. Washington’s win was not always assured. Michele Bachmann would have taken a whack at big government, when she wasn’t trying to convert the residents of Dupont Circle to heterosexuality. Rick Perry would have slashed large chunks of the federal government, once he remembered what they were. Pizza man Herman Cain, had he not been weighed down by accusations of extramarital toppings, probably would have brought the whole place to a halt. But neither of the remaining contenders represents a danger to Washington’s political culture. Mitt Romney, trained at Harvard and financed lavishly by Wall Street and special interests, is a technocrat and a second-generation politician driven more by ambition than any of the various ideologies he has assumed over the years. Conservatives were justifiably searching for an alternative to Willard Milquetoast, but they wound up with an anti-Romney who is the consummate Washington insider: a man who has made himself a multimillionaire by peddling his influence in the capital. “I did no lobbying of any kind, period,” Gingrich said this week, explaining why the $1.6-million-plus he earned from lending his influence to mortgage giant Freddie Mac wasn’t technically lobbying. “I’m going to be really direct, okay? I was charging $60,000 a speech. And the number of speeches was going up, not down. Normally, celebrities leave and they gradually sell fewer speeches every year. We were selling more.” So he wasn’t lobbying — because he was instead trading on his name and influence in Washington to give speeches for $60,000 a pop. That’s well more, for an hour’s work, than the median household income in the United States, which last year was $49,445. Newton Leroy Gingrich, self-described celebrity, poses no threat to Washington’s pay-to-play economy. My Post colleagues Karen Tumulty and Dan Eggen recently quoted a Gingrich lawyer as saying the various tentacles of Newt Inc. have generated close to $100 million in revenue over the past decade. Virtually all of these for-profit activities trade on his name and influence: health-care think tank, consulting, speeches, TV appearances, books and more. His nonprofit political entities have brought in an additional $52 million — some of which is used to charter jets for Gingrich, who “earned” $2.5 million in personal income last year. Gingrich’s rise to power two decades ago was financed by a Washington political action committee, GOPAC. Once in the majority, his leadership team championed the K Street Project, which was designed to make sure top lobbying jobs in Washington went to Republicans. Three years after he won the speakership, he was reprimanded by the GOP-controlled House for misleading investigators over his use of tax-exempt funds for a college class; Gingrich agreed to pay $300,000 to reimburse taxpayers for the investigation. The emergence of the Washington-friendly Newt as the last alternative to a Washington-friendly Mitt is but one sign that the Tea Party’s anti-government insurgency has run its course. A poll released this week by the Pew Research Center found that agreement with the Tea Party has dropped substantially. In early 2010, 24 percent of Americans said they agreed with the Tea Party movement and 14 percent disagreed; now, 20 percent agree and 27 percent disagree. In congressional districts represented by Tea Partyers, agreement once led disagreement by 31 to 10. Now, it’s 25 to 23. Too late, some conservatives have begun to realize that Gingrich offers little in the way of an alternative to Romney. The National Review in recent days dug up a Gingrich quote from 2004 in which he said the conservative Club for Growth was “explicitly wrong” for financing conservative primary challenges to moderate Republicans. And the Washington Examiner editorialized that his past makes “it difficult not to view Gingrich as an exemplar of Washington’s professional Republican politicians who talk the talk to get elected, but often don’t walk it once in office.” In its pivotal endorsement of Gingrich
this week, Manchester, N.H.’s conservative Union Leader editorialized that he has “the best shot” among the candidates of improving Washington. Here in the capital, we know better: Gingrich won’t change a thing.
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Previously:
• 11/30/11 Barney the bully: Congressman Frank's other legacy
• 11/23/11 Jon Kyl's search-and-destroy mission
• 11/21/11 Pay to play, brought to you by Washington
• 11/17/11 Big enough to save the supercommittee?
• 11/16/11 Why Newt Gingrich won't last
• 11/08/11 The 2012 campaign gets seedier
• 11/06/11 A Machiavellian model for Obama
• 11/03/11 The Herman Cain crack-up
• 11/01/11 Cain can --- he will survive
• 10/27/11 Stuntmen of the supercommittee
• 10/26/11 Democrats on the sidelines
• 10/24/11 Rick Perry's birther Parade
• 10/24/11 The birthers eat their own
• 10/19/11 The GOP's middle man
• 10/17/11 The waiting for nothing Congress
• 10/12/11 Sparsely occupied D.C.: Why the movement hasn't caught on
• 10/10/11 Can Obama strike an alliance with Occupy Wall Street?
• 10/06/11 Chris Christie, such a presidential tease
• 10/05/11 Obama and his foot soldiers go toe to toe
• 09/28/11 Cain could deliver
• 09/26/11 Republicans? Mr. Nice Guys?
• 09/22/11 Why Ron Paul is winning the GOP primary
• 09/21/11 I am a job creator who creates no jobs
• 09/20/11 Obama launches a revolution
• 09/19/11 Dems for Romney?
• 09/14/11 ‘Supercommittee’? More than stupor committee
• 09/07/11 Mitt Romney finds his (corporate) voice
• 09/01/11 The infallible Dick Cheney
• 08/31/11 This liberal says Perry is the ultimate conservative candidate
• 08/29/11 Wanted: More bite from Obama the Great Nibbler
• 08/10/11 How Rep. Austin Scott betrayed his Tea Party roots
• 08/09/11 The most powerful man on Earth?
• 08/08/11 The FAA shutdown and the new rules of Washington
• 08/04/11 Lt. Col. Allen West fires a round at the Tea Party
• 08/03/11 Government on autopilot
• 08/02/11 Dems mourn debt deal like death
• 07/27/11 Life imitates sport
• 07/26/11 Obama and Boehner take on Washington
• 07/21/11 Why Americans are angry at Congress
• 07/20/11 The new party of Reagan
• 07/18/11 Rob Portman, the boring Midwesterner who could bring sanity to the debt debate
• 07/13/11 John Boehner's bind
• 07/04/11 Stephen Colbert, Karl Rove and the mockery of campaign finance
• 07/01/11 President Puts Up His Dukes, As He Ought To
• 06/28/11 Rod Blagojevich verdict: All shook up
• 06/27/11 Progressives voice their anger at Obama
• 06/24/11 ‘Mission accomplished,’ Obama style
• 06/22/11 Jon Huntsman's first step toward oblivion
• 06/21/11 Scott Walker finds making bumper stickers is easier than creating jobs
• 06/20/11 A day of awkwardness with Mitt Romney
• 06/06/11 Hubris and humility: Sarah Palin and Robert Gates on tour
• 06/02/11 The Weiner roast
• 06/01/11 Congress clocks in to clock out
• 05/30/11 Hermanator II: No More Mr. Gadfly
• 05/24/11 How Obama has empowered Netanyahu
• 05/24/11 Pawlenty bends his truth-telling
• 05/20/11 Default deniers say it's all a hoax
• 05/18/11: Gingrich gives voice to moderation
• 05/17/11: Donald Trump and the House of Horrors
• 05/16/11: The medical mystery of Mitt Romney
• 05/12/11: The body impolitic: Schock photos should tempt lawmakers to cover up
• 05/10/11: Muskets in hand, tea party blasts House Republicans
• 05/09/11: The GOP debate: America -- and the party -- needs the grown-ups
• 05/05/11: Mitch Daniels, an alternative to scary
• 05/03/11: Obama's victory lap
• 05/02/11: How the journalist prom got out of control
• 04/28/11: Obama's birther day: Why did he lower himself by appearing in the briefing room?
• 04/27/11: Obama, lost in thought
• 04/24/11: Andrew Breitbart and the rifts on the right
• 04/22/11: Ten Commandments for 2012
• 04/21/11: Obama likes Facebook. Facebook likes Obama.
• 04/18/11: Without Nancy Pelosi, Obama is adrift
• 04/15/11: If progressives ran the world
• 04/14/11: Faith in political apostasy
• 04/13/11: One man's revolution is another's political expediency
• 04/11/11: Shutdown theatrics
• 04/06/11: Paul Ryan's irresponsible budget
• 04/05/11: Robots in Congress? Yes, we replicant!
• 04/04/11: Robert Gibbs, Facebook and the White House corporate placement service
• 04/01/11: Haley Barbour, the fat cats' candidate
• 03/31/11: Republican freshmen in House shut down compromise, and possibly the government
• 03/30/11: Coburn and Durbin, the dynamic duo of the debt crisis
• 03/28/11: The Obama doctrine: A gray area the size of Libya
• 03/24/11: Dems as Weiners
• 03/23/11: Obama's quick trip from tyrant to weakling
• 03/17/11: Who's afraid of Elizabeth Warren?
• 03/15/11: The underwear flap over Bradley Manning
• 03/10/11: In Senate's debt debate, talk isn't cheap
• 03/09/11: With Obama's new Gitmo policy, Administration officials had some 'splainin to do
• 03/02/11: Issa press aide scandal is like bad reality TV
• 02/25/11: Jay Carney: Mouthpiece for an inscrutable White House
• 02/14/11: The Donald trumps the pols at CPAC
• 02/09/11: Arianna Huffington's ideological transformation
© 2011, Washington Post Writers Group
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