For the Washington Monthly’s 50th anniversary issue, twenty former editors revisited one of their most important stories for this magazine. They looked at pieces that had an impact on the world or on themselves; that presaged something big to come; or that were totally wrong in an interesting way. Below is one of the resulting essays. Read more of them here.

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It can be hard to remember, now, what a successful president George W. Bush had been.

You have to pierce through the miasma of scandal and failure that left him one of the most unpopular presidents in modern American history. But before Hurricane Katrina, before the Valerie Plame leak scandal and the mass firings of U.S. attorneys, before the cascading, costly calamities of the Iraq War and the financial crash, Bush practically ran the table.

Elected with a minority of the popular vote, Bush nevertheless governed like a landslide winner, advancing a conservative agenda at a pace that left Democrats dizzied and dismayed. He pushed through massive, deficit-busting tax cuts aimed mostly at the rich. His administration rolled back workplace safety and environmental standards and rewrote media ownership rules to favor large conglomerates. He expanded Medicare’s private insurance component and added a prescription drug benefit cheered by big pharma. Bush was even emboldened enough to launch an attempt at privatizing Social Security, the so-called third rail of American politics. 

In early 2003, Washington Monthly editor in chief Paul Glastris and I began thinking about a story that would help explain why Bush was so successful. A major factor, of course, was the overwhelming public approval of his response to the 9/11 attacks. But there was also something else at play. Big presidential initiatives have long had to navigate the thicket of trade associations and other special interests known as “K Street.” Until the Bush years, K Street—so named for the Washington avenue that historically housed many lobbying firms and Beltway corporate outposts—always played both sides. Big companies and trade associations tended to employ a mix of Republican and Democratic lobbyists, so they would be well connected no matter who was in charge in any given year. Lobbyists were linked to their old bosses on Capitol Hill or in executive agencies, but loyal first to their new ones in the private sector. Many major sectors hedged their bets, funneling comparable amounts of campaign cash to both parties so they would never be left out in the cold. In the 1990s, a fashion grew for bipartisan lobbying firms, with both Republican and Democratic partners, designed to serve corporate clients in any political climate. 

From the rise of the modern administrative state through the Clinton years, K Street held enormous power to reshape legislation to its liking or, failing that, to block it altogether. But during Bush’s first term, K Street was uncommonly pliant, even subdued. The Republican Party had conquered Washington’s special interests. In my piece for the Monthly, I set out to explain how.

The magazine had recently moved into new offices near the White House, a stone’s throw in distance—but worlds away culturally—from the steakhouses and sleek offices of K Street. Over deli sandwiches and plates of homemade moussaka—supplied by the late Kukula Glastris, our consummate books editor and the unofficial den mother to the underpaid, twentysomething Monthly staffers—Paul and I batted around ideas. I interviewed dozens of politicians, lobbyists, and former Hill staff, who provided our first clues.

K Street, it turned out, didn’t just work for its corporate clients anymore. Now, under Bush, it worked for the GOP, too. Over the previous decade, the party had built a mirror image of the old Democratic political machines. The spoils were not judgeships or jobs in the county clerk’s office, but mid-six-figure jobs on K Street and lucrative contracts for privatized government programs—with a cut of those profits steered back in the form of campaign contributions to Republican committees and candidates. Each week, senior Republican leaders on the Hill met with a small group of ex-staffers to discuss job openings at leading trade associations and corporate offices. The goal was to stock K Street with party functionaries, and to purge the Democrats who remained.

We called my story “Welcome to the Machine.” (This title was supplied by Paul, who assured me that “everyone” would get the Pink Floyd reference.) As a young reporter, it was my education in a certain kind of journalism, long prized at the Monthly and now much more common at mainstream news organizations, sometimes referred to in journalism as a “conceptual scoop.” While my reporting yielded fresh details on the inner workings of the machine, it wasn’t exactly investigative. Many examples in my story were drawn from daily newspaper coverage. The new machine, it turned out, had been sitting in plain sight. My job was to make better sense of the existing facts and explain how this new world worked to an audience that was eager for answers.

As an investigative reporter at the New York Times, I’ve broken some big stories. But few have had the intellectual impact, or sheer shelf life, of “Welcome to the Machine.” Paul Krugman devoted a column to it, spurring broad discussion. Bloggers (remember those?) across the political spectrum posted and debated the piece. The story was eagerly consumed by liberal and Democratic readers adrift in the post-9/11 era. Even years later, I would notice the piece cited in articles, books, or opinion pieces. 

Remnants of the Republican K Street machine persist. Until very recently, some of Washington’s big corporate trade associations functioned as virtual organs of the GOP. The size of the lobbying industry has increased dramatically, creating even richer potential spoils. Policy expertise resides more with well-paid former Hill aides than with their meagerly compensated counterparts still toiling in Congress.

But as I read the story back now, I am struck by how much more fragile the K Street machine was than it seemed at the time. When I wrote my story, political giving by major industries had tilted two to one in favor of the GOP. Yet money always follows power. The election of Barack Obama forced industries to recalibrate their political giving. The trauma of the financial crash and the Democrats’ successful efforts to overhaul the health care system fractured some political alliances and sealed others. Wall Street became more estranged from the Democrats in the wake of the financial crash and Obama’s efforts at financial reform, but the emerging powers of big tech drew closer. The 2016 election accelerated the trend. By the 2018 midterms, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, major industries were giving slightly more to Democrats in aggregate than they were to Republicans, bolstered by strong Democratic fund-raising in the financial and real estate sector and liberals’ dominance in the technology, health care, and legal professions.

The Tea Party movement also disrupted the K Street machine, creating an insurgent class of Republican law-makers and candidates who painted dependable establishment conservatives as weak-kneed squishes, the better to knock them off in primaries. The resulting civil war strained the GOP’s ability to smoothly mesh policy outcomes and political power.

Then came the ultimate political insurgent, Donald J. Trump. Many traditional Republican donors in the business world closed their wallets to candidate Trump during the 2016 cycle, believing him to be politically toxic and unelectable. Yet during his first two years as president, Trump granted establishment Republicans and their industry allies an almost unprecedentedly free hand in shaping policy. In some sectors—energy, in particular—government and business have become almost indistinguishable. At the start of this year, former lobbyists ran four different federal agencies. When it comes to environmental and extractive policies, the machine whirs along like never before. And it can still deliver policy outcomes: The Trump tax cut, engineered by Republicans on Capitol Hill, was in some ways a signal machine triumph of the Trump era.

But by thrusting the GOP’s id—white identity politics—to the fore, Trump has made K Street–oriented machine politics more difficult for his party to maintain. His firmly held, sometimes incoherent views on immigration and trade set him on a collision course with the Fortune 500 companies that cheered his tax cuts and regulatory policies. He has feuded with major companies to settle political gripes, promising new regulations (!) to combat alleged anti-conservative censorship by Facebook and Google and seeking to stymie AT&T’s merger with Time Warner to punish the latter for news coverage by its subsidiary, CNN. At times, Trump has suggested that he would break with big pharma, perhaps the congressional GOP’s most loyal ally, over drug prices. Trump’s Republican Party is thus both more corporatist than ever, and less.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s leftward drift means that its candidates face growing pressure to forego financial support from lobbyists, big business groups, and corporate PACs. Increasingly, they can afford to do so, thanks to the rise of efficient grassroots fund-raising, through online platforms like ActBlue. Even if Democrats won enough power in 2020 to construct a countervailing K Street machine, it’s not clear that they would want to—or need to.

Ultimately, political machines thrive on certainty and order. Trump is allergic to both. His policies are driven more by resentment, instinct, and ego than by a considered strategy to gain and hold power. Trumpian turmoil in Washington has certainly been lucrative for K Street; total lobbying spending has begun to climb again since he took office, as businesses scramble to avoid the president’s Twitter flamethrower or carve out special deals and dispensations under the cover of his chaos. But it has not been good for the old K Street machine. Swaths of the old Republican professional class in Washington have been displaced by a new group of Trump acolytes and hangers-on, building a mini patronage machine inside the carapace of the old one. Formerly C-list GOP operatives, like Corey Lewandowski, have become the Beltway’s new power brokers, setting up new consultancies and lobbying shops to monetize their connection to Trump. 

But Trump’s reelection appears to be an uphill climb. While the Trumpers scramble to cash in while they can, some mainstays of the Bush-era machine are eying an exit. As the Washington Post reported in April, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—Washington’s most powerful lobbying group—has faced an internal revolt from members who believe it is too aligned with the Republican Party and too timid in challenging Trump on issues like trade and global warming. Whether they are followed by other cogs in the K Street machine will depend on whether Trump and his party can build an enduring political coalition around a declining pool of mostly white voters. Unless it is properly maintained—lubricated by a steady supply of money, jobs, and policy victories—even the most exquisitely engineered contraption eventually grinds to a halt.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described the prevalence of bipartisan lobbying firms in Washington. We regret the error.

The post How Trump Could Blow Up the Republican Lobbying Machine appeared first on Washington Monthly.

suspect I’m not the only one who has noticed that the quality of David Brookss Times column varies wildly from week to week. One day, he’s funny, unpredictable, insightful; you read along, glad that the Times has given this man a permanent place in its pages. Three days later, hes bloviating like Michael Savage, and Maureen Dowd doesnt seem so silly anymore. But if you peruse Brookss considerable pre-Timesian oeuvre, youll find that the same inconsistency is evident throughout his work. There is Brooks the Journalist. And there is Brooks the Hack.

Brooks the Journalist got his start working the police beat in Chicago; today, nearly alone among those conservative pundits who habitually bash the press for its laziness and myopia, Brooks still actually ventures out into the real world to do his own reporting on what it holds. Often when reading his best work, you feel that hes perfectly explained or captured something you knew to be true but couldnt find precisely the right words for. He is a keen observer, adept at distilling his reporting into generalizations that illuminate American life. The most famous of these is, of course, the bohemian bourgeoisie, or Bobos, the upscale, older liberals who combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos, as Brooks put it in his best-selling book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Bobos was a best-seller not only because it captured the mores of middle-aged, blue-state boomerspeople who wear expedition-quality anoraks to shovel snow and spend thousands of dollars on brand-new dinner tables designed to look worn and authenticbut also because he was sympathetic to his subjects. (A wise move, as they were also his audience.) Im a member of this class, Brooks assured readers. Were not so bad.

Indeed, such people enjoy reading Brooks the Journalist precisely because he is one of the few right-leaning pundits who doesnt seem to believe that liberals are evil. Though conservative, Brooks the Journalist is reflective rather than bombastic; his zingers barely singe, let alone burn. To put things in Brooksian terms, hes a conservative, but the kind youd bring home to discuss politics over $17-a-pound artisanal goat cheese and organic chardonnay bottled by third-generation French peasants. Its no wonder the Times felt comfortable putting him on the op-ed page.

But there is also Brooks the Hack. While Brooks the Journalist is honest and self-critical, Brooks the Hack is willing to carry water for his political allies. He opines that the Bush administration is drunk on truth serum and exceptionally forthright about its policies. He unsheathes the marvelous sophistry that our government couldnt even come up with a plan for postwar Iraqthank goodness, too, because any plan hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality. (Actually, technocrats at the Departments of Defense and State did hatch a pretty good plan. Alas, Brookss fellow travelers among the Pentagons civilian appointees ignored it.) He insists that pro-war neoconservatives travel in widely different circles and dont actually have much contact with one another, when in fact a game of Two Degrees of Richard Perle would get you just about every member of this alleged neocon diaspora.

Similarly, Brooks the Hack indulges in predictableand frequently dishonestcaricatures of Democrats. He once wrote that upscale areas everywhere voted for Al Gore, even though a cursory check of census data reveals that seven of the ten richest counties in America voted for George W. Bush in 2000. When it began to look like John Kerry would carry the Democratic banner in 2004, Brooks argued that the Democrats wont nominate a guy unless his family had an upper-deck berth on the Mayflowerthis of a party whose last five nominees included a Georgia peanut farmer, a guy raised by a working-class single mom in Arkansas, and another born to Greek immigrants. Yet Brooks the Hack seems to revel in cheap shots, such as implying that the term neocon was anti-Semiticcon is short for conservative and neo is short for Jewish, he recently wrote in the Times.

More broadly, whereas Brooks the Journalist unfurls grand abstractions that illuminate essential truths about American life, Brooks the Hack peddles unreliable generalizations that describe the world as he and his friends wish it to be. When Brooks set out to describe the differences between red and blue Americaby driving a whopping sixty-five miles from Bethesda, Maryland, to Franklin County, Pennsylvaniahe produced an article replete with seemingly knowing observations that turned out to be factually wrong. Brooks says few blue staters could name even five NASCAR drivers; but as reporter Sasha Issenberg noted in Philadelphia magazine, three of the five top markets for the Winston Cup are in blue states. Brooks says that red America is home shopping country, but it turns out that QVCs audiences skew toward affluent, suburban blue staters. Brooks says you cant spend more than $20 at a restaurant in Franklin County, when in fact its possible to blow $50 on veal medallions and wild-rice pilaf at the bed-and-breakfast where Brooks himself had spent the night.

Its true that Brookss conservatism leads him to smart ideas that a more liberal columnist probably wouldnt conceive. But its also true that his hankering after movement cred accounts for most of what is dishonest and sloppy in his ideas. Eventually, Brooks will have to decide ex-
actly who he wants to be.

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A few weeks ago, as news of the torture at Abu Ghraib made its way out to the wider world, David Brooks published a column that many of his readers had probably been waiting months to see. Brooks, who joined The New York Times op-ed stable in 2003, had long been among the more cogent defenders of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But as the prison scandal reached its apogee, Brooks seemed to have had enough. “This has been a crushingly depressing period, especially for people who support the war in Iraq,” he wrote. “The predictions people on my side made about the postwar world have not yet come true. The warnings others made about the fractious state of post-Saddam society have.” Though he was not ready to give up on Iraq, Brooks continued:

It’s not too early to begin thinking about what was clearly an intellectual failure. There was, above all, a failure to understand the consequences of our power. There was a failure to anticipate the response our power would have on the people we sought to liberate. They resent us for our power and at the same time expect us to be capable of everything. There was a failure to understand the effect our power would have on other people around the world. We were so sure that we were using our might for noble purposes, we assumed that sooner or later, everybody else would see that as well.

Not only was Brooks perhaps the first among that group of conservative thinkers who had advocated war against Iraq for nearly a decade to concede that his side had gotten things dreadfully wrong. He had also put his finger on the central failing of the war hawks–their purblind arrogance and self-delusion–with a degree of precision all the more powerful for having come from a supporter of the war.

t’s instructive, though, to go back and read what Brooks had written about Iraq one month earlier, when the Shiite uprising began to build steam. “Come on people, let’s get a grip,” Brooks lectured:

This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam. Pundits and sages were spinning a whole series of mutually exclusive disaster scenarios: Civil war! A nationwide rebellion! Maybe we should calm down a bit. I’ve spent the last few days talking with people who’ve spent much of their careers studying and working in this region. We’re at a perilous moment in Iraqi history, but the situation is not collapsing.

Oh, good—he talked to some people. (The only Near East experts on the planet who didn’t think the situation was collapsing, apparently.) Having begun his column like an overzealous junior press secretary ham-handedly spinning bad news, Brooks ended it like a second-rate talk-radio host playing tough guy. “Sadr is an enemy of civilization,” he intoned. “The terrorists are enemies of civilization. They must be defeated.” Well, sure.

I suspect I’m not the only one who has noticed that the quality of Brooks’s Timescolumn varies wildly from week to week. One day, he’s funny, unpredictable, insightful; you read along, glad that the Times has given this man a permanent place in its pages. Three days later, he’s bloviating like Michael Savage, and Maureen Dowd doesn’t seem so silly anymore. But if you peruse Brooks’s considerable pre-Timesian oeuvre, you’ll find that the same inconsistency is evident throughout his work. There is Brooks the Journalist. And there is Brooks the Hack.

Brooks the Journalist got his start working the police beat in Chicago; today, nearly alone among those conservative pundits who habitually bash the press for its laziness and myopia, Brooks still actually ventures out into the real world to do his own reporting on what it holds. Brooks the Journalist is erudite enough to pen essays for The Public Interest but accessible enough to write columns for Newsweek. Often when reading his best work, you feel that he’s perfectly explained or captured something you knew to be true but couldn’t find precisely the right words for. He is a keen observer, adept at distilling his reporting into generalizations that illuminate American life. The most famous of these is, of course, the bohemian bourgeoisie, or Bobos, the upscale, older liberals who “combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos,” as Brooks put it in his bestselling book, Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Bobos was a bestseller not only because it captured the mores of middle-aged, blue-state Boomers–people who wear expedition-quality anoraks to shovel snow and spend thousands of dollars on brand-new dinner tables designed to look worn and authentic–but also because he was sympathetic to his subjects. (A wise move, as they were also his audience.) “I’m a member of this class,” Brooks assured readers. “We’re not so bad.”

Indeed, such people enjoy reading Brooks the Journalist precisely because he is one of the few right-leaning pundits who doesn’t seem to believe that liberals are evil. Though conservative, Brooks the Journalist is reflective rather than bombastic; his zingers barely singe, let alone burn. Instead of dispensing wrath on “Hannity & Colmes,” Brooks offers witty aperçus on “The News-Hour with Jim Lehrer.” Even the political philosophy to which Brooks has attached his name, “national-greatness conservatism”–it has something to do with building nicer libraries and resuscitating the space program–seems rather unthreatening. To put things in Brooksian terms, he’s a conservative, but the kind you’d bring home to discuss politics over $17-a-pound artisanal goat cheese and organic chardonnay bottled by third-generation French peasants. It’s no wonder the Times felt comfortable putting him on the op-ed page.

But there is also Brooks the Hack. Brooks the Hack spent his formative years at The Wall Street Journal’s famously kooky and fact-challenged editorial page, for which he wrote “editorial features,” the Journal‘s term for axe-grinding reportage that sidesteps the paper’s famously demanding news pages and, indeed, frequently contradicts what is published there. (Though Brooks’s dispatches, to be sure, ground much less than those of his colleagues.) Later, he helped launch The Weekly Standard, which played house organ to the Gingrich revolution in the days before it played house organ to the Bush administration hawks. (In between these periods, the Standard was perhaps the most trenchant and interesting political magazine in the country.) While Brooks the Journalist is honest and self-critical, Brooks the Hack is willing to carry water for his political allies. He opines that the Bush administration is “drunk on truth serum” and “exceptionally forthright” about its policies. He unsheathes the marvelous sophistry that “our government couldn’t even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq–thank goodness, too, because any ‘plan’ hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality.” (Actually, technocrats at Departments of Defense and State did hatch a pretty good plan. Alas, Brooks’s fellow-travelers among the Pentagon’s civilian appointees ignored it.) He insists that pro-war neoconservatives “travel in widely different circles and don’t actually have much contact with one another,” when in fact a game of “Two Degrees of Richard Perle” would get you just about every member of this alleged neocon diaspora.

Similarly, Brooks the Hack indulges in predictable–and frequently dishonest–caricatures of Democrats. He once wrote that “upscale areas everywhere” voted for Al Gore, even though a cursory check of census data reveals that seven of the 10 richest counties in America voted for George W. Bush in 2000. When it began to look like John Kerry would carry the Democratic banner in 2004, Brooks argued that the Democrats “won’t nominate a guy unless his family had an upper-deck berth on the Mayflower”–this of a party whose last five nominees included a Georgia peanut farmer, a guy raised by a working-class single mom in Arkansas, and another born to Greek immigrants. Yet Brooks the Hack seems to revel in cheap shots, such as implying that the term “neocon” was anti-Semitic– “con is short for ‘conservative’ and neo is short for ‘Jewish’,” he recently wrote in the Times.

More broadly, whereas Brooks the Journalist unfurls grand abstractions that illuminate essential truths about American life, Brooks the Hack peddles unreliable generalizations that describe the world as he and his friends wish it to be. Every pundit makes bad calls during election season, but only Brooks was of the opinion that “[t]he closest thing to a Dean resistance movement is emerging inside the Lieberman campaign,” as he wrote in December 2003, when the steadfastly pro-war senator was parked in a race for fifth. When Brooks set out to describe the differences between red and blue America–by driving a whopping 65 miles from Bethesda, Md., to Franklin County, Pa.–he produced an article replete with seemingly knowing observations that turned out to be factually wrong. Brooks says few blue staters “could name even five NASCAR drivers”; but as reporter Sasha Issenberg noted in Philadelphia magazine, three of the five top markets for the Winston Cup are in blue states. Brooks says that Red America is home-shopping country, but it turns out that QVC’s audiences skew towards affluent, suburban blue staters. Brooks says you can’t spend more than $20 at a restaurant in Franklin County, when in fact it’s possible to blow $50 on veal medallions and wild-rice pilaf at a bed-and-breakfast where Brooks himself had spent the night.

Split Personality

Brooks the Journalist and Brooks the Hack are both on display in his new book, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. Like Bobos, it is a work of cultural reporting, with Brooks in the role of “comic sociologist.” But whereas Bobos limned the mostly liberal, mostly blue state-dwelling upper middle-class, On Paradise Drive is concerned with a lower social register and a broader geographic swath–the “moderately affluent strivers” whose peregrinations have made suburbia the demographic center of American life. Today, more people live, work, and play in the ‘burbs than in urban or rural locales. And as Brooks is not the first to note, the new suburbs are also very different from the old ones. Taken as a whole, for instance, they contain more single people than families with kids. They have replaced cities as the first destination of immigrants, most of whom now skip Chinatown and move directly to the outskirts of places like Charlotte, N.C., and Lincoln, Neb.

What’s more, Brooks argues, these suburbs are not the boring and conformist cul-de-sacs of popular repute, but places where venerable and vibrant American traditions have taken root and flourished. “The human longing for transcendence, spiritual depth, and moral cohesion has not perished in the sprawls of suburbia,” he writes, “it has just taken a different form, because so many Americans live so much of their lives in the imagined land of the future.” It is in the new suburbs–with their limitless physical, social, and political space–that the American penchant for decentralization and segmentation has come to full flower. In suburbia, every subculture has its geographic enclave, every niche sport a championship broadcast on ESPN 2, every hobby its own clubs, conventions, and celebrities. Hence, the ‘burbs are home to white people, but also to a pastiche of American cultural, religious, and lifestyle diversity: “lesbian dentists, Iranian McMansions, Korean megachurches, nuclear-free-zone subdevelopments, Orthodox shtetls with Hasidic families walking past strip malls on their way to Saturday-morning shul,” as Brooks puts it. And thanks to the job mobility of the post-industrial economy, people who don’t like where they live or who they live next to can simply move somewhere else, which Americans do more than any other people in the world.

This is good observational journalism, grounded in (other people’s) social-science research. But then there are those abstractions. For a book about America, On Paradise Drive has very few Americans in it. For the most part, as Brooks explains early on, he prefers “to speak in parables, composites, and archetypes.” And there are a lot of them, some of which will be familiar to readers of Brooks’s magazine writing. There is the Ubermom, the high-achieving woman who, upon leaving the workforce for motherhood, channels her intelligence and drive into unleashing the potential for greatness possessed by each of her children. (“By the time her child is in the pre-preschool years, Ubermom is boosting her junior achiever’s prephonics-acquisition skills.”) There is the Organization Kid, the dutiful meritocrat who spends high school amassing “extracurriculars” and his college years trying to climb the system instead of bucking it. “One finds students applying time-quadrant techniques to maximize their mental efficiency. They read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens,” he writes. “Opportunity lures them, the glorious future.” Others of Brooks’s composite characters lack cutesy names but are endowed with fully-realized inner lives. In an amusing section about niche magazines, Brooks describes “the perfect Cigar Aficionado reader” as someone who sips 400-year-old port, watches James Bond DVDs, and “contemplates whether it is really worth it to travel to Russia just so he can break the sound barrier in a rented MiG, or whether his time would be better spent at the Dean Martin fantasy camp for frustrated crooners.”

It’s easy to find yourself nodding along with On Paradise Drive, in part because Brooks is a very funny writer and in part because his composites are often wickedly acute. (I still remember playing tennis against other Organization Kids whose MBA-holding Ubermoms firmly believed they could turn little Billy into the next Andre Agassi.) I’m even willing to accept that sometimes, “One simply must tolerate imprecision of the poetic if one is to grasp the true or powerful essence of a place or people,” as Brooks argues in his introduction. Ambitious journalism is perforce the work of translating on-the-ground facts into big ideas with universal import.

But it’s hard work, and one is liable, if not relentlessly honest with oneself, to slight a nuanced truth in favor of a pet theory. Just ask any reporter who’s ever been told to find subjects for a story on, say, what Soccer Moms are thinking these days. In practice, if you ask 10 different Soccer Moms what their opinion is of George W. Bush, you’re likely to get 10 different answers. The temptation is to pick the Soccer Mom who’s thinking what everyone in New York and Washington expects her to be thinking–or what the polls say she should be thinking. Or to ask a local advocacy group to provide you with just the right homeless guy you need to illustrate your story on cuts in social services budget. Or to use the same “man on the street” your buddy on the metro desk used last month, hoping readers won’t notice that Fred O’Keefe of Flushing has remarkably quotable views on both the city’s budget crisis and “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?”

Some reporters, of course, don’t even bother. Fabulists such as Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, and Jack Kelley each ran aground on the rocks of reality, so desperate to find telling anecdotes or characters or details that they simply invented them.

Schtick  Figures

Brooks could never be called a fabulist, if for no other reason that he sidesteps the problem altogether by writing about archetypes instead of real people. But there’s evidence in On Paradise Drive of tension between the abstractions Brooks the Hack wants to be true and the reality Brooks the Reporter should have gotten right.

Take, for example, the suburban typology that occupies the early part of the book. You don’t have to read too closely to figure out that, in Brooks’s estimation, some suburbs are better expressions of the new American dream than others. On the one hand, you have the exurbs, the land of office parks, megastores, and sprawling housing developments plopped into the middle of Southwestern deserts and Florida swampland. Brooks evidently likes the exurbs. They are, he writes, “built to embody a modern version of the suburban ideal.” The exurbs are populated by “Patio Man” and “Realtor Mom,” people who are “infused with a sense of what you might call conservative utopianism.” They live in new urbanist planned communities with sculpted driveways and perfect landscaping. They are self-effacing and pleasant. They like paninis and chain stores and golf. They moved to the exurbs because they want bigger houses, nicer neighbors, and lower crime–and also because, Brooks tells us, they are uncomfortable in the increasingly cosmopolitan inner-ring suburbs, with their immigrant group-housing and foreign-film festivals. Patio Man and Realtor Mom vote overwhelmingly Republican. “They are,” Brooks writes, “wonderful people.”

Rather less wonderful–at least in Brooks’s telling–are those who live on the other side of the Beltway. Though he likes to decry clichés about suburban life, here’s how he describes a typical resident of the more liberal inner-ring communities:

The assistant anthropology professor can stride through life knowing she was unanimously elected chairwoman of her crunchy suburb’s sustainable-growth seminar. She wears the locally approved status symbols: the Tibet-motif dangly earrings, the Andrea Dworkin-inspired hairstyle, the peasant blouse, and the public-broadcasting tote bag … No wonder she feels so righteous in her beliefs.

Why not just call her a screechy dyke and be done with it? But that’s not all. These crunchy suburbanites, Brooks alleges, “subtly compete to prove they have the worst lawn in the neighborhood, just to show how fervently they reject soul-destroying standards of conventional success.” They don’t paint their houses enough because they regard “exterior housepaint in the same way they regard makeup, as something that was probably developed using animal testing.” In these places, “the chief dilemma is whether to send the kids to Antioch or Hampshire College.” And so forth. These are not wonderful people. These are character sketches for a Dartmouth Review cartoon.

Then we get to the professional zones, filled with “affluent sophisticated types who disapprove of the suburbs in principle but find themselves living in one in practice.” Here, he insists, “it is apparently socially acceptable to buy a luxury car so long as it comes from a country that is hostile to U.S. foreign policy.” This is funny at first, and then I wondered whether Brooks actually met a single person who bought their Audi because Germany declined to join the coalition of the willing. I doubt it. (What car does Brooks drive, anyway?) Of Trader Joe’s, the chain of low-priced gourmet grocery stores beloved by liberal suburbanites, Brooks writes, “Everyone knows that snack food is morally suspect, since it contributes to the obesity of the American public, but the clientele still seems to want it. So the folks behind this enterprise have managed to come up with globally concerned stomach filler that tastes virtually like sawdust ground from unendangered wood.” Give me a break. Even liberals don’t usually buy food that they think tastes bad, and if you look closely at the allegedly goody-goody foods that Brooks cites, you’ll find that Veggie Booty and wasabi peas are not very good for you. That is why they are called junk food.

But Brooks believes that even the eating habits of liberal suburbanites are shallow and hypocritical. “When you stumble across Teriyaki Fajita Salad du Jardin, you realize it is possible to cram so many authentic indigenous cultures together that they’ve created something totally bogus and artificial,” he writes. Not only that, but the professionals and the crunchies are provincial and out-of-touch compared to other people. They “don’t know what makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal,” “can’t tell a military officer’s rank by looking at the insignia,” and “don’t know what a soybean looks like growing in the field.” Brooks is probably right on all counts. But then again, I would guess that nearly every American who is not a Pentecostal doesn’t know what makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal. (Quick, what distinguishes a Catholic from an Episcopalian?) And I would love to see polling data on how many Americans, in this age of industrialized agribusiness, know what a soybean looks like growing in the field.

The point is that too often, Brooks’s “archetypes” are really just old-fashioned stereotypes. It should go without saying that most people are more complicated and contradictory than stereotypes allow for. I doubt Patio Men, if they exist, are all wonderful people, but I also don’t think they would turn out to be any more or less wonderful than any other group of people in America. The inner-ring suburbs, too, are rather more varied than Brooks’s caricature allows. Montgomery County, Md., where Brooks lives, does have its Takoma Park neighborhood, which I strongly suspect was the model for Brooks’s archetypal “crunchy suburb.” But it has lots of other parts, too: upper-crust Chevy Chase, young professionals living in Silver Spring because the apartments are cheaper there than in the District, the strip-mall row of Rockville Pike, and so forth. Takoma Park is not typical of Montgomery County, but the thing is, there really is no typical Montgomery County. Average things out that way, and you only blur the reality.

Maul of America

There’s some indication that even Brooks himself doesn’t think much of his suburban typology. Patio Man and Realtor Mom originally made their appearance in a Weekly Standard article published shortly before the 2002 elections. That time around, Brooks elevated them to the heart of a much broader thesis. They “represent the beau ideal of Republican selfhood,” he wrote in the Standard, “and are becoming the new base–the brains, heart, guts and soul of the emerging Republican party.” Driven out of the inner-ring suburbs by snooty latté-sipping cosmopolitans, they were moving to the new suburbs, places like Loudoun County, Va. and Douglas County, Colo. As Brooks elaborated later in an article for Blueprint, the house journal of the Democratic Leadership Council:

With the explosion of office park people and institutions, a new culture is emerging. And people who are part of that culture tend to adopt the values of George W. Bush, regardless of the values they had in their old towns. These include order and neatness over disorder and dysfunction; achievement, sports, and competition; and a sense of responsibility and success. It’s a jock culture filled with talk of college football, NASCAR, and kids’ sports teams that travel. It’s a culture in which seeker-sensitive mega-churches are part of the atmosphere, even if you never set foot in one. It’s a culture of big-box mega-malls with parking lots as big as nuclear test sites where sprawl people gather to brag about how much they’re saving by buying in bulk.

The coming political era, Brooks posited, was one of suburb v. suburb, with the Sprawl People of exurbia duking it out for dominance with the crunchies, immigrants, and professionals of the Democratic-leaning inner-ring suburbs. Because the exurbs were growing faster than the latter, and because they were pretty good at incorporating new arrivals into their orderly center-right political culture, they would win.

But like some of Brooks’s other abstractions, this one just didn’t hold up under close inspection. The exurbs have certainly grown faster than the inner-ring suburbs. But as political demographer Ruy Teixeira has pointed out in this magazine (“Deciphering the Democrats’ Debacle,” May 2003) since the former were so small to begin with, the latter are still growing much faster in absolute terms. More tellingly, as the exurbs get bigger–as they become more prosperous, get integrated into the larger metropolitan areas Teixeira calls “ideopolises,” and attract more immigration–they actually tend to get more cosmopolitan and Democratic. That’s why, among counties with the largest total population growth, Al Gore won nearly 3 million more votes than George W. Bush. Loudoun County may have given Bush 56 percent of the vote in 2000, but the same county gave his dad 66 percent in 1988. (Reflecting the emergence of a Democratic ideopolis, Virginia’s northern suburbs have gone from overwhelmingly Republican a few decades ago to evenly split now, helping put a Democrat back in the governor’s mansion.) Other states with sprawl–among them Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado–are becoming more blue, not more red.

That may be why Brooks neglects to include his theory of future Republican dominance among the pages On Paradise Drive, which is, on the whole, not a very political book. Indeed, he pretty much drops his original typology after the first few chapters, implicitly acknowledging that it wasn’t very useful in the first place, and the heart of his analysis–the chapters about how Ubermom and her Organization Kid shop and live and learn–doesn’t rely much on the peculiarities of the crunchy suburbs or the glories of the exurbs. By the end of the book, Brooks is much more interested in what suburbanites have in common: the “Paradise Spell” that drives our tendency to “work so hard, to consume so feverishly, to move so much.” Ultimately, it’s the same longing, the same desire for opportunity, success, and fulfillment, that drive both the exurban Patio Man with his military-grade Weber grill and the suburban lawyer who rips apart his kitchen to make room for a Tuscan-style culinary operations center. This is what Brooks means by living “in the future tense.” And here you sense that–once again–Brooks has put his finger on something. As a friend of mine once put it, there’s no Canadian Dream. But there is an American Dream, and everyone in the world knows what it is. We are the eschatological nation.

Of course, this line of thinking is neither particularly new–see Frederick Jackson Turner’s enormously influential thesis, articulated slightly more than a century ago, about the effect of a permanent frontier on American culture–nor particularly conservative. Not too long ago, in his speech accepting the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination, Bill Clinton reminisced about what he had learned at Georgetown from the historian Carroll Quigley: that “America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two great ideas: first, that tomorrow can be better than today, and second that each of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so.” It was a motif Clinton would come back to repeatedly during his two campaigns for the presidency–he won the suburban vote both times–and during his time in the White House. Brooks may believe that Clinton “debased the presidency and disillusioned a generation of young people,” as he wrote a few years ago. But he shares with the former president a surprisingly similar sense of the essential fabric of American life.

Brooks the Journalist seems to, at any rate. But Brooks the Hack still desires to be part of a wider political movement, even one that commands embarrassing displays of intellectual obedience. And while most of On Paradise Drive is written by Brooks the Journalist, Brooks the Hack still lurks within, always threatening to overcome his better half, always clouding his vision and throwing off his aim. It’s true that Brooks’s conservatism leads him to smart ideas that a more liberal columnist probably wouldn’t conceive. But it’s also true that his hankering after movement cred accounts for most of what is dishonest and sloppy in his ideas. Eventually, Brooks will have to decide exactly who he wants to be.

The post Paradise Glossed appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s instructive, though, to go back and read what Brooks had written about Iraq one month earlier, when the Shiite uprising began to build steam. “Come on people, let’s get a grip,” Brooks lectured:

This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam. Pundits and sages were spinning a whole series of mutually exclusive disaster scenarios: Civil war! A nationwide rebellion! Maybe we should calm down a bit. I’ve spent the last few days talking with people who’ve spent much of their careers studying and working in this region. We’re at a perilous moment in Iraqi history, but the situation is not collapsing.

Oh, good–he talked to some people. (The only Near East experts on the planet who didn’t think the situation was collapsing, apparently.) Having begun his column like an overzealous junior press secretary ham-handedly spinning bad news, Brooks ended it like a second-rate talk-radio host playing tough guy. “Sadr is an enemy of civilization,” he intoned. “The terrorists are enemies of civilization. They must be defeated.” Well, sure.

I suspect I’m not the only one who has noticed that the quality of Brooks’s Times column varies wildly from week to week. One day, he’s funny, unpredictable, insightful; you read along, glad that the Times has given this man a permanent place in its pages. Three days later, he’s bloviating like Michael Savage, and Maureen Dowd doesn’t seem so silly anymore. But if you peruse Brooks’s considerable pre-Timesian oeuvre, you’ll find that the same inconsistency is evident throughout his work. There is Brooks the Journalist. And there is Brooks the Hack.

Brooks the Journalist got his start working the police beat in Chicago; today, nearly alone among those conservative pundits who habitually bash the press for its laziness and myopia, Brooks still actually ventures out into the real world to do his own reporting on what it holds. Brooks the Journalist is erudite enough to pen essays for The Public Interest but accessible enough to write columns for Newsweek. Often when reading his best work, you feel that he’s perfectly explained or captured something you knew to be true but couldn’t find precisely the right words for. He is a keen observer, adept at distilling his reporting into generalizations that illuminate American life. The most famous of these is, of course, the bohemian bourgeoisie, or Bobos, the upscale, older liberals who “combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos,” as Brooks put it in his bestselling book, Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Bobos was a bestseller not only because it captured the mores of middle-aged, blue-state Boomers–people who wear expedition-quality anoraks to shovel snow and spend thousands of dollars on brand-new dinner tables designed to look worn and authentic–but also because he was sympathetic to his subjects. (A wise move, as they were also his audience.) “I’m a member of this class,” Brooks assured readers. “We’re not so bad.”

Indeed, such people enjoy reading Brooks the Journalist precisely because he is one of the few right-leaning pundits who doesn’t seem to believe that liberals are evil. Though conservative, Brooks the Journalist is reflective rather than bombastic; his zingers barely singe, let alone burn. Instead of dispensing wrath on “Hannity & Colmes,” Brooks offers witty aperus on “The News-Hour with Jim Lehrer.” Even the political philosophy to which Brooks has attached his name, “national-greatness conservatism”–it has something to do with building nicer libraries and resuscitating the space program–seems rather unthreatening. To put things in Brooksian terms, he’s a conservative, but the kind you’d bring home to discuss politics over $17-a-pound artisanal goat cheese and organic chardonnay bottled by third-generation French peasants. It’s no wonder the Times felt comfortable putting him on the op-ed page.

But there is also Brooks the Hack. Brooks the Hack spent his formative years at The Wall Street Journal’s famously kooky and fact-challenged editorial page, for which he wrote “editorial features,” the Journal‘s term for axe-grinding reportage that sidesteps the paper’s famously demanding news pages and, indeed, frequently contradicts what is published there. (Though Brooks’s dispatches, to be sure, ground much less than those of his colleagues.) Later, he helped launch The Weekly Standard, which played house organ to the Gingrich revolution in the days before it played house organ to the Bush administration hawks. (In between these periods, the Standard was perhaps the most trenchant and interesting political magazine in the country.) While Brooks the Journalist is honest and self-critical, Brooks the Hack is willing to carry water for his political allies. He opines that the Bush administration is “drunk on truth serum” and “exceptionally forthright” about its policies. He unsheathes the marvelous sophistry that “our government couldn’t even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq–thank goodness, too, because any ‘plan’ hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality.” (Actually, technocrats at Departments of Defense and State did hatch a pretty good plan. Alas, Brooks’s fellow-travelers among the Pentagon’s civilian appointees ignored it.) He insists that pro-war neoconservatives “travel in widely different circles and don’t actually have much contact with one another,” when in fact a game of “Two Degrees of Richard Perle” would get you just about every member of this alleged neocon diaspora.

Similarly, Brooks the Hack indulges in predictable–and frequently dishonest–caricatures of Democrats. He once wrote that “upscale areas everywhere” voted for Al Gore, even though a cursory check of census data reveals that seven of the 10 richest counties in America voted for George W. Bush in 2000. When it began to look like John Kerry would carry the Democratic banner in 2004, Brooks argued that the Democrats “won’t nominate a guy unless his family had an upper-deck berth on the Mayflower”–this of a party whose last five nominees included a Georgia peanut farmer, a guy raised by a working-class single mom in Arkansas, and another born to Greek immigrants. Yet Brooks the Hack seems to revel in cheap shots, such as implying that the term “neocon” was anti-Semitic– “con is short for ‘conservative’ and neo is short for ‘Jewish’,” he recently wrote in the Times.

More broadly, whereas Brooks the Journalist unfurls grand abstractions that illuminate essential truths about American life, Brooks the Hack peddles unreliable generalizations that describe the world as he and his friends wish it to be. Every pundit makes bad calls during election season, but only Brooks was of the opinion that “[t]he closest thing to a Dean resistance movement is emerging inside the Lieberman campaign,” as he wrote in December 2003, when the steadfastly pro-war senator was parked in a race for fifth. When Brooks set out to describe the differences between red and blue America–by driving a whopping 65 miles from Bethesda, Md., to Franklin County, Pa.–he produced an article replete with seemingly knowing observations that turned out to be factually wrong. Brooks says few blue staters “could name even five NASCAR drivers”; but as reporter Sasha Issenberg noted in Philadelphia magazine, three of the five top markets for the Winston Cup are in blue states. Brooks says that Red America is home-shopping country, but it turns out that QVC’s audiences skew towards affluent, suburban blue staters. Brooks says you can’t spend more than $20 at a restaurant in Franklin County, when in fact it’s possible to blow $50 on veal medallions and wild-rice pilaf at a bed-and-breakfast where Brooks himself had spent the night.

Brooks the Journalist and Brooks the Hack are both on display in his new book, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. Like Bobos, it is a work of cultural reporting, with Brooks in the role of “comic sociologist.” But whereas Bobos limned the mostly liberal, mostly blue state-dwelling upper middle-class, On Paradise Drive is concerned with a lower social register and a broader geographic swath–the “moderately affluent strivers” whose peregrinations have made suburbia the demographic center of American life. Today, more people live, work, and play in the ‘burbs than in urban or rural locales. And as Brooks is not the first to note, the new suburbs are also very different from the old ones. Taken as a whole, for instance, they contain more single people than families with kids. They have replaced cities as the first destination of immigrants, most of whom now skip Chinatown and move directly to the outskirts of places like Charlotte, N.C., and Lincoln, Neb.

What’s more, Brooks argues, these suburbs are not the boring and conformist cul-de-sacs of popular repute, but places where venerable and vibrant American traditions have taken root and flourished. “The human longing for transcendence, spiritual depth, and moral cohesion has not perished in the sprawls of suburbia,” he writes, “it has just taken a different form, because so many Americans live so much of their lives in the imagined land of the future.” It is in the new suburbs–with their limitless physical, social, and political space–that the American penchant for decentralization and segmentation has come to full flower. In suburbia, every subculture has its geographic enclave, every niche sport a championship broadcast on ESPN 2, every hobby its own clubs, conventions, and celebrities. Hence, the ‘burbs are home to white people, but also to a pastiche of American cultural, religious, and lifestyle diversity: “lesbian dentists, Iranian McMansions, Korean megachurches, nuclear-free-zone subdevelopments, Orthodox shtetls with Hasidic families walking past strip malls on their way to Saturday-morning shul,” as Brooks puts it. And thanks to the job mobility of the post-industrial economy, people who don’t like where they live or who they live next to can simply move somewhere else, which Americans do more than any other people in the world.

This is good observational journalism, grounded in (other people’s) social-science research. But then there are those abstractions. For a book about America, On Paradise Drive has very few Americans in it. For the most part, as Brooks explains early on, he prefers “to speak in parables, composites, and archetypes.” And there are a lot of them, some of which will be familiar to readers of Brooks’s magazine writing. There is the Ubermom, the high-achieving woman who, upon leaving the workforce for motherhood, channels her intelligence and drive into unleashing the potential for greatness possessed by each of her children. (“By the time her child is in the pre-preschool years, Ubermom is boosting her junior achiever’s prephonics-acquisition skills.”) There is the Organization Kid, the dutiful meritocrat who spends high school amassing “extracurriculars” and his college years trying to climb the system instead of bucking it. “One finds students applying time-quadrant techniques to maximize their mental efficiency. They read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens,” he writes. “Opportunity lures them, the glorious future.” Others of Brooks’s composite characters lack cutesy names but are endowed with fully-realized inner lives. In an amusing section about niche magazines, Brooks describes “the perfect Cigar Aficionado reader” as someone who sips 400-year-old port, watches James Bond DVDs, and “contemplates whether it is really worth it to travel to Russia just so he can break the sound barrier in a rented MiG, or whether his time would be better spent at the Dean Martin fantasy camp for frustrated crooners.”

It’s easy to find yourself nodding along with On Paradise Drive, in part because Brooks is a very funny writer and in part because his composites are often wickedly acute. (I still remember playing tennis against other Organization Kids whose MBA-holding Ubermoms firmly believed they could turn little Billy into the next Andre Agassi.) I’m even willing to accept that sometimes, “One simply must tolerate imprecision of the poetic if one is to grasp the true or powerful essence of a place or people,” as Brooks argues in his introduction. Ambitious journalism is perforce the work of translating on-the-ground facts into big ideas with universal import.

But it’s hard work, and one is liable, if not relentlessly honest with oneself, to slight a nuanced truth in favor of a pet theory. Just ask any reporter who’s ever been told to find subjects for a story on, say, what Soccer Moms are thinking these days. In practice, if you ask 10 different Soccer Moms what their opinion is of George W. Bush, you’re likely to get 10 different answers. The temptation is to pick the Soccer Mom who’s thinking what everyone in New York and Washington expects her to be thinking–or what the polls say she should be thinking. Or to ask a local advocacy group to provide you with just the right homeless guy you need to illustrate your story on cuts in social services budget. Or to use the same “man on the street” your buddy on the metro desk used last month, hoping readers won’t notice that Fred O’Keefe of Flushing has remarkably quotable views on both the city’s budget crisis and “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?”

Some reporters, of course, don’t even bother. Fabulists such as Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, and Jack Kelley each ran aground on the rocks of reality, so desperate to find telling anecdotes or characters or details that they simply invented them.

Brooks could never be called a fabulist, if for no other reason that he sidesteps the problem altogether by writing about archetypes instead of real people. But there’s evidence in On Paradise Drive of tension between the abstractions Brooks the Hack wants to be true and the reality Brooks the Reporter should have gotten right.

Take, for example, the suburban typology that occupies the early part of the book. You don’t have to read too closely to figure out that, in Brooks’s estimation, some suburbs are better expressions of the new American dream than others. On the one hand, you have the exurbs, the land of office parks, megastores, and sprawling housing developments plopped into the middle of Southwestern deserts and Florida swampland. Brooks evidently likes the exurbs. They are, he writes, “built to embody a modern version of the suburban ideal.” The exurbs are populated by “Patio Man” and “Realtor Mom,” people who are “infused with a sense of what you might call conservative utopianism.” They live in new urbanist planned communities with sculpted driveways and perfect landscaping. They are self-effacing and pleasant. They like paninis and chain stores and golf. They moved to the exurbs because they want bigger houses, nicer neighbors, and lower crime–and also because, Brooks tells us, they are uncomfortable in the increasingly cosmopolitan inner-ring suburbs, with their immigrant group-housing and foreign-film festivals. Patio Man and Realtor Mom vote overwhelmingly Republican. “They are,” Brooks writes, “wonderful people.”

Rather less wonderful–at least in Brooks’s telling–are those who live on the other side of the Beltway. Though he likes to decry clichs about suburban life, here’s how he describes a typical resident of the more liberal inner-ring communities:

Why not just call her a screechy dyke and be done with it? But that’s not all. These crunchy suburbanites, Brooks alleges, “subtly compete to prove they have the worst lawn in the neighborhood, just to show how fervently they reject soul-destroying standards of conventional success.” They don’t paint their houses enough because they regard “exterior housepaint in the same way they regard makeup, as something that was probably developed using animal testing.” In these places, “the chief dilemma is whether to send the kids to Antioch or Hampshire College.” And so forth. These are not wonderful people. These are character sketches for a Dartmouth Review cartoon.

Then we get to the professional zones, filled with “affluent sophisticated types who disapprove of the suburbs in principle but find themselves living in one in practice.” Here, he insists, “it is apparently socially acceptable to buy a luxury car so long as it comes from a country that is hostile to U.S. foreign policy.” This is funny at first, and then I wondered whether Brooks actually met a single person who bought their Audi because Germany declined to join the coalition of the willing. I doubt it. (What car does Brooks drive, anyway?) Of Trader Joe’s, the chain of low-priced gourmet grocery stores beloved by liberal suburbanites, Brooks writes, “Everyone knows that snack food is morally suspect, since it contributes to the obesity of the American public, but the clientele still seems to want it. So the folks behind this enterprise have managed to come up with globally concerned stomach filler that tastes virtually like sawdust ground from unendangered wood.” Give me a break. Even liberals don’t usually buy food that they think tastes bad, and if you look closely at the allegedly goody-goody foods that Brooks cites, you’ll find that Veggie Booty and wasabi peas are not very good for you. That is why they are called junk food.

But Brooks believes that even the eating habits of liberal suburbanites are shallow and hypocritical. “When you stumble across Teriyaki Fajita Salad du Jardin, you realize it is possible to cram so many authentic indigenous cultures together that they’ve created something totally bogus and artificial,” he writes. Not only that, but the professionals and the crunchies are provincial and out-of-touch compared to other people. They “don’t know what makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal,” “can’t tell a military officer’s rank by looking at the insignia,” and “don’t know what a soybean looks like growing in the field.” Brooks is probably right on all counts. But then again, I would guess that nearly every American who is not a Pentecostal doesn’t know what makes a Pentecostal a Pentecostal. (Quick, what distinguishes a Catholic from an Episcopalian?) And I would love to see polling data on how many Americans, in this age of industrialized agribusiness, know what a soybean looks like growing in the field.

The point is that too often, Brooks’s “archetypes” are really just old-fashioned stereotypes. It should go without saying that most people are more complicated and contradictory than stereotypes allow for. I doubt Patio Men, if they exist, are all wonderful people, but I also don’t think they would turn out to be any more or less wonderful than any other group of people in America. The inner-ring suburbs, too, are rather more varied than Brooks’s caricature allows. Montgomery County, Md., where Brooks lives, does have its Takoma Park neighborhood, which I strongly suspect was the model for Brooks’s archetypal “crunchy suburb.” But it has lots of other parts, too: upper-crust Chevy Chase, young professionals living in Silver Spring because the apartments are cheaper there than in the District, the strip-mall row of Rockville Pike, and so forth. Takoma Park is not typical of Montgomery County, but the thing is, there really is no typical Montgomery County. Average things out that way, and you only blur the reality.

There’s some indication that even Brooks himself doesn’t think much of his suburban typology. Patio Man and Realtor Mom originally made their appearance in a Weekly Standard article published shortly before the 2002 elections. That time around, Brooks elevated them to the heart of a much broader thesis. They “represent the beau ideal of Republican selfhood,” he wrote in the Standard, “and are becoming the new base–the brains, heart, guts and soul of the emerging Republican party.” Driven out of the inner-ring suburbs by snooty latt-sipping cosmopolitans, they were moving to the new suburbs, places like Loudoun County, Va., and Douglas County, Colo. As Brooks elaborated later in an article for Blueprint, the house journal of the Democratic Leadership Council:

The coming political era, Brooks posited, was one of suburb v. suburb, with the Sprawl People of exurbia duking it out for dominance with the crunchies, immigrants, and professionals of the Democratic-leaning inner-ring suburbs. Because the exurbs were growing faster than the latter, and because they were pretty good at incorporating new arrivals into their orderly center-right political culture, they would win.

But like some of Brooks’s other abstractions, this one just didn’t hold up under close inspection. The exurbs have certainly grown faster than the inner-ring suburbs. But as political demographer Ruy Teixeira has pointed out in this magazine (“Deciphering the Democrats’ Debacle,” May 2003) since the former were so small to begin with, the latter are still growing much faster in absolute terms. More tellingly, as the exurbs get bigger–as they become more prosperous, get integrated into the larger metropolitan areas Teixeira calls “ideopolises,” and attract more immigration–they actually tend to get more cosmopolitan and Democratic. That’s why, among counties with the largest total population growth, Al Gore won nearly 3 million more votes than George W. Bush. Loudoun County may have given Bush 56 percent of the vote in 2000, but the same county gave his dad 66 percent in 1988. (Reflecting the emergence of a Democratic ideopolis, Virginia’s northern suburbs have gone from overwhelmingly Republican a few decades ago to evenly split now, helping put a Democrat back in the governor’s mansion.) Other states with sprawl–among them Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado–are becoming more blue, not more red.

That may be why Brooks neglects to include his theory of future Republican dominance among the pages On Paradise Drive, which is, on the whole, not a very political book. Indeed, he pretty much drops his original typology after the first few chapters, implicitly acknowledging that it wasn’t very useful in the first place, and the heart of his analysis–the chapters about how Ubermom and her Organization Kid shop and live and learn–doesn’t rely much on the peculiarities of the crunchy suburbs or the glories of the exurbs. By the end of the book, Brooks is much more interested in what suburbanites have in common: the “Paradise Spell” that drives our tendency to “work so hard, to consume so feverishly, to move so much.” Ultimately, it’s the same longing, the same desire for opportunity, success, and fulfillment, that drive both the exurban Patio Man with his military-grade Weber grill and the suburban lawyer who rips apart his kitchen to make room for a Tuscan-style culinary operations center. This is what Brooks means by living “in the future tense.” And here you sense that–once again–Brooks has put his finger on something. As a friend of mine once put it, there’s no Canadian Dream. But there is an American Dream, and everyone in the world knows what it is. We are the eschatological nation.

Of course, this line of thinking is neither particularly new–see Frederick Jackson Turner’s enormously influential thesis, articulated slightly more than a century ago, about the effect of a permanent frontier on American culture–nor particularly conservative. Not too long ago, in his speech accepting the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination, Bill Clinton reminisced about what he had learned at Georgetown from the historian Carroll Quigley: that “America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two great ideas: first, that tomorrow can be better than today, and second that each of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so.” It was a motif Clinton would come back to repeatedly during his two campaigns for the presidency–he won the suburban vote both times–and during his time in the White House. Brooks may believe that Clinton “debased the presidency and disillusioned a generation of young people,” as he wrote a few years ago. But he shares with the former president a surprisingly similar sense of the essential fabric of American life.

Brooks the Journalist seems to, at any rate. But Brooks the Hack still desires to be part of a wider political movement, even one that commands embarrassing displays of intellectual obedience. And while most of On Paradise Drive is written by Brooks the Journalist, Brooks the Hack still lurks within, always threatening to overcome his better half, always clouding his vision and throwing off his aim. It’s true that Brooks’s conservatism leads him to smart ideas that a more liberal columnist probably wouldn’t conceive. But it’s also true that his hankering after movement cred accounts for most of what is dishonest and sloppy in his ideas. Eventually, Brooks will have to decide exactly who he wants to be.

The post Paradise Glossed appeared first on Washington Monthly.

But last summer, a coterie of labor campaign operatives, liberal advocacy-group leaders, and old Clinton hands began exploiting one of McCain-Feingold’s loopholes. They organized several groups under Section 527 of the tax code to raise and spend the soft money which the Democratic Party no longer could. Scores of wealthy liberals, among them George Soros, have together given tens of millions of dollars to these “527s,” which have generic names like Americans Coming Together and Voices for Working Families. And in March and April, these groups spent a chunk of the money on issue ads attacking Bush, just as Bush was spending $50 million from his campaign war chest to attack Kerry. Though Kerry has raised $85 million worth of the $2,000 and under “hard money” donations permitted under McCain-Feingold–a Herculean amount for a Democrat–Bush has raised more than twice that. Without help from the 527s, the Kerry campaign would probably be in big trouble.

The GOP, of course, is well aware of this. Which is why its lawyers have filed legal challenges with the Federal Election Commission to get the 527s shut down, charging that this “Democratic shadow party” represents a “conspiracy” to “illegally” pump soft money into the presidential race. Such campaign finance groups as Democracy 21, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Alliance for Better Campaigns–which once butted heads with Bush over his opposition to McCain-Feingold–have joined the battle against this new Democratic weapon, as have anti-soft money editorial boards at newspapers across the country. In an editorial titled “Soft Money Slinks Back,” The New York Times inveighed against “political insiders” who were “carving a giant loophole” in election law, while the Los Angeles Times called upon the FEC to “issue tough new rules” against the 527s. The Boston Globe was even more acerbic, raging in April that the commission “has all but declared itself impotent to act during this election cycle.”

Thus chastened, the FEC last month held two days of hearings on the issue. But a curious thing happened. Instead of coming in for the kill, the GOP’s lawyers who were invited to testify refused to appear. Why did they pass up an opportunity to potentially cripple the Kerry campaign, an opportunity for which they had implored the commission for months? Because the FEC had decided that, as long as it was trying to figure out what kind of political activities were legal for 527s, it should also take a look at another category of organizations, known as “501(c)s.” Many well-known groups–from AARP to the Nature Conservancy–are set up under Section 501(c) of the tax code, and are also allowed to raise and spend donations for political purposes, including running television “issue ads” that mention candidates. And such 501(c)s as the National Rifle Association and the National Right to Life Committee are vital allies of the GOP; they raise money mostly from their members and use it to buy ads or direct mail supporting the position of one candidate (usually the Republican) or attacking the position of another (usually the Democrat) on issues important to the group. The GOP lawyers had an obvious interest in not wanting the FEC to do anything that might cripple these groups’ ability to help the party.

But they were also eager to protect a whole other category of 501(c)s–one that has garnered little attention from campaign finance reform groups or reporters covering the 2004 election. Like the Democratic 527s, these groups have innocuous-sounding names: Americans for Job Security, for example, and Progress for America. Like the 527s, these groups are staffed by veteran party operatives and, in practice, are wholly or primarily devoted to getting their side’s candidates elected. And like the 527s, they may raise and spend unlimited amounts of soft money on radio and television ads, direct mail, and voter contact efforts.

There are, however, a few key differences that make 501(c)s a far more insidious vehicle for soft money. The law does not require that they disclose how much they spend until well after Election Day. Worse, they don’t have to disclose who their donors are at all. Even foreign governments can in theory give money, with no questions asked. No one knows how much the Republican shadow party has raised or will spend this year. But the tens of millions they spent in 2002 were instrumental in putting the Senate back in GOP hands–and there’s every possibility they could help push Bush and the Republicans over the line come November.

One of the peculiarities of Washington’s influence industry is that large parts of it aren’t actually in Washington. If you wanted to learn what issues are important to, say, the American Academy of Physician Assistants or the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, you’d have to journey beyond the district line, and in particular to Alexandria, Va., a small suburb located a few miles down the Potomac. Not too long ago, Alexandria was a fading industrial center, its economy kept afloat by tourists and antique-hunters treading the quaint brick sidewalks of colonial-era Old Town. But beginning in the early 1990s, hundreds of trade associations–drawn by the cheap office space, city-subsidized financing, and easy access to Capitol Hill–began setting up shop here. So many trade associations have flocked here during the past decade, in fact, that they’ve become the city’s second biggest industry, producing almost as many jobs as the local tech businesses.

One of the recent arrivals is Americans for Job Security, located in a tidy brick building on the northern border of Alexandria’s new white-collar sprawl. “It’s so much cheaper out here than being downtown,” says AJS’s president, Michael Dubke, as he greets me at the front door and leads me into a nondescript conference room. Like many of its neighbors, AJS is organized as a 501(c)(6), which is to say a not-for-profit “business league” or trade organization. But as trade organizations go, it is rather unusual. Not only is the group’s membership–several hundred individuals, corporations, and other trade organizations–secret, but by all appearances, the members don’t share a particular line of business. Despite a budget of millions of dollars a year, AJS doesn’t have the kind of public relations or policy staff that, say, the Chamber of Commerce does. In fact, Dubke, a cheerful, clean-cut 33-year-old with the rangy build of an ex-jock, is AJS’s sole employee. The group has no Web site, puts out no policy briefs or press releases, and does no lobbying on the Hill.

About the only thing that AJS does is buy television, radio, and newspaper advertisements–lots of them. This is a source of pride for Dubke. “Ninety-five percent of the money that we take in membership [dues] is spent on our grassroots lobbying,” he tells me, like a discount carpet salesman bragging about his low overhead. “We spend our money on product.” During the hotly contested 2000 race, widely regarded asa watershed election for issue advertising, AJS spent about $9 million on political ads. A chunk of the money went towards attacking Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore for his prescription-drug plan, with ads airing in such key media markets as Spokane, Wash., and Tampa, Fla. (All told, according to a study by the Brennan Center, AJS was the most active outside group supporting Bush in 2000.) But AJS didn’t stick to the presidential race. It also spent millions of dollars on behalf of Republican candidates in closely-fought Senate races in Michigan, Nebraska, and Washington. During the midterm elections two years later, with Democratic control of the Senate at stake, AJS dumped another $7 million into advertising, again mostly in key races, notably Minnesota’s.

Traditional 501(c) groups run ads on a narrow set of issues important to their members. This year, for instance, the NRA might run ads attacking candidates who support extending the ban on assault weapons, while the Sierra Club might air spots against candidates who support drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. AJS, by contrast, is more catholic in its interests. During the last two election cycles, the group’s campaign ads have addressed taxes, education, tort reform, prescription drugs, immigration, dam removal in the Pacific Northwest, even federal regulation of drinking water–“basically anything we label a ‘pro-paycheck’ message,” Dubke remarks.

Much like a political party, AJS only seems to lurch into action at election time, even if one of its many core issues is being debated in Congress at some other time. Traditional Washington trade associations expend most of their resources trying to affect the legislative process, but Dubke sees this as a waste of time. “Our main purpose is to get these public policy issues out into the debate,” he told me. “I have yet to have somebody tell me when is a better time to talk about public policy issues” than during campaign season.

Aside from timing, about the only thing AJS’s ads have in common is that nearly all of them attack Democrats, usually those in tight races. And although groups running “issue ads” are not supposed to coordinate with candidates, in at least some cases AJS appeared to do just that. During 2000, for example, AJS launched a massive ad campaign in support of embattled incumbent Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Mich.). As Newsweek reported that year, funding for the ads came from the tech industry, which cut checks to AJS at the request of then-Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Abraham’s mentor. In 2002, the group ran ads in Alaska, where incumbent Republican Sen. Frank Murkowski was in a tight race with the state’s Democratic lieutenant governor. According to published reports at the time, AJS’s ads followed a conference with Murkowksi’s political consultant and used the same themes that Murkowski’s own campaign was employing.

By all appearances, AJS’s main purpose is rather like that of a Democratic-leaning 527. Just as the 527s collect soft money from traditionally pro-Democratic interests and spend it to help defeat Republicans, AJS collects soft money from traditionally pro-Republican interests and spends it to defeat Democrats–but without facing any of the scrutiny the 527s do. Indeed, that’s the whole idea. The Democratic shadow party has received massive press coverage during the past year, their donors demonized as shady fat cats by Bush surrogates in the conservative press. Contributors can give to the Republican
501(c)s, however, with no fear of being outed. Dubke allows that his donors include corporations, other trade associations, and individuals, but won’t disclose their names (though a few, including the American Insurance Association and the American Forest and Paper Association, have gone public with their involvement). It makes sense that corporations and trade groups that give to AJS might not want their names to get out. With business on Capitol Hill, and hence a need to court Democratic members of Congress, they don’t necessarily want to be seen contributing to a group that might be targeting some of those same Democrats. As Dubke puts it, “We have the ability to say things that other people might be afraid to say because they have other agendas and other interests.”

Another GOP soft-money conduit is Progress for America, a self-described “national grassroots organization” that listed zero income from membership dues on its last tax return. Like many such groups, it is run by a handful of operatives with a half-degree of separation from the GOP. Its founder is Tony Feather, the political director of President Bush’s 2000 campaign. Feather’s own consulting firm handles direct-mail and get-out-the-vote contracts for Bush’s reelection effort, the Republican National Committee, and the party’s congressional campaign committees. The former political director of one of those committees, Chris LaCivita, is now executive director of PFA. The group’s Web site used to describe its purpose as “supporting Pres. George Walker Bush’s agenda for America,” but that slogan, apparently too brazen to pass legal muster, has since been changed; now PFA supports “a conservative issue agenda that will benefit all Americans.” The group hopes to raise up to $60 million in soft money this year, and has enlisted the help of some prominent Republicans to do so, including Bush’s campaign manager, chief campaign counsel, and party chairman. Thus, when Bush’s lawyers accuse the Democrats of organizing a “soft-money conspiracy,” they know what they’re talking about.

Other GOP soft-money front groups include the American Taxpayer Alliance, run by Republican operative Scott Reed, and two groups chaired by former RNC lawyer Christopher Hellmich, Americans for Responsible Government and the National Committee for a Responsible Senate. Then there’s the benignly-named United Seniors Association (USA), which serves as a soft-money slush fund for a single GOP-friendly industry: pharmaceuticals. USA claims a nationwide network of more than one million activists, but, just like Progress for America, listed zero income from membership dues in its most recent available tax return. USA does, however, have plenty of money on its hands. During the 2002 elections, with an “unrestricted educational grant” from the drug industry burning a hole in its pocket, the group spent roughly $14 million–the lion’s share of its budget–on ads defending Republican members of Congress for their votes on a Medicare prescription-drug bill.

So how much will these groups spend on behalf of the GOP this year? There’s no way to know now, because, unlike 527s, these 501(c)s won’t have to disclose their 2004 fundraising activities until 2005 at the earliest. But it’s a pretty fair guess that they’ll give their Democratic doppelgnger a run for its (soft) money. According to an investigation by The Washington Monthly, just three of the pro-GOP groups–Americans for Job Security, the United Seniors Association, and the American Taxpayer Alliance–spent close to $40 million during 2002. And that was an off-year election. By contrast, the eight Democratic groups currently being sued by Bush’s reelection campaign have raised about $50 million so far during the 2004 presidential cycle.

To the average person, it might seem that if the Democratic 527s are a cynical mechanism for evading the ban on soft money, then surely the GOP-leaning 501(c)s are even more so. How, then, does the Republican shadow party get away with it? First, while the 527s admit that their ads are meant to affect elections, the 501(c)s do not. Instead, they insist that they’re running “issue ads” intended merely to rouse debate about specific issues, not get anyone elected or defeated. Legally, this is considered “grassroots lobbying,” an activity on which 501(c)s can spend unlimited amounts of money.

Now, the IRS code wisely allows 501(c)s to spend some of their money on ads meant to affect elections. Otherwise, traditional membership groups like the NAACP or Concerned Women for America wouldn’t be allowed to make their voices heard on a candidate’s position on, say, voting rights or gay marriage. So the second legal test is whether a group’s “primary purpose” is to affect elections. The Democratic 527s admit up front that electioneering is their primary purpose; indeed, that fact is built into the legal definition of a 527. But to merit 501(c) status, the GOP groups must–and do–insist that electioneering is not their primary purpose. Indeed, like most of the GOP shadow groups, AJS reports on its 2000 returns spending zero dollars on political activity.

This is a curious claim for a group like AJS to make, considering it spends 95 percent of its budget on campaign-season ads that mention candidates. Indeed, were you to compare almost any Democratic 527 spot to one run by the Republican 501(c), you would be hard pressed to explain why one is intended to influence an election and the other is not. Following the 2000 elections, University of Wisconsin political scientist Kenneth Goldstein surveyed the issue-ad campaigns run by dozens of outside groups. As part of the study, his student volunteers viewed a series of AJS spots and answered the question, “In your opinion, is the purpose of the ad to provide information about or urge action on a bill or issue, or is it to generate support or opposition for a particular candidate?” They found without exception that what they had seen fell into the second category. When I mentioned the study to Mike Dubke, he responded, “I think that’s ridiculous.”

So who should decide whether AJS’s ads are electioneering (and, hence, whether AJS’s primary purpose is or is not political)? Legally, it’s up to the Internal Revenue Service. But here, the GOP has yet another advantage. Because when it comes to checking up on nonprofits, the IRS makes the notoriously lax FEC look like a band of jackbooted thugs. Given that there are 1.4 million tax-exempt organizations in the United States, and enough personnel to inspect about 2,000 of them per year, the chance of a random audit is about one in 700. In practice, the IRS rarely investigates a nonprofit unless somebody files a complaint. And even then, privacy concerns constrain the IRS from revealing whether or not it has opened an investigation, and indeed whether or not it has come to any judgment.

But even if the taxmen did decide to take a closer look at AJS, it would still be in little danger of an unfavorable ruling. Since the IRS was never intended to police elections, the rules governing political activity by nonprofits are extraordinarily vague. In fact, there is no bright-line test for deciding whether an activity is political in nature or whether a 501(c) organization is “primarily” engaged in electioneering activities, and thus in violation of its tax status. Instead, IRS auditors judge organizations’ activities on more than a dozen criteria and decide whether or not all the “facts and circumstances” of those activities taken together “tend to show” a violation. In other words, the process is completely subjective.

Not surprisingly, this subjectivity makes the auditing process vulnerable to political pressure. And since taking control of Congress in 1995, the GOP has done its best to frighten the IRS away from snooping around. In 1998, Senate Republicans, hoping to galvanize the anti-tax vote for the upcoming elections, staged an elaborate series of hearings featuring horror stories of abusive behavior by IRS agents. A review by the General Accounting Office would later conclude that “no evidence was found of systematic abuses by agents.” But by then Congress had passed legislation that hamstrung the agency’s enforcement efforts. “IRS audit activity fell off dramatically across the board” after the hearings, notes Marcus Owens, a former director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. “While it has recovered somewhat for individuals and corporations, it has not recovered for tax-exempt organizations.”

When the IRS does try to step up to the plate, the agency usually gets smacked down. During the late-1990s, the IRS decided to revoke the tax exemption of a charity run by former Republican congressman Newt Gingrich, after finding that Gingrich had used it as a slush fund for his political action committee. But later, under pressure from a GOP member of Congress, the IRS reopened the case and restored the group’s tax exemption.

It may not be surprising that, with President Bush in the White House and Congress run by his fellow Republicans, the IRS isn’t going after the GOP’s shadow party. A greater mystery is why the press and campaign finance groups haven’t blown the whistle, even as they pound away at the Democrats’ 527s. One reason is that–as with most things–the GOP “won the early game to define the issue,” observes Simon Rosenberg of the New Democratic Network, a 527 which runs electioneering ads. “They convinced reporters that this was only about 527s.” Another reason is that reformers in Washington are often like the drunk who looks for his keys not where he thinks he dropped them, but under a streetlamp, where the light is better. Because 527s must disclose their donors and expenditures every quarter, it’s easier for political reporters and watchdog groups to blow the whistle on them in real time, issuing reports and press releases about the latest soft-money outrage. The 501(c)s disclose virtually nothing–and by the screwy rules of Washington, no data, no foul. “When it comes to 501(c)s, the information is so sparse that hardly anyone has ventured into this area,” says Craig Holman of Public Citizen, one of the few groups that tries to keep tabs on 501(c) political activity.

Holman suggests that a first step towards minimizing this abuse is to require 501(c)s to be at least as transparent as 527s: They should disclose their donors and electioneering expenses quarterly, and the IRS should make that information available on the Web. This disclosure solution probably makes more sense than what the FEC seemed to be contemplating in April: Banning all 501(c)s from using any soft money for any political purpose, a move that might have, for example, made it impossible for nonprofits to run non-partisan voter registration drives. Not surprisingly, the FEC has backed off that idea and now seems inclined to take no action against either 501(c)s or 527s, at least until after Election Day. That’s good news for the Kerry campaign, though the GOP’s campaign of harassment may well have scared off some liberal donors. But it’s great news for the Bush campaign, since it means that groups like AJS can continue to work their magic under the radar with far less oversight than Democratic 527s.

Should the Republican shadow party give Bush the extra artillery he needs to prevail against Kerry, the newspaper editorialists and good-government activists may someday regret the fact that they decried the Democratic shadow party while blithely ignoring the Republican version. Not because it may help get Bush reelected (what do they care?) but because it will drive the whole soft-money political economy deeper underground. Should Kerry lose, the Democratic operatives running 527s may conclude that there’s little value in declaring themselves openly as electioneering outfits. Instead, they’ll likely transmogrify their groups into 501(c)s. Nobody will be able to see how much money George Soros gave this quarter, or figure out who sponsored that $500,000 ad campaign in the St. Louis suburbs. Soft money won’t disappear. It will just become invisible.

The post Bush’s Secret Stash appeared first on Washington Monthly.

When those candidates didn’t quite catch fire, Gen. Wesley Clark entered the race, promptly earning the explicit or implicit backing of many leading Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, whose fundraising network helped Clark build up a substantial war chest in a matter of weeks. But Dean has kept racking up poll leads and fundraising totals, leaving Washington insiders wondering how he could resist the establishment’s onslaught. As one columnist for The Christian Science Monitor wrote in December, “Most establishment Democrats and liberals in the news media are waiting for someone–anyone–to dethrone former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as the party’s presidential front-runner.” Dean’s own campaign sees itself as locked in mortal combat with “a pretty strong establishment” as campaign manager Joe Trippi described it in a December appearance on “This Week.”

A week before Christmas, I decided to seek out the Democratic establishment, hoping to stride through its halls of power and behold its vastness firsthand. Catching a cab a few blocks from the White House, I made my way down K Street, passing by the trade associations and corporate offices that today rarely hire a lobbyist without approval from Republican leaders on the Hill. Veering onto Massachusetts Avenue, we drove by the gleaming wedge of glass and concrete that houses the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank spearheading President Bush’s effort to privatize Social Security, and circled around the Capitol, where Republicans control both chambers of Congress and Democrats have trouble lining up rooms to caucus in. We passed by the Heritage Foundation, numerous alumni of which now help set national policy in the Bush administration, turned right, and meandered over to Capitol Hill, a funky neighborhood perpetually on the verge of gentrification.

The driver let me off in front of a modest, four-story brick office building which houses, among other things, a temp agency, a dry cleaners, and the National Barley Growers Association. The security guard ignored me as I slipped into the elevator, rode to the top floor, and stepped out into the modest, pastel-colored reception area of the Democratic Leadership Council, which helped get the last Democratic president into office, and whose early and frequent criticisms of Dean have helped highlight his fight against the Washington establishment. I was led through a quiet warren of cubicles to the large, paper-strewn office of Bruce Reed, the DLC’s president, chief policy thinker, and resident wit. Reed is a cheerful, outgoing sort who usually appears younger than his 43 years. But today, an air of resignation lurks behind the smile.

When I ask him what the establishment is doing to stop Dean, Reed grimaces slightly, as if he’s just taken a sip of castor oil. “What are we doing to stop him?” asks Reed. “From our standpoint, this has always been up to the candidates themselves.” Reed and his colleagues at the DLC–often painted by liberals as a centrist Death Star, bulging with corporate money and insidious influence over party affairs–have published a few op-eds comparing Dean’s candidacy to George McGovern’s disastrous 1972 run. But that’s about it. Some DLC operatives are working with Lieberman, others with Edwards. The New Democratic Network, a DLC-descended PAC, hasn’t attacked Dean; instead, they’ve praised his use of the Internet to build a campaign organization. “Let’s back up to your central premise,” Reed continues, gazing wearily at a 7-inch-tall cup of Starbucks sitting before him on a conference table. “There is no establishment. We”–meaning Washington Democrats–“are a constellation of interest groups and ideologies and congressional voices. The evidence that there isn’t an establishment is just the mere fact that we have so many candidates–and such a collective inability to choose between them.”

Reed’s point is hard to dispute. Liberal Democrats are as divided as centrists; many went early for Kerry, the early “establishment” candidate who has lately flopped. Labor is split down the middle, with the old industrial unions backing Gephardt, a longtime ally, and the service unions edging towards Dean. Most congressional Democrats and members of the Democratic National Committee–who, as convention “superdelegates,” could conceivably swing behind and energize an anti-Dean candidate–are less interested in challenging the front-runner than in gauging the precise moment of his inevitability. “You have to realize, these people are all followers. Not leaders,” says one Democratic strategist. “They put their finger to the wind.” Democratic donors are also split. After Dean, no candidate has earned a sustained edge in campaign cash. Even the Clinton wing of the party, by some accounts the puppet masters behind the “stop Dean” movement, aren’t much more than an inchoate collection of pollsters, consultants, and former White House staffers divvied up among the rival campaigns of other candidates. “You could undoubtedly find an enormous number of people who would want to stop Dean,” one Democratic strategist told me in December. “But there’s nowhere to go with them. What are you going to do–spend the holidays convincing other candidates to drop out of the races?”

There is, to be sure, a group of Democrats in Washington who think of themselves as part of an establishment. They have helped raise money for and steer talent to different candidates for the party’s nomination. They have access to the press, to whom they have dispensed a litany of on-and-off-the-record doubts about Dean’s electability. They convene for anxious steak lunches at the Palm. But to call them an “establishment” is like calling the House of Lords a force in British legislative affairs. It is almost impossible to exaggerate how incoherent today’s Democratic establishment is, or how little power it has to accomplish anything of substance. Howard Dean has overcome many hurdles on his way to becoming the Democratic frontrunner. But the Democratic establishment is not exactly at the top of the list.

The absence of a true Democratic establishment is the central fact not only of the current presidential contest, but also of the last three years of Beltway politics. Washington Democrats are not wholly without political and strategic assets. But when you put it all together, there’s not much to look at.

Democrats not only lack control of the White House and either chamber of Congress, they don’t even have strong party institutions to fall back on. Not long after the 2000 elections, party chieftains installed fundraising Wunderkind Terry McAuliffe at the Democratic National Committee with a mandate to rebuild the party’s long-dilapidated political infrastructure. He’s succeeded about as well as anyone could, considering that after he became chairman, those same party chieftains successfully pushed through Congress a campaign finance reform which deprived the DNC of most of its income. These days, McAuliffe is reduced to bragging that his new small-donor program brings in enough money to cover the DNC’s operating expenses.

The Democrats also lack the kind of idea factories which, in the absence of controlling any branch of government, are vital to helping parties formulate policy and strategy. The Brookings Institution, supposedly the brain trust of left-leaning intellectuals, houses a number of former Clinton policy hands and publishes well-turned monographs on nuclear nonproliferation and pension reform. But it’s hardly a node in the Democratic resistance–until recently, it was run by a Republican. The foremost advocacy-oriented think tanks on the left–the Economic Policy Institute, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the DLC’s Progressive Policy Institute–together spend about as much in a year as does just one of the three prominent conservative policy shops, the American Enterprise Institute. Meanwhile, the pressures of Republican rule are beginning to undermine the Democrats’ relationship with such long-time allies as the AARP, which recently endorsed GOP-authored prescription-drug legislation, handing Bush a major legislative victory to tout during his reelection campaign. And while Beltway Republicans can count on the likes of the The Washington Times and the FOX News Channel to function as de facto party organs, the Democrats have no such relationship with the mainstream media. NPR has a liberal temperament but, to say the least, lacks a Rush Limbaugh-like taste for political warfare. And The Washington Post, once the liberal Beltway media’s high command, if anything now reflects a center-right perspective. The paper’s editorial page, having spent the Clinton years hyperventilating about Whitewater, opined that Enron’s White House contacts weren’t worth a congressional investigation and strongly supported the war in Iraq.

Washington Democrats have recognized their own disarray, and complain about it often. Yet they have continued to behave in many respects as a party in power, negotiating with Republican leaders on the Hill as if they, and not the GOP, govern the nation. “Democrats are inclined to legislate,” says Chris Jennings, who ran the health-care portfolio during the Clinton administration. “They always want to be the dealmaker.” Nowadays, however, instead of making a deal, the Democrats usually get rolled. Most recently, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) helped congressional Republicans craft their prescription-drug proposal on the understanding that it would not include provisions aimed at privatizing Medicare–provisions which nevertheless made their way into the final legislation, unveiled in December and now signed into law. “It’s not just that Ted Kennedy was the old liberal lion, but that he supposedly knew how to play the game,” says one union strategist, describing the shock many Washington Democrats felt at how the Medicare debate played out. “He’s been on the Hill for 40 years. How could he get conned like this?”

Even as out-of-power Democrats act like establishmentarians, the city’s ascendant GOP ruling class retain the instincts of revolutionaries. For three years, Democratic voters and activists across the country have watched the Republican Party assail, with seeming impunity, everything they hold dear. Aside from filibustering the GOP’s energy plan and blocking a handful of exceptionally reactionary judicial nominees, there are few success stories to which Democratic leaders can point. There’s no question that this experience has created a wellspring of anger against both congressional Republicans and President Bush. But the GOP’s romp has also elicited from the Democratic grassroots a deep contempt for the party’s Washington leadership. That frustration is the defining characteristic of the ongoing primary contest, dwarfing debates over policy, ideology, or electoral strategy. Dean and his movement have risen up to do battle against an establishment that doesn’t really exist–which is why he will almost certainly be the next Democratic nominee. “Dean’s people are motivated, they’re coherent and cohesive,” says one Democratic insider. “They’re giving him money hand over fist. And he can just knock over this Potemkin village.”

The Democratic establishment was once vigorous and powerful, encompassing not only Washington’s Hill barons, party officials, and a large labor movement, but also the heads of various state and city Democratic organizations, ranging from the courthouse cliques of the Solid South to Richard J. Daley’s Chicago machine. The old Democratic establishment was not necessarily democratic, and not always progressive. But by linking the local and state institutions that engaged average citizens to the Washington elites who crafted legislation, this establishment provided crucial capacities to the Democratic Party. It could hash out compromises on everything from labor law to presidential candidates (often in the proverbial smoke-filled room). In the days before television, it communicated the party’s message and organized rank-and-file voters. And for three decades, this establishment held together the disparate blocs–conservative Southerners, urban autocrats, blacks, union members, and northern liberals–that made the Democrats a majority party. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the Democrats won seven out of nine presidential elections and usually controlled both houses of Congress as well.

But the same forces that dismantled the old Democratic coalition during the next two decades also dismantled the old Democratic establishment. Conservative whites deserted the party over its support for civil rights and began to vote Republican. The labor movement began a slow decline in membership and influence. Civil-service laws whittled away at the power of the big-city machines. What prerogatives the Democratic establishment retained were slowly stripped away by liberal reformers within the party. During the late 1970s, a DNC-sponsored commission chaired by George McGovern eviscerated the establishment’s power over nominations, linking delegate selection to the outcome of primary elections rather than the fiat of state-level party bosses.

The reformers succeeded in breaking up the old system. But the effect was less to devolve power to the party’s grassroots than to shrink what had been a national Democratic establishment into a largely Washington-based one, which absorbed the reformers into its ranks. Power flowed away from the disintegrating state organizations and to a growing array of Washington-based pressure groups descended from the civil rights, feminist, consumer, and environmental movements. But these–the Children’s Defense Fund, Common Cause, and Public Citizen, among others–increasingly were Beltway-based organizations run by professional activists. They raised money from members but didn’t involve them much in day-to-day politics the way, say, neighborhood party organizations turned out voters in return for filling potholes. These groups influenced politics largely through endorsements, lobbying their allies on the Hill, direct mail, and media campaigns. (The exceptions were labor and the black urban machines which supplanted the white ethnic ones, both of which could still turn out voters the old-fashioned way.) Similarly, as advertising and free media began to supplant state parties and urban machines as the establishment’s conduit to voters, a burgeoning class of Washington-based pollsters, political consultants, and fundraisers came to the fore. The reign of the bosses gave way to the reign of the experts.

But although this post-1972 Democratic establishment owned a huge chunk of Washington real estate, it was not particularly well-organized. The younger members of congress and newly-assertive liberal activists coexisted uneasily with the remnants of the pre-reform establishment. By Ronald Reagan’s first inauguration, the DNC and other party organizations were metaphorically atrophied and, at times, literally bankrupt. For most of the 1980s, the Democrats had no clear leader and, after three successive presidential losses, no governing ideology to replace the old Cold War liberalism.

What gave the Democratic ruling class power was its permanence. Decades of Democratic dominance in Washington had bequeathed a wealth of experience and talent, people who knew the levers of power and how to work them. Many of Washington’s key trade associations, law firms, and lobby shops were run by operatives who had cut their teeth in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. (Among the last of them is Jack Valenti, the former Johnson aide and long-time head of the Motion Picture Association of America, who this year announced his decision to retire.) Control of the House and Senate helped the congressional wing of the party extract jobs and campaign contributions from Republican-leaning business interests, while giving Democratic-leaning interests a purchase on policymaking and at least some incentive to cooperate and compromise with one another. With a majority in the House, Democrats could control the committee staffs, which provided a research engine to develop and implement policy. The Speaker’s Office, especially under Rep. Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.), provided a message of the day around which other Democrats and their allies could align themselves. Indeed, to many Democrats–not to mention many Republicans–the permanence of Democratic rule on the Hill was an accepted fact of Washington life.

When it came to presidential primaries, the Washington-based Democratic establishment wasn’t as dominant as its earlier incarnation. Small groups of party officials could no longer handpick delegates and tell them whom to vote for. Insurgent or “entrepreneurial” candidates could in theory win the nomination simply by winning the affections of Democratic primary voters, as Jimmy Carter did in 1976. But thanks to the earlier campaign finance reforms, a candidate’s ability to raise money became the chief criteria for whether or not he or she could make a successful run for the nomination. During the early 1980s, party leaders reasserted their power by front-loading the primary schedule. That made it hard for later entrepreneurial candidates, such as Gary Hart, to raise money quickly enough to sustain a surge, and put a premium on the fundraising advantages that usually accrued to candidates blessed by the establishment, such as Walter Mondale. Day to day, the establishment could exert real power in Washington even when on the defensive. Not long after Reagan’s 1980 victory, for example, a group of party strategists began to meet biweekly with O’Neill’s general counsel, Kirk O’Donnell, to plot strategy. Seizing on Reagan’s proposal to cut the Social Security benefits of some retirees, the Democrats began to introduce legislation to put House conservatives on the wrong side of the issue. “It was drip, drip,” says Tony Coelho, the former California congressman who at the time ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “We created a voting record where the Republicans were voting wrong on Social Security and so forth. They were winning, but in ’82, we ran against them on a lot of the stuff we had forced them to vote on. We picked up 26 seats and then we kept going from there.”

Every scrap of power this establishment possessed in Washington, however, was contingent on Democratic control of Congress. The labor movement was not nearly as large or vigorous as it had once been. Left-leaning pressure groups derived most of their power not by mustering large, active memberships on the ground, but through their access to and tight alliance with Democrats on the Hill. And all along, the foundations of that majority were rotting away. Electorally, Democratic rule in the House and Senate rested on a large contingent of Southern conservatives whose constituents had been reliably voting for Republican presidential candidates for over a decade. Financially, congressional Democrats had, through the 1980s and early 1990s, become dependent on campaign cash from corporate special interests, who gave to them not out of ideological sympathy but in return for tax breaks, subsidies, and other giveaways that gave the party the appearance–and often the reality–of decadence and corruption. Some of that money went to build voter lists and send direct mail, but the Democrats never really created a permanent, enduring party infrastructure: a grassroots fundraising capacity and policy and message shops independent of the Hill.

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, the party looked healthy. Democrats commanded the White House, respectable majorities in the House and Senate, and control of 40 statehouses; Democratic governors represented eight-tenths of the U.S. population. Clinton annexed the DNC to the White House political shop, and directed its chairman, David Wilhelm, to focus all his efforts towards passing health-care reform. That move was understandable at the time. But instead of universal health care, the party got a legislative debacle that deprived the Democrats of a clear success on which to run. Combined with the House banking scandal fomented by Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and his allies, the passage of NAFTA (which depressed the labor vote), and Clinton’s 1993 tax hike (which motivated the GOP base), the result was decisive. In November 1994, the Democrats lost control of both Houses of Congress for the first time in four decades.

The conservatives who took over the House in 1995 were organized very differently from the Democrats they overthrew. They had built their movement largely without control of governmental institutions, in the shade of Democratic rule. During the 1970s, with the help of newly energized right-wing donors, conservative activists had begun to build a relatively small network of advocacy think tanks, media outlets, legal advocacy shops, and ideological pressure groups to counter both the Democratic establishment and what they viewed as a compliant, dissolute Republican establishment. During the 1980s, this “counter-establishment,” as journalist Sidney Blumenthal called it, challenged the GOP old guard for dominance in the White House and on the Hill. They built up a critique of liberalism and a system of institutions that, by combining policy, political, and media functions under one roof, could sustain their movement in the wilderness.

Far from demoralizing the conservative counter-establishment, Clinton’s 1992 victory caused it to gel. Grover Norquist’s famed Wednesday Group began meeting not long after Election Day, coordinating key conservative interest groups, Hill staffers, and media. Think tanks like AEI and Cato expanded to absorb the exodus of policymakers from the Bush administration, keeping conservative talent within the Beltway. While right-wing media outlets attacked Clinton’s character, conservative backbenchers brought together social conservatives and business lobbyists–uneasy partners in the GOP coalition through the 1980s–to leach support from his policy agenda and lay the groundwork for a counter-attack. When the GOP took over Congress in 1995, the counter-establishment fused with the Republicans’ congressional wing to become, in effect, Washington’s new ruling class.

But although the Democratic establishment was effectively dead, its members were slow to pick up on the fact. Gingrich’s implosion in 1995, followed by modest Democratic pickups during the next few election cycles, lulled House Democrats–and the interest groups which radiated outward from them–into believing that they could retake the Hill without the kind of spade work that the conservatives had invested. Most importantly, the Clinton White House lent the rump Democratic establishment some of the capacity they had with Congress. Although he had been in many respects a Beltway outsider, Clinton’s popularity, political acumen, and fundraising prowess lent Washington Democrats the appearance of vitality, even as their brethren at the state and local level continued to lose ground and the soft-money scandals of the mid-1990s decimated what remained of the party’s infrastructure. Control of the executive branch provided thousands of jobs to Democratic policy experts, while the White House itself acted as a centripetal force on the party’s congressional caucus and disparate interest groups. The president himself represented “a single voice that could define the debate” and drag the rest of the party establishment along behind him,” noted Bruce Reed, while the White House provided “a table to sit around” to resolve disagreements and formulate strategy.

All of that was lost in 2001, when George W. Bush entered office. Without institutional support, the Democratic establishment fractured into its constituent parts, none of them dominant in terms of money, message, or ideology. Unlike conservatives, the Democrats hadn’t built up a farm team of ideological institutions to absorb the governing experience and political talent streaming out of the White House. As Kenneth Baer, a Democratic consultant and former White House speechwriter, lamented in Slate a month after Bush’s inauguration, “One way to explain the party’s post-election drift is that the people who best understand the intersection of policy and politics–those most able to craft a Democratic response to Bush–are scattered to the wind.”

Responsibility for crafting a Democratic strategy and message defaulted to the minority leaders in the House and Senate, Gephardt and Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). But although they had some early successes–notably, capitalizing on White House arrogance to convince Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) to abandon his party, giving Democrats control of the Senate–Daschle and Gephardt couldn’t create an effective opposition. One problem was that the Democrats still didn’t understand how tenuous their hold on power really was. When the Enron scandal boiled over in early 2002, for instance, Joe Lieberman–at the time chairman of the Senate Government Affairs Committee–argued that the Democrats shouldn’t “rush to judgment” and waited five months to subpoena the White House regarding administration officials’ contacts with Enron executives, by which point public interest in the firm’s bankruptcy had waned. Democrats also lacked the P.R. capabilities that conservatives had built up during their years out of power. When conservative activists and media outlets began to attack Daschle as “an obstructionist” for blocking Republican energy legislation–one group, the Family Research Council, ran ads comparing him to Saddam Hussein–the Democrats had no war room equipped to bombard newspapers with letters to the editor, demanding an apology. Nor could Democrats muster an army of chat-show surrogates who would aggressively parrot the party line on tax cuts.

Part of the problem, of course, was that there was no party line–on tax cuts, or anything else. Without an apparatus to build consensus around effective message, strategy, or policy, the Democrats spent the first two years of the Bush administration, in the midst of a recession, without an economic plan. As the GOP aggressively pushed massive a series of long-term tax cuts mostly benefiting the wealthy, the Democrats split, with liberals preaching total opposition, moderates favoring modest tax cuts for the middle class, and a few conservatives jumping ship to support Bush’s plan. The plan which in retrospect made the most tactical and substance sense–massive, short-term cuts for the middle class, financed by payroll-tax reductions–was promoted by some party leaders, including former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich. But without a mechanism for dragging other Democrats on board, the party was left without a national economic message to campaign on. They decided to talk a lot about a Democratic prescription-drug plan instead–and found out, too late, that voters couldn’t tell their proposal apart from the Republicans’.

Without strong party institutions, the Democrats became even more dependent on the resources of their special interests–and even less willing to break with those interests even when doing so would have been politically prudent. There is no better example than the 2002 debate over creating a new department for homeland security. Democrats came up with the idea, while Republicans spent five months resisting it. But when Bush decided to support it–with provisions that would have given him authority to hire and fire employees of the new agency and dissolve their collective bargaining agreements–Senate Democrats blocked the bill out of deference to public-employee unions. On the campaign trail that fall, Bush successfully painted Democratic candidates like Vietnam veteran Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.) as soft on terrorism, arguably costing Democrats control of the Senate.

It took another year for Democrats to begin sorting through the lessons of that defeat. And only when the failures of Bush’s Iraq policy–misleading statements in the State of the Union, failure to find weapons of mass destruction, and chaos on the ground–became evident did establishment Democrats, including those running for president, find their voices and begin aggressively criticizing the president. But by then, it was too late. Dean had gotten there first.

Since last winter, the 2004 primary campaign has been, for all intents and purposes, a referendum on the Washington establishment, held by the party’s grassroots. Rank-and-file Democrats love Dean not so much because he’s “taken on” a powerful Washington establishment, but because he has tapped voters’ fury and dismay that the establishment seems so powerless–even with half the popular vote behind it. It’s because the establishment is pathetic, not powerful, that these people support Dean.

This grassroots fury against the “Washington Democrats”–as Dean likes to call them–is the only factor that clearly explains his extraordinary ascent and the striking inability of any other candidates to catch fire. Certainly it’s got little to do with his stance on individual issues. Yes, Dean came out against the war resolution that other establishment candidates voted for. But Wesley Clark also opposed the resolution. And while Clark has been derided for supposedly flip-flopping on how he would have voted on the war resolution, Dean himself has split hairs. He supported an alternative resolution, sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), that was only slightly less of a blank check than the one that actually passed. In most other respects, Dean’s views are hardly different from his establishment rivals. He’s more traditionally liberal on tax cuts (he’d repeal all of them, where Lieberman and Edwards would keep the middle-class cuts), but of the five major candidates, his health-care proposal is the least radical. His ideas to expand federal aid for child care and higher education are, as Ryan Lizza pointed out in The New Republic recently, rather Clintonesque. Despite efforts by centrist intellectuals and some journalists to limn his candidacy as a liberal-versus-center battle, issue by issue, it doesn’t add up. If voters had wanted a left-liberal candidate, Dennis Kucinich or Al Sharpton would be leading the polls. Dean’s supporters are not stupid. They know that in Dean, they are getting a flinty, balanced-budget governor who opposes gun control and favors welfare reform. But that’s not the source of their admiration. Dean’s supporters love him because, unlike everyone else in those endless debates, he’s not tainted by association with the hapless Washington establishment.

But the Democrats’ grassroots aren’t the only ones who find the establishment lacking. Increasingly, the establishment finds itself lacking, too. The Medicare debacle, in some ways the party’s signal defeat of the last three years, seems to have made a particular impact. “It illustrated to them that it was possible to bypass the Democratic Party on legislation, even on an issue that they believed they were the ultimate arbiter of,” says Chris Jennings. Whereas Senate Democrats were afraid to oppose flat-out any bill that offered hundreds of billions in benefits to seniors, top Democrats in the House took a close look and decided to dig in their heels. The lock-step Republican majority passed the bill anyway, but many observers noted that, under pressure from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, only 16 Democrats voted for the bill–drawing a clear line in the sand on a piece of legislation which now faces growing criticism from those it was supposed to benefit.

There are also the first hints that Washington’s Democrats have learned a thing or two from the conservative insurgents who displaced them. In early December, I sat down with John Podesta, who was the last chief of staff to serve under Clinton, in the sparsely-furnished corner office of his new think tank, the Center for American Progress. “Good riddance,” he replied when asked about the decline of the Democratic establishment. “It wasn’t really working.” Podesta is one of a small but growing group of Washington Democrats who have begun to recognize not only the depth of their disarray, but also of how badly equipped the party is to change. And they’ve taken the first steps towards building the kind of institutions that sustained conservatives during the 1970s and 1980s. Podesta, like the men who founded the key advocacy think-tanks on the right, is a political operative, not an academic. (He holds a law degree, but no Ph.D.–a credential required for permanent employment at a place like Brookings.) Instead of monographs, his think tank produces op-ed-style policy briefs and the “Progress Report,” a trenchant, opinionated roundup of Republican legislation and policies produced daily by the communications staff. Meanwhile, a new wave of the so-called 527 organizations–each a coalition of Democratic-leaning interest groups, including labor–have sopped up the funds that used to fill the DNC’s soft-money accounts. And instead of blowing it all on television ads, as the party did for so many years, most of the 527s have funneled the cash into massive, well-coordinated turnout and voter contact operations in preparation for the 2004 elections.

Increasingly, Washington Democrats have begun to understand what Dean’s candidacy can offer them. For the last two decades, the establishment has tried to organize voters indirectly, through pollsters, pundits, and consultants rather than directly, through “people who connected with voters, who could control different power structures across the country,” says one labor strategist. Unlike the old machines, Dean’s burgeoning organization is fundamentally decentralized and democratic. (One popular Deaniac slogan: “Dean is the messenger. We are the message.”) But by collaborating with a far-flung network of pro-Dean blogs and Web sites, while using such tools as Meetup.com to bring activists together on local college campuses and in neighborhood bars, Dean’s campaign involves his supporters at the granular level, rather as Daley’s aldermen and ward heelers did. “We didn’t keep building the infrastructure of the party,” notes Coelho, who many in the party still hold responsible for the Democrats flat-footedness leading up to the 1994 elections. “It’s time to permit the system to move on. [Dean’s people] are creating a new group that will take over at some point, and I think that when they do, our party will be stronger than in the past.”

But even as Dean continues to occasionally bash Washington Democrats in public, his top staff–including his campaign co-chairman, Steve Grossman, a former DNC head–have spent the last few months quietly reaching out to them. And for good reason: Should Dean win both the nomination and, next fall, the presidency, he will face a massive, motivated, well-funded Republican establishment that will work every day to defeat his agenda, no matter how liberal or centrist it is. As disorganized as they are, Beltway Democrats still constitute a valuable reservoir of talent, experience, and money. Without a rebuilt, robust Democratic counter-establishment, Dean will be a monumental failure as president. Howard Dean needs the Washington Democrats, in other words, as much as they need him.

The post The Myth of the Democratic Establishment appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Within a few months, of course, Glassman was forced to eat a certain amount of crow. The market peaked, then plunged 3,000 points over the course of two years, before struggling back to slightly below where it was when Dow 36,000 was published. Meanwhile, the dot.com bubble burst, burying thousands of Web ventures and billions of investor dollars. Many of Glassman’s peers were ruined. (Conservative high-tech guru George Gilder, for instance, lost over 90 percent of the subscribers to his newsletter and still has a lien on his house.)

But Glassman not only survived the crash–he also thrived. He was soon back on The Washington Post‘s business page dispensing stock picks and earning sizable fees on the lecture circuit. Last year, he even published another investment tome, this one titled The Secret Code of the Superior Investor: How to Be a Long-Term Winner in a Short-Term World. Most surprisingly of all, Tech Central Station is one of the few Internet magazines to grow into middle age. Today, the hybrid venture enjoys a monthly readership approaching that of Web sites for more established public affairs journals. It has around 100 columnists and semi-regular contributors, and runs smartly-written think pieces by the likes of Newt Gingrich, James Pinkerton, and Michael Fumento.

Glassman’s triumph owes, in part, to his quick mind, deft prose style, and telegenic presence. But the real secret of his success is that the market Glassman writes about is very different from the one in which he thrives: the burgeoning world of Washington influence-peddling. As a writer and public figure, Glassman has, over time, aligned his views with those of the business interests that dominate K Street and support the Republican Party; he has also increasingly taken aggressive positions on one side or another of intra-industry debates, rather like a corporate lobbyist. Nowhere is this more apparent than on TCS, where Glassman and his colleagues have weighed in on everything from which telecommunications technologies should be the most heavily regulated to whether Microsoft is a threat to other software companies.

But TCS doesn’t just act like a lobbying shop. It’s actually published by one–the DCI Group, a prominent Washington “public affairs” firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called “Astroturf” organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street. As it happens, many of DCI’s clients are also “sponsors” of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors’ banner ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms’ policy positions, on TCS and elsewhere.

James Glassman and TCS have given birth to something quite new in Washington: journo-lobbying. It’s an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups. But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also proven the hardest for K Street to influence–until now.

Glassman has always had a knack for seeing opportunities before others do. After graduating from Harvard in 1969, he and his wife moved to New Orleans and launched Figaro, an early harbinger of the urban alternative weeklies that would proliferate in the coming decades. After selling the paper in 1978, he moved to Washington and up the media food chain, with stints as an editor or publishing executive first at Washingtonian and The New Republic, then at Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News & World Report. In the mid-1980s, he also began to pen an occasional column on business for TNR and other publications. Most business writing of the time was dull and technical, but Glassman’s articles had charm and flavor. They ranged from a satirical look at corporate tax evasion (titled “How to Beat the I.R.S.: With llamas, Scottish stamps, and rent-a-cows”) to a lacerating profile of Lee Iacocca, the former Chrysler executive (“Something about Lee Iacocca,” he wrote, “inspires exaggeration”).

His next business success was with Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper bought by Arthur Levitt in 1986, when it was little more than a sleepy newsletter with four employees and an unpaid circulation of 5,000. Hired as the paper’s editor, Glassman quickly amassed a group of energetic young reporters and pushed them to cover the Hill less like a legislative sausage factory and more like a community. Several former staffers describe him as a laid-back boss who strolled the offices with a golf putter and threw raucous election night parties at his house on Capitol Hill. “He was a great story editor, and a spectacular editorial writer,” says Levitt. “His mission, when he signed on, was to create a paper which screams, ‘Read me.’ And he did that.”

Just as importantly, Glassman–with his wife, Mary, who served as publisher– figured out how to make Roll Call a financial success. Through the 1980s, Washington’s lobbying industry had grown massively, as businesses rushed to extract favors from a sympathetic Reagan administration. Glassman convinced individual corporations and trade associations to supplement their handshake lobbying with advertisements in the pages of Roll Call, promoting or attacking pending legislation. “It was a singular business insight,” says Glenn Simpson, an early Glassman hire who now writes for The Wall Street Journal. “You have a captive audience of 535 of the most powerful people in the world and their 10,000 staff members who all read you closely, and then you have all these people who want to influence those people.” Within a year, circulation more than doubled and Roll Call‘s ad pages increased sevenfold. Levitt eventually awarded Glassman equity in the paper, which by all accounts made him a wealthy man when he sold it in 1993.

As he became more successful, the onetime student radical and McGovernik also moved right. In 1995, by then a business columnist for The Washington Post, Glassman began moonlighting for the op-ed page; there, during the height of Gingrichism, he assailed federal student loans, defended high C.E.O. pay, and agitated for the flat tax. Articulate and irreverent, Glassman was also a hit on Washington chat shows. In the fall of 1996, he was named a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a leading conservative think tank and a kind of government-in-exile for Republican officials from the first Bush administration. But though he had become increasingly conservative, Glassman was more Jack Kemp than Robert Bork; as a pundit, he usually favored the shiv over the cudgel. During fierce congressional debate over the National Endowment of the Arts, for instance, many conservatives appeared to consider the likes of “Piss Christ” a portent of American decline. Glassman’s objection to the NEA was more practical: Based on the available evidence, he noted, “Government money makes bad art.”

Like most pundits, of course, his predictions were not always borne out by events. In a column shortly before the 1996 election, for instance, he wrote that the stock market might “nose dive” if Bill Clinton were re-elected president. Nor was Glassman always consistent. In a 1994 column, he attacked those of his colleagues “who give speeches to trade associations and corporations and get paid $2,000 or $5,000 or even $30,000 a pop” and confessed to giving up his own then-modest lecture schedule because he felt “uneasy” about the potential conflicts. Later, his conscience balmed, Glassman would rejoin the speakers’ circuit, commanding up to $15,000 a pop.

Glassman was extraordinarily prolific–and increasingly influential. By the late 1990s, his financial column in the Post was nationally syndicated; he was a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal and other publications; and he hosted two different television programs, “TechnoPolitics” on PBS and the Sunday show “Capital Gang” on CNN. And as the stock market continued to climb, he found his next niche: tribune of the New Economy. Until then, Glassman’s financial advice was invariably prudent and middle-of-the-road; like most sensible investment columnists, he told his readers to avoid day-trading, to buy and hold for the long-term, and to diversify their holdings. But in 1998, in the Journal, Glassman and Hassett published the first of several op-eds arguing against the notion that stocks might be overvalued. “We are not so foolish as to predict the short-term course of stocks,” they wrote as the Dow was approaching 9,000, but “[w]orries about overvaluationare based on a serious and widespread misunderstanding of the returns and risks associated with equities.” A year later, with the Dow breaking five figures and a book advance in their pockets, the two were somewhat less circumspect, predicting in a follow-up column that the Dow would hit 36,000–“tomorrow, not 10 or 20 years from now.”

When Dow 36,000 was finally published in book form, a number of reviewers took exception to the book’s thesis on stock valuation. The Journal‘s concluded that Dow 36,000, while well-argued, was “dangerous” to investors; Jeremy Siegel, a University of Pennsylvania economist on whose work Glassman and Hassett had based part of their argument, at one point complained that they had misinterpreted his data and drawn erroneous conclusions. But Glassman had become a prophet. By October 2000, with the Dow sinking, reported the New York Observer, Glassman was making over 100 speeches a year promoting his vision. “We are on the verge of a tremendous wealth explosion, the likes of which has never been seen,” he told one group of New York investors.

Some months before the publication of Dow 36,000, Glassman’s PBS show was cancelled, and he began to look around for a new gig. With his longtime friend Charles Francis, a prominent Republican lobbyist and public relations maestro, Glassman began approaching funders with a new pitch. Taking a nod from “TechnoPolitics,” he envisioned an entity that would cover “the nexus between science and technology on the one hand and public policy on the other,” as he later described it to me, with assorted “sponsors” and himself as the site’s “host.” Tech Central Station was launched in early 2000, with a smattering of content and one sponsor, AT&T. But Glassman had bigger plans. As he explained during a speech in Los Angeles not long after the launch, “We concentrate on such issues as Internet taxation, broad-band dissemination, privacy, biotechnology, high tech trade, and so on,” serving as “a kind of watchdog in an area in which few people seem to be doing long-term principled thinking on public policy.” Glassman exulted, “I think in a sense we kind of invented a new sort of institution.”

But what sort of institution, exactly? At first glance, TCS does resemble a think tank-cum-opinion magazine–indeed, a successful one. Each day, the site publishes a new batch of brisk, topical articles. In style and substance, TCS’s content is an intellectual descendent of the rapid-response policy briefs pioneered by conservative think tanks during the 1980s, and as influential: The site’s articles and contributors have been cited hundreds of times in the mainstream media and reprinted on op-ed pages across the country. TCS brings all of this off with a relatively small staff, drawing on the brainpower of established think tanks rather than housing and paying its own fellows and scholars, and publishing their arguments in its own “magazine” rather than hawking sound-bites to print reporters and columnists. “We can get the word out much more quickly [than a traditional think tank],” says Glassman, “and it’s a lot less expensive not having a lot of bricks and mortar.”

If TCS combines all the strengths of a modern advocacy think tank with the reach and accessibility of a successful political magazine, it has succeeded largely by rejecting the conventions that traditionally govern journalism and policy scholarship. Most think tanks are organized under the 501(c)(3) section of the tax code and must disclose many details of how they are financed, being–at least in theory–expected to justify their non-profit status with work in the public interest. Even think tanks of an acknowledged ideological bent seek to insulate the work of their scholars and fellows from the specific policy priorities of the businesses or foundations that provide their funding. Likewise, traditional newspapers and magazines, whether for-profit or not, keep a wall between their editorial and business sides; even at magazines of opinion, the political views of writers are presumed to be offered in good faith, uninfluenced by advertisers.

Unlike traditional think tanks, Tech Central Station is organized as a limited liability corporation–that is, a for-profit business. As an LLC, there is little Tech Central Station must publicly disclose about itself save for the names and addresses of its owners, and there is no presumption, legal or otherwise, that it exists to serve the public interest. Likewise, rather than advertisers per se, TCS has what it calls “sponsors,” which are thanked prominently in a section one click away from the front page of the site. (AT&T, ExxonMobil, and Microsoft were early supporters; General Motors, Intel, McDonalds, NASDAQ, National Semiconductor, and Qualcomm, as well as the drug industry trade association, PhRMA, joined during the past year.) Each firm pays a sponsorship fee–although neither Glassman nor any of the sponsors would disclose how much–and gets banner advertisements on the site. When I contacted a few of the sponsors, each described their relationship to TCS in a slightly different way. An Intel spokeswoman said that TCS was “a consultant” to the computer-chip maker. AT&T’s representative said her firm was “a funder.” A Microsoft representative explained that the company “is constantly looking for ways to educate on some of the critical and important issues in the technology sector.”

On closer inspection, Tech Central Station looks less like a think-tank-cum-magazine than a kind of lobbying practice. Which makes sense: Four of the five co-owners of TCS are also the co-owners of the DCI Group, the Washington public affairs firm founded by Republican operative Thomas J. Synhorst. TCS’s fifth owner is Charles Francis, who is also a senior lobbyist at DCI and is listed on TCS’s phone directory. And as it happens, three of TCS’s sponsors–AT&T, General Motors, and PhRMA–have also retained DCI for their lobbying needs. (Both DCI’s spokeswoman and TCS’s chief executive officer declined to be interviewed for this article. However, after I requested comment, the Web site was changed. Where it formerly stated that “Tech Central Station is published by Tech Central Station, L.L.C.,” it now reads “Tech Central Station is published by DCI Group, L.L.C.”)

Like its publishing arm, DCI’s business is to influence elite opinion in Washington. But instead of publishing articles, DCI specializes in what’s known as “corporate-financed grass-roots organizing,” such as setting up front groups to agitate for a client’s position, placing letters to the editor with key newspapers, and using phone banks to generate calls to politicians. TCS, for its part, includes a disclaimer on its site noting that “the opinions expressed on these pages are solely those of the writers and not necessarily those of any corporation or other organization.” But it is startling how often the opinions of TCS’s writers and sponsors converge.

Last July, for instance, PhRMA retained DCI to lobby against House legislation that would permit the reimportation of FDA-approved drugs from Canada and elsewhere. The same month, TCS put out a press release announcing that it planned to cover an upcoming bus trip taken by Canadian patients to “access prescription drugs and medical treatment” in the U.S. (The trip was sponsored in part by the Canadian subsidiaries of many of the same pharmaceutical companies that belong to PhRMA.) A few days after the press release was issued, TCS columnist Duane Freese published an article touting the bus trip and attacking the legislation; other contributors also wrote columns for the site attacking reimportation.

The articles on Tech Central Station address a broad range of issues, some of concern to its sponsors, many not. And most of the site’s authors are no doubt merely voicing opinions they have already reached. But time and time again, TCS’s coverage of particular issues has had the appearance of a well-aimed P.R. blitz. After ExxonMobil became a sponsor, for instance, the site published a flurry of content attacking both the Kyoto accord to limit greenhouse gasses and the science of global warming–which happen to be among Exxon-Mobil’s chief policy concerns in Washington.

TCS’s articles have also complemented work being done by DCI. During 2000, Microsoft contracted with DCI to perform various services, among them generating “grassroots” letters opposing a breakup of Microsoft and launching Americans for Technology Leadership, an anti-breakup group funded in part by Microsoft and run out of DCI’s office. Meanwhile, down the hall, Tech Central Station went on the offensive, inaugurating an “anti-trust” section that over the coming months would publish little except defenses of Microsoft and attacks on the software maker’s corporate and governmental antagonists, with occasional detours into the subject of lawsuit reform. (Microsoft smartly plugged some of the articles on its own Web site.)

But the greatest asset Glassman offers his site’s sponsors is himself. “He’s conversant in many different topics,” says an admiring former employee, “and he also knows how to talk like an expert on something even if he doesn’t know anything about it.” (For the record, AEI lists Glassman’s research interests as “Social Security, economics, technology, politics, federal budget, interest rates, stock market, taxes, and education.”) Glassman is not a registered lobbyist. But with his credentials as an AEI fellow and Post columnist, his knack for colorful writing, and his easy access to chat shows and op-ed pages across the country, he is an effective advocate for whatever side he chooses to take. And since becoming the “host” of TCS, he has often taken the side of the site’s sponsors.

Until 2000, for instance, Glassman had written about the government’s case against Microsoft on precisely one occasion. (He opposed it.) After Microsoft became a sponsor of TCS, he inveighed against the suit in nearly two dozen columns for the site. He also penned op-eds for another dozen or so publications and appeared on TV to attack a Microsoft breakup in vivid, even strident terms. (On “Crossfire” Glassman argued that one court decision in the suit placed “in jeopardy not just high technology, but, I think, the entire U.S. economy that’s been booming.”) When it came to the subject of climate change, on which he had seldom remarked before TCS was launched, Glassman became equally prolific, attacking Kyoto or the science of climate change in 40 columns for the site, many of them syndicated elsewhere. Meanwhile, he also took to the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal, the St. Louis Dispatch, and The Washington Times to trash Kyoto; in none of them did he disclose TCS’s connection to ExxonMobil.

All of these positions are, in theory, perfectly compatible with Glassman’s generally libertarian, anti-regulatory politics. But in at least one area–telecommunications–the only discernable consistency to Glassman’s opinions is the degree to which they track those of AT&T, the original sponsor of TCS. During 2001, in a string of columns and in an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Glassman criticized legislation that would have relaxed the requirement that regional Bells rent their phone lines to other companies, including AT&T, seeking to offer local services to the Bells’ customers. Identifying himself as a journalist, think tank fellow, and host of TCS–but not disclosing the Web site’s sponsorship by AT&T–Glassman told Congress that the bill, known as Tauzin-Dingell, would “kill” the Bells’ competitors. Though this was perhaps the only area of policy in which he favored more government regulation, and though his position was similar to that of congressional Democrats and liberal public interest groups, Glassman argued his was actually the true expression of free market principles. “I have devoted much of my professional career to advocating deregulatory, free-market solutions to economic and social problems,” he insisted. “I know deregulation when I see it, and the Tauzin-Dingell bill is not deregulation.”

As it happens, however, AT&T was not merely an aspiring provider of local phone services. At the time, it was the largest owner of cable systems in the United States. During 1999, America Online, the Internet service provider, lobbied aggressively for legislation to force cable companies like AT&T to offer its services on their cable systems at government-mandated rates. But when Glassman later wrote about this issue, he took a very different view of government’s requiring companies to open up their expensive hardware to competitors–although he again presented his position as a defense of high principle. “Common sense tells you that government has no business dictating the terms under which you rent your property to other people,” he wrote on TCS. “But somehow, thanks to an aggressive lobbying campaignmany reporters took seriously the idea that cable companies could be forced to rent out their property at prices set by government.” The real principle, it would appear, is that government has no business forcing companies to share their wires with competitors–unless the competitor happens to sponsor a web site one hosts.

During my brief phone interview with Glassman–he declined a follow-up–I asked him whether or not TCS published opinions that contradicted the policy views, of, say, AT&T. “Frankly, we think that other points of view are well represented everywhere else,” he responded cheerfully. “To have one point of view on an issue like telecom is something that we don’t have a problem with.” He added, “We’re an advocacy group. There’s no doubt about that. I don’t think we ever had pretenses of being an academic think tank.”

Government decision-makers are subject to a cacophony of opinions–from paid lobbyists, think-tank scholars, academics, newspaper editorials, consumer groups, and letters from ordinary citizens. And in the past decade, corporate lobbying has evolved to influence–and, where possible, control–the arguments emanating from each of these sources. It’s why corporations have put so much money into think tanks, issue advertisements, and consulting arrangements with economists and other academics. It’s how firms like DCI have flourished by orchestrating pseudo-grassroots movements to simulate or amplify constituent opinion on behalf of corporate clients.

After all, it’s only human nature to put more trust in the arguments of seemingly independent observers than those of paid agents of an interested party. And that’s why a journalist willing to launder the arguments of corporations and trade groups would be so valuable. A given argument, coming from such a journalist, would have more impact than precisely the same case articulated by a corporate lobbyist.

Glassman certainly has impact. Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission considered whether regional Bell companies should continue to fully share their wires with competitors like AT&T–the position Democrats favored. The tiebreaking vote was cast by a conservative Bush appointee, Kevin Martin. Martin sided with his Democratic colleagues, a surprising position, but one made easier, say observers, by the fact that a few prominent conservative pundits, chief among them Glassman, had taken AT&T’s side in the argument. “Glassman’s clueless,” opines an economist who specializes in telecom and supports relaxed regulations on both cable and phone systems. “But he gives good cover.”

As he has so many times in his career, James Glassman has recognized a new and largely untapped opportunity for his journalistic talents. If his past is any guide, two things are likely to happen. Other journalists and pundits will follow suit, touching off a growth market in Washington journo-lobbying–and then that market will crash.

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And Santorum’s Tuesday meetings are a crucial part of that effort. Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum’s responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican–a senator’s chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. “The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that that was the purpose of what we were doing,” says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. “It’s been a very successful effort.”

If today’s GOP leaders put as much energy into shaping K Street as their predecessors did into selecting judges and executive-branch nominees, it’s because lobbying jobs have become the foundation of a powerful new force in Washington politics: a Republican political machine. Like the urban Democratic machines of yore, this one is built upon patronage, contracts, and one-party rule. But unlike legendary Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, who rewarded party functionaries with jobs in the municipal bureaucracy, the GOP is building its machine outside government, among Washington’s thousands of trade associations and corporate offices, their tens of thousands of employees, and the hundreds of millions of dollars in political money at their disposal.

At first blush, K Street might not seem like the best place to build a well-oiled political operation. For most of its existence, after all, the influence industry has usually been the primary obstacle to aggressive, ambitious policy-making in Washington. But over the last few years, Republicans have brought about a revolutionary change: They’ve begun to capture and, consequently, discipline K Street. Through efforts like Santorum’s–and a House version run by the majority whip, Roy Blunt (R-Mo.)–K Street is becoming solidly Republican. The corporate lobbyists who once ran the show, loyal only to the parochial interests of their employer, are being replaced by party activists who are loyal first and foremost to the GOP. Through them, Republican leaders can now marshal armies of lobbyists, lawyers, and public relations experts–not to mention enormous amounts of money–to meet the party’s goals. Ten years ago, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the political donations of 19 key industry sectors–including accounting, pharmaceuticals, defense, and commercial banks–were split about evenly between the parties. Today, the GOP holds a two-to-one advantage in corporate cash.

That shift in large part explains conservatives’ extraordinary legislative record over the last few years. Democrats, along with the press, have watched in mounting disbelief as President Bush, lacking either broad majorities in Congress or a strong mandate from voters, has enacted startlingly bold domestic policies–from two major tax cuts for the rich, to a rollback of workplace safety and environmental standards, to media ownership rules that favor large conglomerates. The secret to Bush’s surprising legislative success is the GOP’s increasing control of Beltway influence-peddlers. K Street used to be a barrier to sweeping change in Washington. The GOP has turned it into a weapon.

To see how effective this machine can be, one need only compare the Bush administration’s current push to reform Medicare with Bill Clinton’s 1993 attempt to pass universal health insurance. Both set out to enact revolutionary changes in the nation’s health-care system. And by most measures, Clinton would have seemed more likely to succeed, having staked his presidential campaign on the popular issue at a time when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. By contrast, Bush rarely mentioned Medicare during his campaign, and enjoys much slimmer majorities in Congress. Furthermore, although his prescription-drug benefit is popular, Bush’s stated goal of moving more seniors into private health plans is most definitely not. Yet where Clinton’s plan met an ignominious death, Bush’s appears headed for speedy passage.

There were, of course, many reasons why Clinton failed, from mishandling relations with congressional leaders to the perceived insularity and arrogance of the task force of policy wonks Hillary Clinton assembled to tackle the challenge of achieving universal health care. But another major obstacle was the business and health-care interests on K Street. Clinton worked to win their backing. Among other things, his plan would have capped employer contributions to workers’ health insurance at a level far below what many large companies, like General Motors and Kodak, were already paying to their employees’ health plans, saving the companies billions of dollars. But some of those firms nevertheless denounced Clinton’s plan after it was unveiled, rightly believing that they could bid up the price of their support even more. Meanwhile, conservative activists, eager to deny a new Democratic president his first major political victory, worked to convince business lobbyists that they would gain more by opposing Clinton than by supporting him. As more and more K Street lobbies abandoned Clinton, the plan went down to defeat.

Bush has taken a different approach. Instead of convening policy wonks to solve a problem, he issued a price tag and a political goal: Set Medicare on the road to privatization. When legislators from both parties balked at his initial proposal to offer more generous drug benefits to seniors who left Medicare for private plans, Bush dropped it–but retained incentives to lure seniors into the private market. What he didn’t have to do was fight K Street, because the lobbyists were already tamed. Those health-care interests that had doubts about Bush’s plan have been successfully pressured to keep quiet. Most of the rest have given Bush their full support.

A good example is the pharmaceutical industry. Drug companies have a natural affinity for the GOP’s effort to move seniors into private plans, because if Medicare were to begin providing prescription drugs, its bargaining power could drive down drug prices. But over the past few years, Republican leaders have carefully cultivated and cajoled the industry. The upper ranks of its Washington trade group, PhRMA, are stocked with former aides to powerful Republicans, and its political behavior reflects it: The industry, which gave roughly evenly during the fight over Clinton’s health-care plan, now contributes 80 percent of its money to Republicans. PhRMA has essentially become an extension of the GOP. It supported Bush’s plan with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign even before the plan had been finalized and made public, and continued its support even as Bush compromised in ways that went against the drug industry’s interests. By contrast, large corporations waited to see what Clinton’s plan looked like and then haggled over its details, while health-care companies funded the famous “Harry and Louise” ads that eventually helped sink it.

Bush’s Medicare legislation could still stall or get watered down. But the fact that the White House and the GOP have pushed it so far, so fast, regardless of the risk and downside, hints not only at the power of an organized K Street, but at the political end to which it is being directed. For years, conservatives have tried and, mostly, failed to significantly reduce the size of the federal government. The large entitlement programs in particular command too much public support to be cut, let alone abolished. But by co-opting K Street, conservatives can do the next best thing–convert public programs like Medicare into a form of private political spoils. As a government program, Medicare is run by civil servants and controlled by elected officials of both parties.

Bush’s legislation creates an avenue to wean people from Medicare and into the private sector–or, at least, a version of the private sector. For under the GOP plan, the medical insurance industry would gradually become a captive of Washington, living off the business steered to it by the government but dependent on its Beltway lobbyists–themselves Republican surrogates–to maintain this stream of wealth. Over time, private insurers would grow to resemble the defense sector: closely entwined with government, a revolving door for Republican officials, and vastly supportive, politically and financially, of the GOP. Republicans are thus engineering a tectonic political shift in two phases. First, move the party to K Street. Then move the government there, too.

The emerging Republican machine is the mirror image of that built by the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successors. The edifice of federal bureaucracy that emerged between the 1930s and the 1960s shifted power and resources from the private sphere to the public, while centralizing economic regulation in federal agencies and commissions. Democratic government taxed progressively, then redistributed that money through a vast and growing network of public institutions. Those constituencies that Democratic governance serviced best–the working class, the poor, veterans, the elderly, and, eventually, ethnic and racial minorities–made the Democrats the majority party. “Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect,” as Roosevelt’s aide Harry Hopkins put it, became the basis of Democratic power.

For many years, most business leaders adopted a conciliatory approach to the new system and accepted its basic premises. But during the 1970s, prodded by intellectuals like Irving Kristol and Lewis Powell, businesses began funding a new wave of aggressively ideological think tanks and advocacy groups to challenge the intellectual underpinnings of Democratic governance. Corporations sought influence by opening Washington offices, launching PACs, and pouring money into their trade associations. Savvy GOP operatives steered that money toward the Republican Party. Between the early 1970s and mid-1980s, the number of trade associations doubled; between 1981 and 1985, the number of registered lobbyists in Washington quadrupled, vastly augmenting business power and giving rise to K Street.

But there was a limit to what these groups could accomplish: Democrats still enjoyed an entrenched majority in Congress. The need to cultivate them meant that K Street’s immediate interests would never align with the GOP’s even if, more often than not, their long-term interests did. As a result, there emerged a broadly bipartisan lobbying culture. To facilitate broad access, most trade associations hired lobbyists from both parties, who were expected to be pragmatic and nonideological. Although certain industries may have had traditional ties to one party, most corporate PACs distributed money roughly equally.

This culture flourished even during Ronald Reagan’s two terms. When Reagan was elected and Republicans won the Senate, GOP activists urged business to donate more to their party. But a little-known California Democrat named Tony Coelho stopped them in their tracks. As chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he reminded business lobbyists that his party still controlled the House and, with it, the committees and subcommittees through which any legislation would have to pass. At the same time, he worked to convince businessmen that Democrats, too, could deliver for them. During Reagan’s first two years, Coelho tripled the DCCC’s fundraising. So even as the Republican realignment chugged ahead, Democrats retained a rough parity on K Street.

But while Democratic power endured, it contained an inherent tension. For the most part, K Street groups supported Democrats because they had to and Republicans because they wanted to. The Democrats needed corporate money to stay competitive, but were limited by the pull of their liberal, labor-oriented base. Although the party became generally more pro-business during the 1980s, it had few natural constituencies on K Street. At best, control of Congress allowed Democratic leaders to cut occasional deals with business interests, delivering key compromises–a tax break here, a floor vote there–in exchange for a portion of business giving.

Thus, under Democratic rule, the private sector remained unorganized, with lobbyists wielding huge influence, but in the service of a thousand different agendas and interests. And, as these multiplied, K Street became an obstacle to any large reforms. Lobbyists grew adept at larding ambitious legislation with special-interest provisions. When a reform threatened a large enough bloc, ad hoc coalitions could defeat almost anything, regardless of its popularity with voters. This inherent incoherence disadvantaged Republican presidents as much as it later would Clinton. Reagan’s 1981 tax cut, primarily intended as an across-the-board rate reduction for individuals, passed Congress as a special-interest bonanza adorned with far more corporate loopholes and special breaks than his advisers had planned, so ballooning the federal deficit that Reagan spent the remainder of his presidency ratcheting taxes back up, four times between 1982 and 1984 alone. “The hogs were really feeding,” David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, later confessed. “The greed level, the level of opportunism just got out of control.”

It took something that hadn’t happened in 40 years to begin to change the culture of K Street: In 1994, Republicans won control of Congress. All of a sudden, the Democrats’ traditional power base evaporated, and with it much of their leverage over lobbyists. New Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and a handful of close advisers like Ed Gillespie and Grover Norquist, quickly consolidated power in the House, and turned their attention to the lobbying community. Revolutionaries all, they nursed a deep disdain for K Street pragmatism. “They had a hard time dealing with lobbyists who were used to dealing with Democrats [and] were looking at ways to change this in the interests of the [conservative] coalition,” says one conservative activist.

One way was to start ensuring that the new GOP agenda of radical deregulation, tax and spending cuts, and generally reducing government earned the financial support they thought it deserved. In 1995, DeLay famously compiled a list of the 400 largest PACs, along with the amounts and percentages of money they had recently given to each party. Lobbyists were invited into DeLay’s office and shown their place in “friendly” or “unfriendly” columns. (“If you want to play in our revolution,” DeLay told The Washington Post, “you have to live by our rules.”) Another was to oust Democrats from trade associations, what DeLay and Norquist dubbed “the K Street Strategy.” Sometimes revolutionary zeal got the better of them. One seminal moment, never before reported, occurred in 1996 when Haley Barbour, who was chairman of the Republican National Committee, organized a meeting of the House leadership and business executives. “They assembled several large company CEOs and made it clear to them that they were expected to purge their Washington offices of Democrats and replace them with Republicans,” says a veteran steel lobbyist. The Republicans also demanded more campaign money and help for the upcoming election. The meeting descended into a shouting match, and the CEOs, most of them Republicans, stormed out.

DeLay’s attempt to corral the private sector stalled soon after. While corporate giving took on a more Republican cast and more Republicans began to be hired, the GOP leadership experienced significant pushback, for two reasons. One was that Democrats still controlled the White House. The other was that, by most measures, Clinton’s presidency had been very good for business, especially for the large corporations who had supported Clinton’s efforts to bring the budget deficit under control. By 1996, corporate and trade association PACs still gave roughly three-quarters of their money to both parties’ incumbents. After Clinton’s 1996 reelection, Gingrich’s subsequent combustion, and Democratic gains in Congress two years later, the bipartisan lobbying culture remained largely intact.

It took the 2000 elections, which gave Republicans the White House and Congress, to completely change the climate. In the months after, Santorum became the Senate’s point man on K Street and launched his Tuesday meetings. Working on the outside, Norquist accelerated what he calls the “K Street Project,” a database intended to track the party affiliation, Hill experience, and political giving of every lobbyist in town. With Democrats out of power, these efforts are bearing fruit. Slowly, the GOP is marginalizing Democratic lobbyists and populating K Street with loyal Republicans. DeLay alone has placed a dozen of his aides at key lobbying and trade association jobs in the last few years–“graduates of the DeLay school,” as they are known.) Already, the GOP and some of its key private-sector allies, such as PhRMA, have become indistinguishable.

Republicans, of course, see things differently. “The Democrats are terrified that our K Street Project is going to replicate the way that they behaved when they had the House and Senate,” says Norquist. For him and many of his contemporaries, Democratic rule prior to 1994 was no less autocratic than that of Republicans today. But there’s a fundamental difference: Democrats were limited by the basic tension between pleasing their labor base and corporate interests. Unions did, and still do, function as arms of the Democratic Party. When it came to the vastly bigger interests on K Street, someone like Coelho could aim only for financial parity and perhaps a slight advantage in jobs. The emerging GOP machine, however, is premised on a unity of interests between party and industry, which means the GOP can ask for–and demand–total loyalty.

With thin Republican majorities in the House and Senate, a market for Democratic lobbyists remains, and traditional bipartisan lobbying firms still thrive. But increasingly, the trade associations and their corporate representatives–those firms run by Republicans–are the beneficiaries of Washington’s new spoils system. And like Mayor Daley’s ward supervisors, they are expected to display total loyalty. “These guys come downtown thinking that they owe their job to somebody on the Hill or the influence that somebody brought to bear for them, and they think it’s their primary function, in addition to working for the entities they’ve joined, to sustain the relationship between the Hill and themselves,” says Vic Fazio, a top Democratic lobbyist and former congressman from California. “They rationalize it by saying it’s good for the old boss and the new one, too.”

Day-to-day, the most trusted lobbyists–like those who attend Santorum’s meetings–serve as commissars, providing the leadership with eyes and ears as well as valuable advice and feedback. And generally, placing party surrogates atop trade associations makes them more responsive to the party’s needs. However, the K Street strategy also provides the GOP with a number of specific advantages. From a machine perspective, such jobs are far more useful than appointive positions in the executive branch. Private sector work has none of government’s downside. Political machines thrive on closed-door decision-making; on K Street, there’s no other kind. Neither are trade associations subject to inspector generals or congressional oversight; there are no rules against whom you can meet with, no reporters armed with FOIAs. These jobs also make for better patronage. Whereas a deputy undersecretary might earn $140,000, a top oil lobbyist can make $400,000. Controlling K Street also helps Republicans accumulate political talent. Many ex-Clintonites who might have wanted top lobbying positions couldn’t get them, and so left Washington for posts at universities, corporations, and foundations elsewhere. But the GOP, able to dole out the most desirable jobs, has kept more of its best people in Washington, where they can be hauled out for government or campaign work like clubs in a golf bag.

But jobs and campaign contributions are just the tip of the iceberg. Control a trade association, and you control the considerable resources at its disposal. Beginning in the 1990s, Washington’s corporate offices and trade associations began to resemble miniature campaign committees, replete with pollsters and message consultants. To supplement PAC giving, which is limited by federal election laws, corporations vastly increased their advocacy budgets, with trade organizations spending millions of dollars in soft money on issue ad campaigns in congressional districts. And thanks to the growing number of associations whose executives are beholden to DeLay or Santorum, these campaigns are increasingly put in the service of GOP candidates and causes. Efforts like the one PhRMA made on behalf of Bush’s Medicare plan have accompanied every major administration initiative. Many of them have been run out of the offices of top Republican lobbyists such as Ed Gillespie, whose recent elevation to chairman of the Republican National Committee epitomizes the new unity between party and K Street. Such is the GOP’s influence that it has been able to marshal on behalf of party objectives not just corporate lobbyists, but the corporations themselves. During the Iraq war, for instance, the media conglomerate Clear Channel Communications Inc. had its stations sponsor pro-war rallies nationwide (a few affiliates even banned the Dixie Chicks, who had criticized Bush, from their play lists). Likewise, last spring Norquist and the White House convinced a number of corporations and financial services firms to lobby customers to support Bush’s dividends tax cut. Firms like General Motors and included flyers touting the plan with dividends checks mailed to stockholders; Morgan Stanley included a letter from its CEO with the annual report it mailed to millions of customers.

Although this arrangement is intended to mutually benefit the GOP and the businesses who support it, in practice, the new Republican machine must balance the needs of K Street with the interests of the party. Sometimes that requires the GOP to take positions that it knows will be unpopular with voters or open the party up to criticism from the press. Shortly after Bush took office, at the behest of business groups, congressional Republicans summarily tossed out a set of ergonomics standards that Bush’s father had sent wending through the rule-making process a decade earlier. Similarly, in June, Republican-appointed commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission–bowing to the wishes of large broadcasters and newspaper chains–dumped 50-year-old federal regulations on media ownership, causing a wave of public anger. And while it’s not uncommon for lobbyists to have a hand in writing legislation on the Hill, the Bush administration has sometimes shifted the locus of executive policy making so far towards K Street that Bush’s own appointees are cut out of the process. While environmental groups complained loudly about being excluded from meetings of Dick Cheney’s energy task force, Bush’s own energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, was barely involved. As Public Citizen pointed out in a February 2003 letter to Congress, Joseph Kelliher, a senior advisor to Abraham and his point man on the task force, didn’t write white papers or propose ideas of his own, but merely solicited suggestions from a cross-section of energy lobbyists and passed them on to the White House, where they were added to the task force’s recommendations nearly verbatim. Top administration officials then handed the package down to the House, where it was approved almost unaltered.

But the flip side of the deal is that trade associations and corporations are expected to back the party’s initiatives even on occasions when doing so is not in their own best interest. When Bush’s recently passed dividends tax cut proposal was first announced, the life insurance industry complained that the bill would sharply reduce the tax advantage of annuities sold by insurance companies, potentially costing them hundreds of millions of dollars. The industry’s lobbyists were told to get behind the president’s proposal anyway–or lose any chance to plead their case. So they did. In mid-March, Frank Keating, the head of the industry’s trade group and a close friend of Bush’s, hand-delivered a letter to the White House co-signed by nearly 50 CEOs, endorsing the president’s proposal while meekly raising the hope that taxes on dividends from annuities would also be included in the final repeal (which they weren’t). Those firms that didn’t play ball on Bush’s pan paid the price. The Electronic Industries Alliance was one of the few big business lobbies that declined to back the tax cut, in large part because the high-tech companies that make up a good portion of its membership don’t even issue dividends. As a result, the trade group was frozen out of all tax discussions at the White House. The final bill reflected the ability of the GOP machine to pass legislation largely on its own terms: Whereas Reagan’s 1981 tax bill was a Christmas tree of special breaks, Bush’s was relatively clean, mainly benefiting wealthy individuals and small businesses, as the administration had intended.

If you read The Washington Post last spring, you might have come across what seemed, on the surface, to be just another small beer scandal. This one involved Rep. Michael Oxley (R-Ohio), who heads the House Committee on Financial Services. Late last year, Oxley was set to launch an investigation of pricing practices in the mutual fund industry. But in December, one of his staffers allegedly let it be known that Oxley might go easy on the mutual funds if their trade group, the Investment Company Institute (ICI), pushed out its Democratic chief lobbyist, Julie Domenick. The Post‘s reporting caused a minor uproar; the House Ethics Committee briefly considered an investigation. The press coverage, however, never made clear why a powerful committee chairman like Oxley would risk his career over one job on K Street.

What explains Oxley’s decision is the same thing that explains why the Bush administration would risk angering voters by attempting to privatize Medicare: The GOP needs K Street’s muscle for long-term ideological projects to remake the national government. For years, conservatives have been pushing to divert part of Social Security into private investment accounts. Such a move, GOP operatives argued, would provide millions of new customers and potentially trillions of dollars to the mutual fund industry that would manage the private accounts. The profits earned would, of course, be shared with the GOP in the form of campaign contributions. In other words, by sluicing the funds collected by the federal government’s largest social insurance program through businesses loyal to the GOP, the party would instantly convert the crown jewels of Democratic governance into a pillar of the new Republican machine. But to make the plan a reality, the GOP needed groups like the ICI to get behind the idea–by funding pro-privatization think tanks, running issue ads attacking anti-privatization Democrats, and so on. The ICI, however, had always been lukewarm to privatization, for which conservatives blamed Domenick. Hence, the GOP machine decided she had to go. In the end, to quell the Oxley scandal, Domenick was allowed to keep her job. But ICI hired a former general counsel to Newt Gingrich to work alongside her, and the GOP’s campaign to get K Street behind Social Security privatization continues.

If the GOP is willing to be aggressive enough, even the federal payroll can become a source of patronage. Recently, as part of Bush’s “competitive sourcing” initiative, the Interior Department announced that over half of the Park Service’s 20,000 jobs could be performed by private contractors; according to the Post, administration officials have already told the service’s senior managers to plan on about one-third of their jobs being outsourced. (Stay tuned for “Yosemite: A division of Halliburton Corporation.”) But the Park Service is only the beginning. Bush has proposed opening up 850,000 federal jobs–about half of the total–to private contractors. And while doing so may or may not save taxpayers much money, it will divert taxpayer money out of the public sector and into private sector firms, where the GOP has a chance to steer contracts towards politically connected firms.

Anyone who doubts this eventuality need look no further than Florida. There, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out last year, Gov. Jeb Bush, the president’s brother, has outsourced millions of dollars worth of work formerly performed by government employees to private contractors. There’s little evidence that doing so has improved state services, as the governor’s own staff admits. But it has vastly improved the financial state of the Florida Republican Party. According to an investigation by The Miami Herald last fall, “[t]he policy has spawned a network of contractors who have given [Bush], other Republican politicians, and the Florida GOP millions of dollars in campaign donations.”

The Bush brothers would not be the first political family to turn government contracts into a source of political power. When the current mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, won his father’s old job 14 years ago, civil service reform had already wrecked the old system of bureaucratic patronage. So the new mayor began to farm out government services to private contractors, many of which returned the favor by donating generously to Daley’s reelection campaigns. Today, Daley dominates Chicago politics almost as thoroughly as did his father. Like his father, Daley has used his power, in part, to improve city services voters care about, from better schools to the flower beds lining Lake Shore Drive. By contrast, the fruits of today’s Republican machine–tax cuts and deregulation–have been enjoyed mainly by corporations and upper-income voters, while federal services, from college aid to environmental protection, are getting scaled back.

Indeed, it’s striking how openly and unapologetically Bush and his party have allied themselves with corporations and the wealthy. The rhetoric of compassion aside, no one who pays attention to what goes on in Washington could have much doubt as to where the Bush administration’s priorities lie. If the economy doesn’t improve or unemployment continues to get worse, the GOP may find it’s not such an advantage to be seen catering so enthusiastically to monied interests. But most Republicans seem confident that the strength they gain by harnessing K Street will be enough to muscle through the next election–so confident, in fact, that Bush, breaking with conventional electoral wisdom, has eschewed tacking to the political center late in his term. And if the GOP can prevail at the polls in the short term, its nascent political machine could usher in a new era of one-party government in Washington. As Republicans control more and more K Street jobs, they will reap more and more K Street money, which will help them win larger and larger majorities on the Hill. The larger the Republican majority, the less reason K Street has to hire Democratic lobbyists or contribute to the campaigns of Democratic politicians, slowly starving them of the means by which to challenge GOP rule. Already during this cycle, the Republicans’ campaign committees have raised about twice as much as their Democratic counterparts. So far, the gamble appears to be paying off.

It wouldn’t be the first time. A little over a century ago, William McKinley–Karl Rove’s favorite president–positioned the Republican Party as a bulwark of the industrial revolution against the growing backlash from agrarian populists, led by Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. The new business titans flocked to McKinley’s side, providing him with an extraordinary financial advantage over Bryan. McKinley’s victory in 1896 ushered in a long period of government largely by and for industry (interrupted briefly, and impermanently, by the Progressive Era). But with vast power came, inevitably, arrogance and insularity. By the 1920s, Republican rule had degenerated into corruption and open larceny–and a government that, in the face of rapidly growing inequality and fantastic concentration of wealth and opportunity among the fortunate few, resisted public pressure for reform. It took a few more years, and the Great Depression, for the other shoe to drop. But in 1932 came the landslide election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the founding of the very structure of governance today’s Republicans hope to dismantle. Who knows? History may yet repeat itself.

The post Welcome to the Machine appeared first on Washington Monthly.

There was an element of truth to his charge. By the late 1990s, the number of active-duty men and women under arms had decreased from more than 2 million during the Gulf War to just under 1.4 million, much of it due to planned post-Cold War drawdowns begun under Bush’s father. Yet during the same period, the military had faced a major new deployment roughly every six months–most of them operations, like Haiti or Somalia, that were layered on top of the post-Cold-War requirement that the Pentagon be able to fight two major regional wars at once.

All these deployments profoundly changed the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers, including Brian Wells, a staff sergeant with the 10th Mountain Division. Wells joined the 10th Mountain in 1998, moving his family to the division’s home base at Fort Drum, N.Y. The following year, as U.S. forces bombed Kosovo, he spent a month away from his family at Fort Polk, La., participating in the arduous war games that bring soldiers to peak preparedness. Immediately after, he was deployed to Bosnia for four months; on his eldest son’s first day of kindergarten, Wells was on peacekeeping duty outside Tuzla. A year later, he headed back to Louisiana for more exercises. Like most soldiers, Wells enjoyed being in the military. But between his deployment, exercises, training, and time spent at battle schools, military life was becoming grueling. His wife and two sons, now aged 2 and 6, didn’t see him as often as they’d like. “With all the different situations around the world with different countries,” Wells told me last January, speaking in the clipped cadence of a 10-year military veteran and the flat vowels of his native Chicago, “it just kept adding on and adding on and adding on.”

Bush gained office in part by pledging to relieve soldiers like Wells from the onerous burdens the Clinton administration had imposed by, among other things, reconsidering the U.S. presence in the Balkans. Yet military life hasn’t gotten easier since Bush took office; indeed, it’s gotten measurably harder. For Wells, the war on terrorism has meant “more frequent deployments, less time at home”–not just more missions, but more time training for them and the constant pressure of being on a permanent war footing. “Since the war on terrorism has expanded so quickly and so vastly, you never know when, or where, you’re going to go,” he says. Wells spent five months in Afghanistan after September 11 and did yet another stint in Louisiana this past fall. “I missed all four of our birthdays, the anniversaries, major holidays. 2002–gone. No birthday parties, no Christmas, nothing.” Orders to deploy to the Middle East could come any day.

More military spending, it turns out, hasn’t made life any easier. The extra $70 billion a year the Bush administration has pumped into the Pentagon has bought more smart bombs and slightly fatter paychecks. But it hasn’t bought a much bigger military force. There are only about 27,000 more active-duty troops today than in 2000–and even with those additions, the military is more overstretched now than it was when Bush took office. During the first three months of this year, the United States had more than twice as many troops on overseas missions at any given time as it did in 2000. It’s getting harder to recruit new soldiers, and, on the whole, harder to keep the ones we have. The Army is so short of some specialties that it has imposed stop-loss on about 50,000 troops–that is, refused to let them retire or resign–while in January, the Marine Corps imposed a 12-month stop-loss order on the entire service. Large swathes of the U.S. military thus no longer meet the definition of a volunteer force. Nor, increasingly, do the reserves. Since September 11, thousands have been serving for long stretches, far from home, to meet the country’s growing homeland-security requirements and to fill in the gaps left by active-duty soldiers deployed elsewhere in the world. Their employers are grumbling, and their families are griping.

The average man in uniform, in other words, is more frustrated and overburdened today than he was two years ago–affecting not just the soldiers themselves, but their ability to protect the rest of us. “The great majority of Army combat units are not ready for combat without significant additional training,” wrote Lt. Col. Tim Reese, a respected commander who led a U.S. tank battalion in Kosovo, in Armor magazine last summer. Our capability and security has already begun to suffer. Because Army troops weren’t able to deploy quickly enough, the first ground forces in landlocked Afghanistan last year were Marines, specialists in amphibious assault. During the U.S.-led battle at Tora Bora and Operation Anaconda, the brass was both unwilling and unable to deploy enough troops to encircle the enemy, allowing hundreds of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters to escape to neighboring Pakistan, including, possibly, Osama bin Laden.

Things are about to get much worse. During the last two months, President Bush has ordered some 87,000 of America’s overstretched soldiers to the Persian Gulf, where they joined a force of roughly equal magnitude already preparing for war in Iraq. As many as 250,000 U.S. troops will take part in an eventual invasion of Iraq, on top of those already peacekeeping, battling terrorism, and guarding American interests around the world. Fighting a war, of course, is the military’s primary purpose. But when the shooting stops, about 75,000 of those soldiers will need to stay behind–twice as many as are currently stationed in South Korea to deter an invasion from the North, and more than 12 times the dwindling number serving in Bosnia and Kosovo.

That can only mean decreased readiness, shrinking re-enlistments, lower morale, and, quite possibly, more mistakes like the one at Tora Bora. Today’s military is “like a football team playing back to back games in overtime with no practice or rest time,” says Maj. Donald Vandergriff, an ROTC instructor at Georgetown University and a leading expert on the military’s personnel crisis. “They may win one week, but they can’t win the next week because they’re exhausted.” Today’s force, say reformers, needs a top-to-bottom change in the way it recruits, structures, and deploys its men and women in uniform in order to meet new threats. Anything less puts those troops, and the rest of us, in danger. Yet the Bush administration has so far avoided the tough internal battles that will be needed to remake America’s overstretched military. Instead, the president is poised to use America’s overstretched military to remake the world.

For most civilians, the notion that a military with 1.4 million full-time men and women under arms is unduly burdened might seem counterintuitive. But of that number, only a fraction are what are known as “trigger-pullers”–that is, front-line troops in combat divisions. Of the Army’s 460,000 soldiers, for instance, only about 120,000 are part of the service’s 10 active-duty combat divisions. And only about one-third of each 15,000-man division consists of actual combat troops. Of the rest, most are part of the military’s vast overhead and logistics apparatus, from mechanics to quartermasters to secretaries.

In part this is the price the United States pays for global reach; deploying all around the world takes up more resources and man hours than staying at home. (During the Gulf War, according to one estimate, there were more signal troops and truck drivers in Saudi Arabia than there were combat soldiers.) And in part, it’s the military’s increasing reliance on high-tech equipment, which speeds up the tempo of battle by allowing forces to operate under nearly any conditions and requires a longer logistical “tail” when deployed. Today, the military’s overall “tooth to tail” ratio is about 1 to 7–one of the lowest in the world, and getting lower.

That makes it hard to solve the current overstretch problem in what would seem to be the logical way: increase the number of soldiers. Add a few thousand trigger-pullers, and you have to add seven times that number, on average, in support personnel. Recruiting so many qualified candidates would not only be expensive, but would challenge the current all-volunteer force, already struggling to meet its recruitment goals. (They’ve done so, but only by spending much more money per recruit than in years past, making it easier to get through basic training, and accepting more convicted felons.) In any event, the Bush administration has refused to approve all the additional manpower the services have requested. The president has never once publicly called upon young Americans to join the military, an omission that has caused some amount of grumbling throughout the ranks. After all, when the Pentagon can’t bring in more recruits, those who’ve already signed up pay the price.

When the weather cooperates, Fort Drum, home to the 10th Mountain Division, is a little over an hour’s drive north of Syracuse, just east of the Adirondacks. During most of the winter, though, storms over Lake Ontario dump loads of snow onto the region, and when I arrived there in the middle of January, the base was a few feet deep in powder. A public affairs officer met me at the front gate–like all U.S. bases, Fort Drum has been a “closed post” since 9/11–and escorted me around in a big SUV, proudly pointing out the video store, on-post schools and playgrounds, and most importantly, rows of tidy family sized houses. The growing number of “enlisted marrieds” in the ranks was an unintended consequence of the military’s move to an all-volunteer force in 1973, and the Pentagon has been playing catch-up ever since. Since the early 1990s, millions of dollars have poured into better housing, family services, and especially child care–important when more and more of the country’s married soldiers are married to each other.

Better housing and pay certainly make military life easier, and the Bush administration has made a point of putting more money into each than the previous administration. But as one recently retired soldier joked to me, a bigger apartment for the family doesn’t do you much good if you’re never around to see them. Too much time away from home, not low pay, are what usually drive people out of the service. As Wells told me, “This past year, not that I have any gripe, but being married, you get it from your wife.”

The pace is easier on soldiers who aren’t married, like Ron McGirr, a tall, soft-spoken military police sergeant I met at Fort Drum. But McGirr has another problem: As an MP, his specialty is among those most heavily in demand in the military today, which means he gets deployed again and again. Starting in 1998, McGirr was assigned to a military police company based in Germany; in the middle of his tour there, he spent six months in Kosovo policing Muslim neighborhoods and providing base security for U.S. forces. “When I first came in, it took three years before you deployed for anything other than exercises,” he said, as winter-camouflaged troops tramped through deep snowdrifts outside. But now, he pointed out, frequent deployments–sometimes averaging more than one a year–are the norm for new enlistees. September 11 has only quickened the pace; McGirr, whose responsibilities as an MP include on-post security, was especially busy after U.S. bases abroad went into permanent lockdown. Then, a few months after the attacks, he was reassigned to the 10th Mountain Division, arriving at Fort Drum in late January. Just 10 days later he was deployed to Afghanistan to build bunkers and guard Taliban prisoners of war.

The problem is not just the increasing number of missions, but the decades-old system by which soldiers are organized and deployed. Since before World War I, the military has used a centralized personnel management scheme, known as the individual replacement system, originally designed to fight what military wonks today call “second-generation” warfare–wars of attrition between industrial nations. Since those conflicts tended to have long lead-ups, what mattered most was how many guys you could get to the front line, rather than how fast you could get them there. Consequently, readiness was primarily measured by a given unit’s “fill”–how many troops it could deploy–instead of how much time those soldiers had spent training together. Soldiers, in turn, were viewed as interchangeable cogs in a machine, to be replaced as needed like spare parts. And to make it easier to organize and administer those modern armies in garrison, units were kept “branch-pure;” that is, tanks in one battalion, infantry in another, engineers in still another.

The system came in for criticism almost as soon as it was inaugurated, but though warfighting has changed dramatically since 1917, the individual replacement system remains in place today. If the 3rd Infantry Division is assigned to deploy, say, a brigade combat team–usually three battalions of between 500 and 900 men each, plus headquarters and support assets–to the Middle East, that team is built essentially ad hoc, from the ground up. To fill the units being deployed, the Army cannibalizes other units for personnel–often from other bases around the country or around the world. Ideally, such a formation would have months to train together as a team and learn to fight as one, since experience shows that formations that train together for long periods before deployment, developing cohesion and trust, are far more effective in combat. But in the post-Cold War world, most deployments happen on a moment’s notice–sometimes a month or two, sometimes less. “When you get down to the unit level, what it means is that for the most part, the formations you are deploying on any given day consist of strangers,” says Col. Douglas A. Macgregor, a research fellow at the National Defense University and author of Breaking the Phalanx, a bible for military reform advocates.

The more missions the military has, the more it has to move around, reassemble, and retrain its soldiers. And instead of fighting one big war or two medium-sized wars, today’s military has lately been charged with lots of minor operations, known as small-scale contingencies, and the occasional medium-sized one, like the upcoming war in Iraq. Even the small-scale contingencies are no picnic. As a 2001 RAND study noted, “Even relatively small operations require large amounts of leadership time, cause turbulence from cross-leveling and tailoring of the force, and require specialized training.” It doesn’t help that most of the military is still arrayed to fight World War III. A large fraction of the United States’ manpower is deployed to permanent garrisons in Germany, South Korea, and Japan. That doesn’t mean these troops sit on their hands. (Most of the peacekeeping soldiers in Bosnia and Kosovo, for instance, rotate out of bases in Germany.) But it does mean that many soldiers are primarily trained and organized for battles that will never occur, which means that they must constantly be trained for their actual missions as well, like patrolling Croat neighborhoods in Brcko, and then trained back again to prepare for their theoretical missions, such as battling hordes of Soviet tanks smashing through the Fulda Gap. Perversely, the current system produces units that simultaneously train more and are less ready.

It also disrupts soldiers’ lives constantly, as they are moved around the world at the last minute to fill out units scheduled for deployment. Some researchers estimate that, in any given week, as many as 60,000 soldiers are in transit from one place to another–three times as many soldiers as the Army puts into the Balkans in a given year. (This high “personnel tempo” also adds to the training tempo; since the troops in a given unit constantly turn over, the unit as a whole must train that much more in order to perform well together.) The burden doesn’t fall equally, though. Since most of the military is structured to organize over months, for a predictable war, few units are capable of deploying on very short notice. So while the bulk of our heavy, active-duty units are rarely deployed to places like Afghanistan, light units that are rapidly deployable–such as the 10th Mountain division, today the most frequently deployed in the Army–get sent to hotspots over and over again. The same goes for individual soldiers: Those with specialties in high demand for peacekeeping and nation-building, including MPs like Ron McGirr, get used more often than they normally would.

All of this goes a long way toward explaining why the same military that won the Gulf War without too much trouble gets stressed out keeping up a few peacekeeping and antiterrorism deployments that take up a fraction of its manpower. But when the dust settles, occupied Iraq will require more of what Bush’s advisers once derided as “social work” than the Balkans and Afghanistan combined. If putting a few thousand U.S. troops into Bosnia every six months is difficult, imagine the strain of keeping tens of thousands of personnel in an occupied Iraq, year after year.

The most visible symptom of overstretch, however, is its effects on the Guard and Reserves, who make up a little less than half of the Pentagon’s available personnel and two-thirds of the Army’s. In daily life, reservists (the term applies to members both of the Guard and the Reserves) are civilian citizens, many of them doctors, police, firemen, or nurses. When the military can’t meet deployments with active duty personnel, they call up reserve units and individual reservists, who must take leave from work and family at a moment’s notice. Three-quarters of U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan today are National Guardsmen, for instance, in part to free up active-duty troops to prepare for war in Iraq.

Most of the reserves, however, consist not of combat troops but of logistics and support soldiers who undergird the big combat deployments–from engineers and MPs to civil affairs officers and truck drivers. Indeed, nearly all of these specialties are concentrated in the part-time reserve forces, rather than the active duty force. Unfortunately, those are the same specialties most needed in peacekeeping and humanitarian deployments, where the bulk of the work isn’t duking it out with enemy infantry but establishing constabulary forces, providing clean water, and fixing bombed-out power grids. So, ever since the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon has leaned more and more heavily on the reserves–using them as a crutch to avoid reconfiguring the active-duty force away from the heavy divisions that remain the Army’s pride and joy. Today, the reserves are increasingly indistinguishable from the active-duty force, with a growing number of reservists and guardsmen serving for months at a time. “The National Guard and Reserve did not sign up with the idea that they would be fully integrated into the active Army,” says Ramon Nadel, a retired Army colonel who now teaches combat leadership. “And the more operations other than war that we have, the more the reserves get pulled away.”

“We call up the reserves basically because we can,” says John Tillson, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses who studies the effects of operations tempo on soldiers. “Since we have all these tempo problems, we need to find some way to mitigate them. It’s easier to call up the reserves than to change the personnel system.” Even before September 11 the reserves were overstretched; since the early 1990s, the number of reservist “duty days” has nearly tripled, from more than 5 million to around 13 million per year. But the situation has gotten drastically worse since September 11. Pentagon officials estimate that since then, reservists have served between 30 and 40 million duty days, about what they contributed at the height of the Gulf War. By the beginning of this year, more than 124,000 reservists had been called up for duty during the course of Operation Enduring Freedom–nearly as many as have cycled through Bosnia, Kosovo, and the post-Desert Storm operations combined. “You will find reservists, particularly Army reservists and National Guard guys, who have served in Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Kuwait,” says G.I. Wilson, a recently retired Marine colonel.

Pretty soon, they’ll be able to add Iraq to that list. The active-duty force has, for instance, exactly one civil-affairs battalion–that is, the specialists who set up courts and train police forces in the wake of a conflict. The other 97 percent of the Army’s civil-affairs specialists are in the reserves. Once the shooting stops, these and other elements of our already overstretched reserve force will bear the brunt of rebuilding, caring for, and policing Iraq. And when they get called up for duty, they’ll leave behind understaffed police stations and fire departments. A survey conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum found that half of all law enforcement agencies in the United States have already lost personnel to reserve call-ups since September 11, while another, conducted by the International Association of Fire Chiefs found that more than 70 percent of fire departments have members in the reserves. “We have only two paid firefighters,” noted one response to the latter survey. “Both have been called.”

Of course, police and firefighters are also the front-line responders in case of terrorist attacks on American soil (attacks that will be more likely, according to recent CIA reports, if U.S. troops invade Iraq). Therefore, stretching the already overburdened reserves to fight Saddam might not only increase the danger to U.S. soldiers, but to the rest of us at home.

Today’s military is at the breaking point. Active-duty troops have fewer opportunities to build camaraderie with their fellow soldiers, spend less and less time at home, and have more and more unpredictable schedules. Reservists suffer trouble at their daytime jobs, lose employment opportunities, and endure deployments away from home far longer than the ones they expected when they signed up. It’s a downward spiral; soldiers driven too hard and deployed too often will eventually choose not to re-enlist, compounding the personnel shortage and increasing the burden on those who stay. And there are only three ways to fix it.

One is to rapidly pull back our overseas commitments, as Bush promised to do during the 2000 campaign. The fact that we still have troops in Bosnia and Kosovo indicates not only that Clinton was right to put them there in the first place, but also that peacekeeping in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and elsewhere is likely to remain a big part of the Pentagon’s mission for the foreseeable future. The United States can’t stop fighting the war on terrorism, either. Since 9/11, in addition to Afghanistan and the Middle East, we’ve deployed troops to Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Colombia, and several other terrorism hot spots. And whether or not one supports the idea of a war against Iraq, the United States needs a military capable of combating terrorism, meeting its peacekeeping commitments, and fighting a major regional war all at the same time. (If not in Iraq, then perhaps on the Korean peninsula.)

That leaves two other possibilities: Increase troop levels, or use the soldiers we have more efficiently. So far, the former has been a wash. But at the prodding of Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), President Bush recently signed into law a provision for shorter enlistment terms to attract more college students. That could help reverse the decline, since what’s killing the recruiting offices right now is college. The Pentagon rightly doesn’t want recruits without at least a high-school education; the problem is that a rapidly growing percentage of high school graduates are going on to become college students, who in turn are increasingly unlikely to enlist. Unless the military can recruit more college grads, its manpower crisis will continue. Research by Charles Moskos, the eminent military sociologist, suggests that shorter enlistment terms appeal to college graduates, who tend to marry later than the high-school grads (which means they will be less prone to family pressures while in service) and are typically better-educated than the current recruit (which means they can be trained faster). To get maximum benefit from the new short enlistment option, John Tillson suggests grouping cohorts of college students from the same region or university, who would train and deploy together overseas on short-term enlistments. Such groups could provide cohesive, highly motivated units for many of the military’s undermanned specialties. They could even form the basis of a new U.S. force dedicated exclusively to peacekeeping and nation-building abroad, relieving soldiers with perishable combat skills from the work.

And what if recruiting more college students on a voluntary basis doesn’t provide a substantial number of new enlistees–as is very likely? Then the Bush administration might want to consider a more radical approach: Draft them. Every year, a million young adults begin attending four-year colleges. As a condition of admission, those students could be required to serve their country for up to two years, in civilian national service programs like AmeriCorps, or homeland security efforts such as guarding nuclear plants, or in one of Tillson’s cohort units in the military. Some percentage would choose the latter, especially if they were to receive more G.I. Bill-type college aid as a reward for higher-risk duty.

If the Bush administration can’t find a way to increase the number of personnel, they’ll need to try the last solution: Change the way the military is organized so that it can commit more of the men and women we have in uniform to the right kinds of jobs, while utilizing them more efficiently and effectively than before. Fixing this problem may be the hardest battle of all, but it’s not impossible. Pulling most of our troops from Germany, for instance, would free up perhaps 40,000 soldiers for work elsewhere; as it is, says Douglas Macgregor, “You have commitments that are strategically irrelevant competing with commitments that are strategically unavoidable.” Shifting at least one of the Army’s heavy combat divisions to the reserves, and replacing it with more active duty service support troops like MPs, would help lessen the burden on reservists.

More fundamentally, say reformers, the World War I-era individual replacement system must be scrapped. In his widely read book of last year, The Path to Victory: America’s Army and the Revolution in Human Affairs, Vandergriff recommends replacing that system with what’s known as unit-manning. Under this system, units would be kept intact, with the same personnel and officers, for a three-year life cycle consisting of training, deployment, and rest phases. A unit-manning system would give soldiers more predictable lives, since they’d know well in advance when they’d be deployed and when they’d be at home. The units produced would be more cohesive, and thus more flexible, requiring less time to train up to specific missions and having a higher overall readiness level. And they wouldn’t look anything like today’s units. Macgregor’s book, Breaking the Phalanx, recommends replacing divisions and brigades with 5,000-man formations designed to deploy quickly and fight as a module. Instead of today’s branch-pure units, which must be assembled, like Legos, into a given formation, you’d have a range of set formations designed and trained to field certain capabilities rather than specific troop types.

Many of these reforms have been attempted at one time or another in the past–and snuffed out by the existing military bureaucracy, since those who have successfully navigated to the top of the existing system oppose changing it. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to his credit, has advocated unit manning and more flexible formations in speeches and reports during the last two years. In reaction to Vandergriff’s book, the Army, under the direction of Secretary of the Army Thomas White and the Vice Chief of Staff, Gen. John Keane, has formed a Unit Manning Task Force to study how to move away from the individual replacement system. Unfortunately, the head of the task force was recently transferred to a new post, leaving it “effectively dead,” according to John Tillson. The Army’s Chief of Staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, discussed the zero-defects culture at an Army conference in April 2001, and has been a vocal supporter of the need to shift the service to smaller, more flexible units. But these moves haven’t yet blossomed, in part because the resistance is so stiff, and in part because Rumsfeld’s office has focused most of its political capital on the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs–that is, machines, not men. “We say it stands for ‘Raging Military Acquisition,’” says G.I. Wilson. “I applaud Rumsfeld for trying to do transformation, but we’re not looking for tactical or operational solutions. We solely rely on technological and acquisitions solutions, because that means more money for Boeing, TRW, SCIC. We seek solutions that generate profit, income, or contracts in congressional districts. We’re more worried about the hardware, than having people to operate it.”

And it’s people who win battles, not just hardware. Bush didn’t create the military overstretch, but he did campaign on fixing it, and instead has allowed it to worsen. The soldiers at Fort Drum, like American soldiers around the world, didn’t join the military to stay at home; they will deploy willingly, even gladly, wherever and as often as their commander-in-chief asks them to. But driving men and women in uniform to the breaking point isn’t leadership–it’s a way to get them killed. Three years ago, candidate Bush charged the preceding administration with wanting things both ways: “To command great forces, without supporting them. To launch today’s new causes, with little thought of tomorrow’s consequences.” He should heed his own warning.

The post G.I. Woe appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s not immediately clear why. Krugman is a pretty good writer, but not a great one. He’s adept at explicating numbers and statistics in clear English, but he’s not a stylist like Dowd or the The Washington Post‘s Michael Kelly. Krugman isn’t well-connected in Washington; in fact, he almost never leaves the environs of Princeton University, where he has taught economics since 2000. He’s not a connoisseur of politics. He can’t tell you how many votes John F. Kennedy won Illinois by in 1960 or who Arthur Finkelstein is. Nor is Krugman much of a reporter. There are few facts in his columns that any Times intern couldn’t glean from documents published daily by the Congressional Budget Office or dozens of Beltway think tanks. Krugman doesn’t travel around the country interviewing lieutenant governors or lard his columns with juicy blind quotes. He doesn’t plot Democratic strategy like E.J. Dionne, dine with foreign dignitaries like Thomas Friedman, or write smart big-think like Ronald Brownstein. Nevertheless, for nearly two years, Krugman has been the columnist every Democrat in the country feels they need to read–and every Bush Republican loves to hate.

Krugman’s primacy is based largely on his dominance of a particular intellectual niche. As major columnists go, he is almost alone in analyzing the most important story in politics in recent years–the seamless melding of corporate, class, and political party interests at which the Bush administration excels. Like most people, the Washington press, and especially pundits, were slow to grasp the magnitude of the shift. Krugman, whether puncturing the fuzzy math of Bush’s tax cut or eviscerating the deceptive accounting behind Bush’s Social Security plans or highlighting the corruption behind Dick Cheney’s energy task force, has nearly always been the first mainstream writer to describe–and condemn–Bushonomics in plain English.

As an economist, of course, Krugman surely has an edge over most liberal pundits; his sterling academic reputation gives his critiques a punch that few Democratic politicians or liberal editorialists could hope for. But in truth, little that Krugman writes about has relied on his academic expertise. His columns aren’t about trade theory or stochastic calculus, but about flagrant deceptions and fourth-grade arithmetic. What makes Krugman interesting, in short, is not just why he writes what he writes. It’s why nobody else does.

“This is not what I do. This is not who I am,” Krugman sighs. It’s a week before the election, and he has invited me to his tiny, cluttered office on the fourth floor of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, an imposing pile of white marble that, from a distance, resembles an oversized bicycle rack. In pictures, Krugman looks self-assured, even a little hard-eyed. In person, he’s friendly but ill at ease, a schlumpy professor in chinos and a beige button-down, who dislikes being interviewed, he says, owing to a few bad experiences with reporters. And it shows–his eyes dart nervously around the room, and every so often he rubs his face vigorously with both palms. “This is not my natural habitat. Sometimes, I think that if I had known what it would be like, I would never have agreed to do this column. What I really do is international trade and finance,” he says, gesturing toward an anonymous stack of papers on one side of the room. “Professionally,” he adds, “I should be worrying a lot about Brazil right now.”

In truth, Krugman hasn’t been a pure academic since at least the mid-1990s, when he first began writing widely for popular magazines like Fortune and Slate. But his column for the Times has been unusual on several counts. One is what Krugman enthusiasts might call his sense of mission. Beginning during the 2000 campaign Krugman began to write frequently about George W. Bush, and since Bush took office, the president or his administration have made an appearance in about three-quarters of Krugman’s 200 or so columns. He has written especially forcefully, and especially often, about the Bush administration’s plans for privatizing Social Security (“Enron-like”) and Bush’s now-passed tax plan (“patently, shamelessly dishonest”). Indeed, Krugman has written so many columns attacking Bush’s tax cut that you could make a book from them–as, in fact, he did, publishing Fuzzy Math: The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan in May 2001. And although Krugman can get pretty worked up–he once compared Bush to the nativist French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen–he’s generally not a screamer. Rather, he writes mostly about facts, and spin: the fact that at least 40 percent of Bush’s tax cut will eventually go to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, versus the administration’s spin that it was aimed mainly at the middle class. Plenty of other columnists have made these points. But only Krugman makes them in such detail, over and over again.

If Krugman’s zeal is in part what makes him so appealing to liberal activists, it’s also what makes him so off-putting to Republicans and conservatives–and a fair number of center-left journalists. Krugman is regularly attacked by fellow pundits, most exhaustively by former New Republic editor-turned-blogger Andrew Sullivan and former Washington Monthly editor-turned-blogger Mickey Kaus, each of whom inveighs against Krugman almost as often as Krugman inveighs against Bush. And like many partisans, Krugman can stir unruly passions. Last year, after he published an encomium to the late economist James Tobin, he received a bizarre screed from actor and game-show host Ben Stein; Stein, who majored in economics in college, accused Krugman, a likely future Nobel laureate, of having a “limited background” in the field. There are Web sites devoted to attacking Krugman’s work, as well as a Paul Krugman Archive, which contains every article he has ever written, started by a high school student in New York.

For Krugman devotees, however, the main appeal is his proclivity for writing things before it is okay to write them. Journalists may love to break news, but they hate to contradict the narratives that crystallize around particular politicians or policies. Late last winter, for instance, the established storyline on California’s energy crisis was that Left Coasters had only themselves to blame: the state had passed a flawed deregulation law, which led its utilities to rely on the spot energy market when prices were high. This neutral explanation came from the supposedly competent and disinterested Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, so reporters favored it. And while the press gave plenty of column inches to the Bush administration’s preferred spin–that environmentalists had stymied the construction of needed generation capacity–few reporters gave credence to groups like Public Citizen, who blamed the crisis on market manipulation by energy companies, many of them based in Texas and enjoying close ties to the administration. But Krugman, noting that economists had long worried about the vulnerability of California’s trading system to price-fixing, argued that market manipulation was the obvious culprit; otherwise, he wrote in March 2001, the power company executives “are either saints or very bad businessmen.” Krugman was ignored at the time. Twenty months later–following the collapse of Enron, three federal investigations into the California crisis, and a passel of indictments against energy company officials–Krugman has been proved right.

More often, though, his scoops are conceptual. The tax cut, Bush’s Social Security plan, Enron, the energy crisis, and Harken–all Krugman hobbyhorses–were widely covered in the media. But he has been the only prominent columnist to attempt to weave all of them into a single, continuing narrative about the Bush administration’s policies, wealth inequality, corporate profiteering, and the ascendancy of crony capitalism. Many political columnists, for instance, expressed outrage and anger over the way Enron executives locked ordinary employees into Enron-only 401(k) plans while they themselves were unloading the company’s stock. For Krugman, though, Enron’s abuse was of a piece with the Bush approach on tax cuts: “First, use cooked numbers to justify big giveaways to the top. Then if things don’t work out, let ordinary workers who trusted you pay the price.”

Krugman was not, and is not, the only person in America who believes that the Bush administration is in cahoots with interests out to bilk Americans and pervert the political process. But as a Times columnist, closely read by the political elite and syndicated to papers across the country, he has been able to validate the anger of a whole class of angry, frustrated Democrats who feel that he’s the only one prepared to describe the world as it really is. “He goes against the very basic thing that people and journalists want to believe about Bush: ‘Say what you want, but the guy’s honest,’” says James Carville, the blunt, flamboyant host of CNN’s “Crossfire.” “Krugman says, no–he’s a complete fraud.”

Krugman was born and raised on Long Island, where he enjoyed what he describes as an “utterly conventional” suburban childhood. After reading Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation novels, he nurtured a secret desire to be one of Asimov’s “psychohistorians”–futuristic social scientists who could predict the course of human history. At Yale during the 1970s, he did the next best thing, majoring in economics under the tutelage of economist William Nordhaus. Like Nordhaus, Krugman attended graduate school at MIT; in 1977, Krugman joined the economics faculty at Yale. Within a few years, he had begun to help think through what would later be called “new trade theory,” which holds that an increasing proportion of trade can be explained by technological innovation rather than countries’ comparative advantage (i.e., in natural resources). Krugman’s work on the subject cemented his academic reputation and launched him into the ranks of rising young stars in the field.

His first and last sojourn in Washington began in 1982, when Martin Feldstein, then chairman of Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), invited Krugman, Lawrence Summers, and a few other whiz kids onto the CEA’s staff. The early ’80s recession and debt crisis had thrown Reagan’s economic policy into disarray, and Feldstein had been brought in to fix things up. Working in government had two contradictory effects on Krugman. On the one hand, it induced in him a deep dislike for those he would later describe as “policy entrepreneurs”–activists and journalists, usually lacking academic credentials, who seemed to exert so much influence over economic decision-making in Washington. Feldstein was a pioneer of the supply side policies then in favor among Reaganites, who believed taxes were the most important determinant of economic growth. But unlike policy entrepreneurs such as Jude Wannisky and The Wall Street Journal‘s Robert Bartley, Feldstein refused to pretend that Reagan’s massive tax cut could pay for itself. When Feldstein insisted on issuing accurate budget projections anticipating government deficits, and even called for a small tax increase to offset them, the administration’s supply side purists attacked. (Treasury Secretary Donald Regan even urged reporters to “throw out” the council’s annual report.) Like many economists, Krugman cherished his discipline’s purity, and the sight of Feldstein being pummeled for not painting a rosier election-year picture was deeply disillusioning. “One thing you learn when you’re working in an administration–not to mention at the Fed, where it’s even more extreme–is to think three times before you speak and then bite your tongue,” says Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. “That’s not how academics normally behave.”

But Krugman also found that he liked writing about economic policy, and a seed was planted. The technical papers and books that he produced during the mid- and late 1980s, many of them integrating and extending his earlier work on trade theory, were notable for their creativity and number and helped set Krugman on his way to winning the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded biennially to a rising young economist, in 1991. But Krugman’s late-’80s work was also less abstract than his previous efforts, drawing inspiration from real-world policy dilemmas. Eventually, at the suggestion of Michael Barker, a former Hill staffer working at The Washington Post, Krugman, by then ensconced at MIT, sat down to write his first book for a popular audience. The Age of Diminished Expectations, a kind of primer on basic economic principles as they applied to current events, was published in 1990. And while it wasn’t a bestseller, the book was lucid, informative, and widely read among journalists and opinion leaders, launching Krugman’s career as a bona fide public intellectual.

Very soon, however, Washington disappointed Krugman again. His writing and congressional testimony about income inequality brought him to the attention of Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992, which used some of his findings to attack the Bush administration. When Wannisky and other conservatives argued that skyrocketing income inequality was in fact a myth, Clinton’s aides enlisted Krugman to help them fight the ensuing propaganda war. When he published a defense of Clinton’s economic plan in the Times that August, it was widely assumed that Krugman would be Clinton’s pick, should he win, as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Clinton did win. But his economic transition team was headed by Robert B. Reich, a Harvard lecturer, journalist, and author who had penned the early ’90s other big policy tome, The Work of Nations. Not only had Reich tussled with Krugman over trade policy during the 1980s; he had also gone to Oxford with Clinton. Eventually, Reich became Secretary of Labor in the new administration, while Berkeley economist Laura D’Andrea Tyson was named chair of the CEA. Many other economists were drafted into top administration slots, including Krugman’s colleague from the Reagan days, Larry Summers. But Krugman was passed over–largely, say former Clinton officials, because he was deemed too volatile. (After clashing with fellow attendees at Clinton’s Little Rock economic summit, for example, he had appeared on “Larry King Live” to declare the meeting “useless.”)

Krugman didn’t take the rejection well, and lashed out at Clinton’s appointees. To Washingtonians, the key division on the Clinton economic team lay between the stimulators, such as Reich and Tyson, and the deficit hawks, notably Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and budget director Leon Panetta. But for Krugman, the key division was between real economists qualified to set national policy and policy entrepreneurs, who were not. In a Times article that January, he was quoted as saying Tyson lacked “analytical skills”–just a few weeks after giving a speech at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association lambasting Reich and Ira Magaziner as “pop internationalists” who “repeat silly clichs but imagine themselves to be sophisticated.”

Reich, Tyson, and a handful of other alleged policy entrepreneurs came in for further attack in Krugman’s next book, Peddling Prosperity (1994). It wasn’t just that they were wrong, Krugman declared. It was that they were all dangerous hacks, snake-oil salesman selling foolish remedies to credulous politicians (like Clinton). Real economists eschew policy, insulating themselves from the intellectual compromise endemic to the political world. Policy entrepreneurs, however, tend to write “in newspapers and semi-popular magazines like Foreign Affairs, The Harvard Business Review, and The New Republic.” Moreover, the “fault line between serious economic thinking and economic patent medicine, between the professors and the policy entrepreneurs,” Krugman wrote, “is at least as important as the divide between left and right.”

But what was strange about Peddling Prosperity, as economics journalist Robert Kuttner would note in a lengthy assessment of Krugman published in The American Prospect two years later, was that Krugman quickly became the most prolific policy entrepreneur of them all. (Reich and Kuttner are co-founders of the Prospect, where I was a staff writer for four years.) By 1996, Krugman had published enough articles in Foreign Policy, Fortune, The Economist, Harper’s, this magazine, and, yes, Foreign Affairs and The Harvard Business Review, to fill a second mass-audience book–Pop Internationalism. His defense? “What I eventually realized,” he wrote in the introduction, “was that an effective answer to pop internationalism would require a new kind of writing … essays for non-economists that were clear, effective, and entertaining.”

Evidently, the urgency of combating pop internationalists outweighed the dangers of popular writing, and Krugman took to his new task with great enthusiasm. Slate signed him up for a column, as did The New York Times Magazine, and he quickly mastered the form. Some of Krugman’s best writing dates from this period, and he was acclaimed as the heir to John Kenneth Galbraith. His pieces in Slate, especially, were funny, revealing, and exceptionally fluid, if occasionally dismissive to those with whom he disagreed. As always, a good portion of his writing was devoted to debunking them–leftists who criticized the World Trade Organization, supported protectionism, and still believed in Keynes; conservatives who argued that the Dow could reach 36,000 and still believed in supply side economics.

It was largely on the strength of Krugman’s writing for the Times Magazine and Slate–plus, of course, his burgeoning academic reputation–that Howell Raines, then the Times editorial-page editor, approached Krugman about writing a regular column. This was in 1999, at the height of the boom, and Raines felt that the Times needed someone who could, as Krugman puts it, “write about the vagaries of business and economics in an age of prosperity.” Krugman’s early Times column was notably less droll than his earlier writing and covered the kinds of topics he and Raines had discussed: the AOL Time-Warner merger, Bill Gates, and, when it finally happened, the stock market plunge. But Krugman still had a taste for the blood of the “hired gun”–“usually a mediocre economist,” he wrote in an April 2000 column, who “has found a receptive audience for work that does have an ideological edge.”

There’s a sense, then, in which Krugman hasn’t changed. His writing about the Bush administration, like that about policy entrepreneurs, is primarily concerned with stupid economic policy–or at any rate, what Krugman considers to be stupid economic policy. He hasn’t changed his substantive views on comparative advantage or monopolistic competition. It’s worth noting, moreover, that Krugman was passed over for a Clinton economic post for precisely the qualities that make him such an effective Bush critic: His peevishness; his confidence–bordering on arrogance–in his own ideas; his lack of concern for the niceties of political or bureaucratic culture, and his resulting isolation from Washington life.

And yet something has changed. Now it’s Krugman’s work that cuts with an ideological edge. To read through his columns about Bush is to watch disdain pass through frustration into rage. The first few, written during the 2000 campaign, are dismissive; how could anyone take what this guy is saying about his budget seriously? But a few weeks before Election Day, Krugman was getting impatient. “I really, truly wasn’t planning to write any more columns about George W. Bush’s arithmetic,” he wrote in an October dispatch. “But his performance on ‘Moneyline’ last Wednesday was just mind-blowing.” In the space of a few minutes, he noted, Bush had made three major misstatements–about how much he had promised to spend on prescription drugs for seniors, about how much of the surplus his tax cut would eat up, and about whether Social Security got a better “return” than bonds. “What is really striking here is the silence of the media–those ‘liberal media’ conservatives complain about,” Krugman lamented. “As I said, I don’t want to keep writing about this. But reporters seem to be too busy chasing rats and dogs to look at what the candidates say about their actual policy proposals.” The same went for Bush’s Social Security proposal. “It just was not acceptable to report Bush’s plan straight,” Krugman told me recently, “to assert that it requires a large influx of money from someplace to make it work.”

Even after Bush became president, it’s clear that Krugman saw Bush’s deceptions as more joke than threat. In particular, Krugman, like many people outside and inside Washington, didn’t believe that the Bush administration would persevere with the tax cut in the face of a deepening slump. But as Bush and his lieutenants did just that–and more infuriatingly, began to offer an endlessly changing, and often contradictory, set of explanations and numbers to defend their plan–Krugman’s writing changed. He no longer wrote about policy hustlers of the left and the right; instead, he began to devote the majority of his columns to the Bush administration. His tone was more angry, less wry. During the campaign, Raines had forbidden him to use the word “lie” when describing Bush’s proposals, even the demonstrably mendacious Social Security plan. Now Krugman used it with gusto. “Mr. Bush was lying [during the tax cut debate],” he wrote in August 2001. “It was obvious from the start that the administration’s numbers didn’t add up. And in case you were wondering, the administration is still lying.”

“There’s been a kind of missionary quality to his writing since then,” muses Princeton’s Blinder. “He’s trying to stop something now, using the power of the pen.” But that’s not all. The change is deeper: Krugman now takes politics seriously. As Kuttner puts it, “The interesting thing about Krugman is that he was a mainstream neoclassical economist who was moderately liberal as a citizen, but tended to look at politics as an illegitimate distortion of the perfection of the market economy. He viewed the left and the right as symmetrical evils. Krugman has now discovered power.”

Krugman seems to agree. “I think we were all living in a fool’s paradise in the late 1990s. There probably wasn’t as much energy in my criticism of the right. I was wrong, obviously,” he says. “If I’d understood where politics would be now, it would have been quite different. I thought that Reich and Magaziner were proposing bad ideas, but that’s not the same as being frightened of where they might be taking us. We can have arguments about trade policy later. Now I’m frightened.”

Krugman has also discovered that when you’re the center of attention and you make a mistake, people notice. The most serious error was in a column written last July about Bush’s dealings with the Texas Rangers, of which he became a part-owner in 1989. It’s well known that Bush put $606,000 into the syndicate that bought the Rangers in 1989, about 2 percent of the total cost. When the deal was initialized that same year and Bush became the team’s general manager, the syndicate awarded their well-connected partner an additional 10 percent stake, gratis. When the team was sold in 1998, Bush earned $14.9 million on his original investment. But Krugman went further, charging that Bush’s extra return was “a 12-million dollar gift” to “a sitting governor,” when in fact the gift had been awarded years before Bush’s election as governor in 1994. Krugman later admitted the error–on his Web site, but not in the Times.

In a column about Army Secretary Thomas White, Krugman, citing a report by reporter Jason Leopold in the online magazine Salon, wrote that shortly after White knew of Enron’s impending losses, he wrote an email to another executive “Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q.” White, charged Krugman, was an “evildoer.” But two weeks later, after White told the Times he couldn’t “recall” writing the email in question, Salon took the story off their site, and after re-examining Leopold’s evidence, neither Salon nor the Times could authenticate it. In his next column, Krugman apologized for the mistake. But not before he was roundly pilloried for repeating the quote, even more so than Salon for printing it. “Krugman Comes Clean” wrote Andrew Sullivan on his Web site, as though Krugman had been involved in some kind of cover-up.

Both columns involved major errors–one sloppy, one more understandable. (If columnists re-reported every article they ever cited from reputable magazines, we wouldn’t have op-ed pages.) But it is a measure of the nerve Krugman touches that his mistakes draw vastly more criticism than the same or worse sins committed by other columnists. In a November Times column, for instance, William Safire declared it an “undisputed fact” that 9/11 terrorist Mohammed Atta had visited an Iraqi agent in Prague, even though investigations by the CIA and by the Czech intelligence agency–not to mention reams of reporting by Safire’s own paper–had determined that no such meeting had ever taken place. Later, Safire changed his mind, calling his assertion “a hunch,” but not an error–and nobody, save MSNBC columnist Eric Alterman, called him on it. But Safire isn’t the only one. During the Enron scandal, according to the Web site Spinsanity.org, nearly 20 pundits, reporters, and columnists repeated the myth that Ken Lay had stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom during the Clinton administration; only about half of them issued corrections. Likewise, many liberal columnists–Michael Moore, Robert Scheer, even The New Yorker’s Hendrick Hertzberg–wrote that the Bush administration had given $43 million in aid to the Taliban prior to 9/11, when in fact it was $43 million worth of foodstuffs and food security delivered to Afghans through the United Nations. Yet few of these errors sparked anything close to the reaction that Krugman’s have.

On balance, Krugman’s record stands up pretty well. On the topics he writes about most often and most angrily–tax cuts, Social Security, and the budget–his record is nearly perfect. “The reason he’s gotten under the White House’s skin so much,” says Robert Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, “is that he’s right. None of it is rocket science.”

So if dismantling the facade of lies around, say, Bush’s tax cut is so easy to do–and makes you the most talked-about newspaper writer in the country–why don’t any other reporters or columnists do it themselves? Because doing so would violate some of the informal, but strict, rules under which Washington journalists operate. Reporters usually don’t call a spade a spade, unless the lie is small or something personal. When it comes to big policy disagreements, most reporters prefer a he-said, she-said approach–and any policy with a white paper or press release behind it is presumed to be plausible and sincere, no matter how farfetched or deceptive it may be.

Similarly, among pundits of the broad center-left, it’s considered gauche to criticize the right too persistently, no matter the merits of one’s argument. The only worse sin is to defend a politician too persistently; then you become not a bore, but a disgrace to the profession and its independence–even if you’re correct. Thus, in Washington circles, liberal Times columnist Bob Herbert is written off as a predictable hack, while The New York Observer’s Joe Conason, who vigorously defended the Clintons during the now-defunct Whitewater affair, is derided as shrill and embarrassing. Obviously, conservative columnists and pundits aren’t quite as averse to being persistent or shrill. But center-left journalists do not, to put it mildly, take their cues about what’s acceptable practice from conservative pundits.

That’s because liberal journalists and conservative journalists have different value systems. Most liberal pundits–E.J. Dionne, Ronald Brownstein, or Maureen Dowd–came up through the newsroom ranks, a culture that demands shows of intellectual independence from politicians, especially Democrats. Many conservative pundits, on the other hand–Safire, Tony Blankley, or Peggy Noonan–come straight from political careers, a culture that encourages intellectual fealty and indulges one-sidedness. Krugman is not a journalist by training, and he’s never held appointive or elective office. But like conservative pundits, he doesn’t feel bound by the niceties that professional reporters do. Hence the discomfort with Krugman’s methods among center-left journalists.

“He is obviously a very smart guy, basically liberal, with complicated views, who once recognized when his own side was wrong. And at some point he switched and became someone who only sees what’s wrong with the other side, in fairly crude terms,” says Mickey Kaus. “The Bush tax cut is based on lies. But it’s not enough to criticize a policy to say that it’s based on lies. You have to say whether it’s good or bad for the country.” True, Kaus is probably Krugman’s most vociferous non-right-wing critic. But even among those journalists and politicos who enjoy his column, it’s not uncommon to hear the comment that Krugman might be a little more effective if he were just a little less rabid. “It is considered the appropriate thing to say at a dinner party that, while Krugman is very bright, he’s just too relentless on Bush,” drawls James Carville. “Because to accept Krugman’s facts as right makes the Washington press look like idiots.”

These days, however, there’s a good market for journalists willing to be a little relentless when it comes to the Bush administration. Of course, Krugman, like any good economist, knows that in most markets the biggest profits come from having some sort of monopoly. But monopolies don’t endure; competitors always arise. Right now, when it comes to analyzing the intellectual underpinnings of the Bush administration, Krugman has no competition. But as is usually the case, it might be better for everyone else if this particular monopoly didn’t last.

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