House Rules: A Freshman Congressman's Initiation to the Backslapping, Backpeddling, and Backstabbing Ways of Washington. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 1992 by James Boyd

Why even the best congressmen sell out to stay in

Arriving at the Speaker's throne in January 1989 for his swearing-in, Nebraska Rep. Peter Hoagland was something of an ornament to the political process. At 47, tall and rangy with wavy black hair, he had the kind of smooth good looks that deflect resentment by virtue of one homey defect, extruding ears. Scion of a family prominent in Omaha for five generations and heir to a tradition of "giving something back," he had half a lifetime of conscientiousness behind him-honor graduate of Stanford, a Vietnam-era hitch in the Army, captain of his moot court team at Yale Law School, and years amid the legal nitty-gritty as a public defender. Along the way, he defected from his parents' Republicanism when he saw in John F. Kennedy's administration "a disinterested quest for intellectual truth."

Returning to Omaha in his mid-thirties, Hoagland built a $250,000-a-year personal injury law practice, spearheaded a "sunshine laws" ballot initiative that paved the way for a tough new ethics law in the legislature, served on the national board of Common Cause, and won election to Nebraska's unicameral legislature, where he earned a reputation as a reformer and a man of "candor and directness."

Even upon his ascent to Congress, he refused to accede to the self-inflation of his new position. Forbearing to use his staff as chauffeur and valet, he commuted to Capitol Hill from the suburbs each day via bus and subway, seeming always to wear the same baggy blue suit. He resisted the pomp, indulged in by most members, of stationing flags of nation and state on either side of his office door, and he declined to wear the gold eagle lapel pin that heralded him as a congressman. Soft-spoken in private as well as in public, he never exploited the power or the tensions of office to abuse underlings. It is a sworn fact that his chosen expletive was "gee whiz." Through years of the forced conviviality of politics, Peter Hoagland had hung onto a remnant of personal dignity; he shrank from the back slapping that is a congressional rite and had been seen to wince when back-home hacks or labor union allies called him "Pete."

He would seem, then, to have posed a considerable challenge to the assimilative powers of Congress. But it is the message of this new book* that he, like others before him, did not. The twin facts that cripple congressmen's ability to serve the public interest-fear of losing office, and the institutional tentacles Congress throws out to banish that fear-immediately began to close in on him. Robert Cwiklik, without losing faith in Hoagland, traces that encirclement with remarkable fair-mindedness and insight.

Hoagland was in sync with one basic truth about Congress long before he got there: Party or platform wasn't the thing, incumbency was. The central circumstance making his congressional career possible was the existence in 1988 of an "open seat"-i.e., the incumbent was not running for reelection. He knew, as only a long-repressed office seeker could, that the incumbent's advantages-name recognition, campaign money, staff organization, the support of special interests, and credit from thousands of constituents for helping with federal services-had effectively removed that seat from the democratic process. Eight years he had waited for the seat to open and now that he had it, he intended to close it off for at least another decade. His predecessor had locked up the seat as a Republican; he could do so even more easily as a majority Democrat-if only he had the time to learn how to exploit those advantages and get them in place.

Not to worry. Congress laid them all out upon his arrival, as if in a display case.

One night early on, Hoagland, a newly minted member of the House Banking Committee, responded to an invitation to a fundraiser for a colleague, Rep. Tom McMillen, and the scales fell from his eyes. It has long been illegal to use a congressman's office suite for soliciting contributions. That's why the Democratic Club is just around the comer from the Capitol. A banquet room was filled with two types-lobbyists, wearing lapel stickers that identified their employers and bearing checks of up to $2,000 ($85,000 would be netted); and fellow congressmen, who helped draw the lobbyists and who were circulating among them, laying the foundations for their own fetes. Other such banquet rooms adjoined-Hoagland learned that some of his colleagues attended two or three fundraisers in an evening. And just around the comer from the Democratic Club was yet another ethics-free zone where hustling money from special interests was de rigueur-a building that housed both the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), equipped with boxy little offices just right for congressmen, one at a time, to work the phones, using time-proven lists to seduce PACs around the nation.

From that night on, Hoagland became a regular, not only raising money for his next campaign but also earning back the $293,000 he had lent his last one, which, under House rules, was legal. Quickly he mastered the time-saving pragmatics, not bothering with any PAC "whose legislative interests don't coincide with any of the committees I'm on." So adept was the neophyte that a secretary at the DCCC said Hoagland should get the "telephoner of the year" award. Says Cwiklik, "The process is quite routine -like ordering towels from a catalog. On a typical call to a PAC run by Massachusetts bankers, Hoagland was put through to the secretary in charge of solicitations. Would one of their lobbyists be at his upcoming fundraiser? The secretary asked the congressman to fax an invitation, then said, Could you spell your name for me?"' Dignity had become a disposable encumbrance.