How Washington really works - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 1993 by Charles Peters

The result of this change, says Hodding Carter, a columnist for The Wail Street Journal, is that:

The top journalists move in packs with the affluent and powerful in Washington. They swarm with them in the summer to every agreeable spot on the Eastern seaboard. When any three or four of them sit down together on a television talk show, it is not difficult to remember that the least well paid of these pontificators make at least six times more each year than the average American family. The truth is that there is not a hell of a lot of tolerance or empathy among the leading figures of national journalism for outsiders, losers, nonconformists, or seriously provocative political figures or causes.

The thinking done by today's journalists is thus unlikely to err on the side of originality. There is, in fact, a considerable amount of intellectual insecurity in the press room. Reporters are often reluctant to examine substantive issues. If they do, they instinctively embrace the conventional wisdom. But they really prefer reporting the horse-race aspects of politics to dealing with candidates' positions. If forced to deal with issues, they will quote experts.

The discipline that journalists have been most diffident about is economics. Their ignorance of economics is so great that even one of the more intelligent TV reporters, Ted Koppel, devoted only six out of 1,850 of his shows to the deficit during the eighties when it was growing by $1.6 trillion.

But even when reporters understand an issue, they often look in the wrong place; that is, they look for scandalous illegality when they should be looking into why government doesn't work. What's wrong with government today seldom has much to do with law-breaking, but lies instead in the cultures of the bureaucracy, Congress, the White House, and the judiciary-that is, in the customs and rituals and pressures that govern conduct in these institutions. The average reporter is remarkably ignorant of these cultures.

Access to grind

One culture that the press has paid more attention to in recent years, but which still remains woefully under-covered, is that of lobbyists. The popular conception of a lobbyist is someone who passes money under the table, arranges for clandestine midnight assignations, or holds the threat of blackmail not very high over an official's head. In fact, much of the activity that falls within the broad definition of lobbying is not evil or even underhanded. For example, the simplest and most obvious of lobbying techniques is personal friendship.

Consider Philip Morris, which shrewdly hires lobbyists from the hometowns of congressmen. The Philip Morris lobbyist in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, happens to be a longtime friend of South Dakota Senator Thomas Daschle, who, as a member of the Senate Finance Committee, could vote against taxes on tobacco.

Lobbying friendships can also stem from mutual membership in Washington clubs like Burning Tree (golf) or the Metropolitan (lunch). Burning Tree forbids lobbying on its premises, but the friendships formed there have been central to many a lobbyist's success. Charls (yes, that is how he spells it) Walker, one of the most successful corporate lobbyists of the seventies and eighties, plays a lot of golf at Burning Tree. If you are a former congressman, belonging to the club of present and former Members gives you an actual physical advantage in the access race: The floor of the House and Senate and legislators' private dining rooms are open to former Members and no other lobbyists.