Friday Interview: The K Street Gang

Matthew Continetti, associate editor of the Weekly Standard, recently delivered a Headliner lecture to the John Locke Foundation discussing his book The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine. He also discussed the book with Carolina Journal associate editor Mitch Kokai. (Go to http://carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.) Note: the interview occurred before Election Day 2006, when Republicans lost control of both houses of Congress.

Kokai: First, let’s start with the issue that took up a lot of your time. That was looking into the Republican establishment through a book called The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican Machine. In putting together this book, what are some of the things you learned about the way things work in D.C. that folks might not know?

Continetti: I guess the chief lesson is that things haven’t really changed in Washington since the Republicans took power in 1994. And of course when the Republicans came into power after the Republican revolution, they promised to change the way business was done in Washington. They said they were going to clear up public corruption. They were going to move power — shift power — from the federal government to the states, and they were also going to drain the swamp. And over the last two years we’ve found that they have been up to their necks in the muck.

Kokai: Now of course beyond the basic issue of the K Street Gang, the whole [lobbyist Jack] Abramoff scandal, we’ve had [Florida Rep. Mark] Foley. Are you surprised with what we’ve seen with this Congress based on the research that you did?

Continetti: Well, I was a little bit surprised. I mean I came to Washington only a few years ago to write for the Weekly Standard, and I guess I was a little naive about how Washington worked and the Abramoff scandal in particular, which is the focus of The K Street Gang.

The audacity with which Abramoff and his accomplices committed the crimes to which they have pleaded guilty is striking. I mean if you read these e-mails that, the way in which they say that they can’t wait to get their hands on the money that they’re taking from the Indians illegally, or the way in which they plot strategy with the members of Tom DeLay’s staff.

Rep. Bob Ney recently pleaded guilty and is on his way to prison for taking bribes from Abramoff. That was really eye-opening to me. Of course, one consistent theme in politics I think since the beginning of the American republic has been scandal. The fact is that human weakness, human avarice, human greed, all of these are universal phenomena. They are found in any place. The great, reassuring thing to me anyway is that we do clean house.

Kokai: One of the reasons that the Republicans were able to win power in 1994 was by portraying the Democrats who had power for 40 years in Congress as being the party of corruption. Do you think that supporters of the Republicans and the ones that you’ve talked to have been surprised that things turned out the way they did under GOP leadership?

Continetti: Well, there is no question that there is a huge amount of conservative discontent with the way that the Republicans have handled themselves in power, in particular over the last two years.

Now some of that has to do with corruption, there is no doubt. We should remind ourselves, though, that the corruption issue usually is trumped by actual policy issues. And even though The K Street Gang involves one or two, three or four members of Congress, that is still a relatively small minority, not only in proportion to the rest of the GOP membership but also in the House at large.

And of course there are Democratic scandals as well. So I’d say the discontent is more over other issues like Iraq and spending than it is over this scandal issue. There is no doubt that people are surprised.

Kokai: There have been some who have suggested — even among conservatives — that it might be good for Republicans to lose. Have you run into that idea as you’ve talked to people around the country? Are there some folks who would kind of like to see them lose so they could regroup on the principles?

Continetti: I’m not sure that people so much want the Republicans to lose as think that they deserve to lose. And I think that sentiment is strong among many conservatives to the point now where you also have a reaction among conservative pundits.

In fact a recent editorial in the Weekly Standard argues with that idea that the Republicans deserve to lose, saying that you know Democratic control of the Congress would be far worse than any kind of remaining hubris the Republicans might have from escaping this electoral trap.

I am of the mind that at the end of the day it would probably be better for Republicans to kind of have to re-engage with their founding ideas; it would certainly generate new leadership in the Republican Party.

But you know in politics the best thing is to win. And that is what matters. We are definitely in for some very exciting years ahead.

Kokai: Do you get the sense that books like yours, reporting on the Foley scandal and what has happened — do you get the sense that this type of new knowledge of what is going on in D.C. will help Republicans regroup in some sense and get focused on issues, rather than corruption and scandal?

Continetti: Right, well I mean the always reassuring fact to me is that there are self-correcting mechanisms in democratic politics. And you look at The K Street Gang, all of the members of that gang that I wrote about in my book, they’ve either been forced from politics like Tom DeLay, or they are on their way to jail, like Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney, David Safavian, a former White House official.

Ralph Reed is someone who has been a former director of the Christian Coalition; he has been driven from politics. He lost a primary battle in Georgia this summer that he was widely expected to win. But the corruption issue played a role in that campaign and in his loss. So at the end of the day I am reassured that once you have this cleaning house take effect, then new faces come to the fore.

These new faces are probably just as susceptible to the types of corruption that we see in Washington today. But they are new. And more important I think is that we see signs that the voters are holding the representatives to high standards.