AMERICA IN THE GRIP OF BUSH'S 'IRON TRIANGLE'
THE OBSERVER International News Sunday, 3 December 2000
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,406082,00.html
Ed Vulliamy in Washington
AMERICA IN THE GRIP OF BUSH'S 'IRON TRIANGLE'
Ed Vulliamy in Washington reveals the network of big business interests that
is now waiting to reap its rewards from an administration that may stand for
little but revenge and greed The ominous joke in Washington is that George W.
Bush is learning how to pronounce the word 'inaugural'. The city that has for
eight years filled its cappuccino bars with the staff of a reforming
presidency is bracing itself for change: an influx of Texan Stetsons and
Cuban heels - and a politics stamped with a familiar brand name, the Bush
family. 'It will be,' says one senior White House aide, 'the restoration of
the aristocracy, motivated by revenge and greed.'
The Bush Transition Office has just opened across the River Potomac from the
leafy, liberal streets of Georgetown in McClean, Virginia, where
heavy-hitting lobbies of the conservative Right fill the phone directory.
From here, where workers are rewiring to make way for more phone lines,
Bush's presidency-in-waiting will take shape, even though the election result
remains contested. The question the capital is asking is the one posed by
White House communications director Sidney Blumenthal on Friday: 'If Bush
wins, who is the President?' That is a question more and more Americans are
raising as Bush's grip on the White House strengthens by the day.
Just what does 'Dubya' stand for? The answer seems to be: not much. The more
you look at Bush the less you see. For every clue as to what kind of
President he would make, there is a question; for every pattern, a glitch.
The clues are among the entourage, either packing for Washington or else
already here, planning the next four years while Bush bides his time -
relaxing, apparently - at his ranch. If there was ever a President defined by
his donors and patrons, it is Bush. Like a player in a baroque allegorical
drama, he is not really a person, more a personification of interests. They
come from three overlapping spheres of influence: his father's ancient regime
, the clique of political operatives with which 'Dubya' has governed the
nation's second biggest state, and - most formidably - business interests
behind the Republican Party that have waited eight long Clinton years for
this moment.
For all of them, another Bush administration is payback time. A network
controlled by George Bush Sr first opened the floodgates for the funds that
bought 'W' the election. 'The old man's network,' says Bush's cousin, John
Ellis, 'is probably 50,000 people, and I think they were looking for some
kind of vindication. I don't think you can possibly overrate the hatred of
Bill Clinton in the Republican Party'.
The old guard falls into two categories. The privy council of the last Bush
administration is led by Dick Cheney, getting down to the unfinished business
of 1992 while 'Dubya' is out of town. It includes General Colin Powell,
former Secretary of State James Baker, Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz and
National Security aide Condoleeza Rice. From his father's domestic team, Bush
has former Federal Reserve appointee Lawrence Summers, and faithful soldier
Andrew Card to be his Chief of Staff - of whom one aide said: 'At least he's
not a Texan.'
Then there is the overlapping circle of investors and corporate barons made
rich by Bush's father, collected into the Carlyle Group, a cabalistic,
Washington-based merchant bank chaired by Ronald Reagan's former Pentagon
chief, Frank Carlucci. Carlyle is a financial club for Bush Snr's intimate
circle and can expect to enjoy political clout in the White House. Bush Snr
is one of the bank's paid emissaries. Among the partners are his economic
adviser Richard Darman and Dubya's front man in Florida, James Baker (Bush
Jnr has his own connections with Carlyle). From this ancien rÈÈgime comes
talk of bipartisanship, conciliatory gestures to a riven nation and Congress,
and even recruitment of pro-Bush Democrats into the Cabinet.
But behind the figureheads are other faces - the hardline Texan managers of
the most disciplined and lavishly funded political campaign in recent
history. And behind them are the real power brokers, hands to guide the White
House from within the world of business and industry with whom Bush has
worked for years, who wield awesome power in American society and owe no debt
to compromise. In the capital, the point man works both on stage and behind
the scenes.
When the Supreme Court convened on Friday, Bush was represented by Theodore
Olson, a high-profile attorney and former partner of Kenneth Starr. But,
backstage, Olson is the Washingtonian who has kept the right-wing candle
burning on the capital's dining circuit during the Clinton years, along with
his socialite wife, Barbara. It is intriguing that Bush should have appointed
the man who accepted some $2.4 million from the ultra-conservative donor
Mellon Scaife for what became known as the Arkansas Project - the conspiracy
to launch the Paula Jones lawsuit, to detonate the fruitless Whitewater
'scandal' through paid operatives in Little Rock, and ultimately to force the
impeachment of President Clinton. Now Olson has become ambassador inside the
Beltway for the state of Texas.
To most Washingtonians, Texas - with its 1.4 million children without health
insurance, squandered surplus, appalling pollution record, exaggerated school
standards, housing crisis and execution factory - is not an alluring model
for America. But Bush has, from the beginning, pointed to Texas as the
validation of his presidential collateral. And the Bush power base - of his
own generation, at least - lies in his fiefdom, in whose image he would forge
the nation.
Most obviously, Bush will continue to lean on the so-called 'Iron Triangle'
of his closest aides throughout his political career. The most visible of
these is spokeswoman Karen Hughes, whom CNN's Charles Zewe says 'treats the
media like a covey of quail that can be rounded up'. 'Bush,' says a Texan
Democrat consultant, 'is the boy in the bubble of infotainment.' Hughes, an
army brat born in Paris (France, not Texas), with size-12 shoes and
Texan-sized voice, will be the woman to make sure the bubble does not burst,
like the boil on Bush's cheek the week after he first thought he was elected.
The second point of the triangle is the buzz-cut Oklahoman Joe Allbaugh,
quiet enforcer of the governor's will. He would be the White House 'thought
police', with a further role to mediate friction that exists, hidden, between
Hughes and the apex of the Iron Triangle, Karl Rove. Rove goes back nearly 30
years in Republican politics, 25 of them with the Bush family. He moved to
Texas to work for the then Congressman Bush in 1973. Talking to him is like
meeting a robot; it is hard to detect any sign of feeling other than devotion
to and control over his current master, for whom he has fought every
political campaign. Even Tom Paulen, former chairman of the Texas Republican
Party, calls Rove 'a control freak'. Rove was Bush Snr's emissary to his own
son. He had the idea 'Dubya' should run 'some time during the 1995 session',
he told The Observer - and in this he is more than a political strategist.
Rove does not only form part of the Iron Triangle; he welds it to other
scaffolding in the Bush political edifice. He is the centre of a nexus that
connects not only the gubernatorial machine to Bush Snr, but to the business
and party interests that sought out George W. Bush (rather than the other way
round) to win back the White House at, literally, any cost. 'I never dreamed
about being President,' says Bush, 'All of a sudden, people started talking
to me about the presidency'.
Karl Rove organised the meetings in 1998 that began the Republicans' courting
of this real-life Forrest Gump - for a reason. Clinton was regarded as an
illegitimate President because he gave certain quarters of American power a
hard time - characterised by a new term in the Wall Street lexicon during the
aftermath of the election: 'Bush stocks'. 'There's been a sigh of relief,'
said Larry Smith, an analyst with Sutro in New York. Bush's proclaimed
victory was greeted by a sudden leap in the share value of big pharmaceutical
companies, big insurers of health care, and the big oil and tobacco
companies. While Rove was masterminding Bush's gubernatorial victory of 1994
in Texas, he himself had another job with one of these companies: a paid
political intelligence operative for the Philip Morris cigarette company,
reporting to another Bush aide, Jack Dillard, ubiquitous tobacco lobbyist.
Unlike that of Clinton, Bush's record on tobacco does not displease the
industry; he decreed it impossible for the civil lawsuit against tobacco
companies to proceed in Texas.
'The prospect of Bill Clinton gone and a Bush presidency makes the tobacco
industry almost giddy,' says Martin Feldman, an analyst of the industry for
the consultants Salomon Smith and Barney. Corporate delight at the prospect
of a Bush team heading for Washington stems from the core political
philosophy Bush brings from Texas to Washington, which is also Rove's
principal achievement. In Texas legalese it was called 'tort reform'; in
Washington it translates as grand-scale deregulation of business, services
and industry. Even if a full-blooded Bush agenda is partly clipped by the
pall of illegitimacy and the narrowness of his official victory, this is the
Texas manifesto the newcomers to Washington will be determined - and likely -
to accomplish. It was described to The Observer this last week by a senior
White House aide as 'bringing the business special interests into politics so
they can take over the regulatory bodies of government and regulate
themselves'. For example: the Environmental Protection Agency, the fair trade
agencies, the health, safety and 'human resources' executives, the regulation
of industry, education, guns, medicine and land use. And so, behind the
political 'Iron Triangle' is the real 'Iron Triangle' also lying in wait with
Bush - the businessmen. Foremost among these is Don Evans, the rainmaker.
Evans, an oil executive from Bush's home town of Midland, Texas, goes back
three decades with the governor, who was his childhood friend and confidant.
Evans became his presidential campaign chairman, filling the biggest
political war chest of all time. He is now tipped by one Republican insider
for 'any job he wants' in the White House. Whatever that is, he will be among
the most influential politicians in America. The word among Republicans is
that Evans may have his eye on the chairmanship of the party's National
Committee.
Evans represents the industry in which Bush himself began his career, which
propels the economy of Texas and was crucial to both his and his father's
victories - oil. No industry has a higher stake in 'tort reform' than the
drillers of black gold, and few look forward to a deregulating Bush
administration more than the executives of the oil industry, which has
already been promised almost unfettered exploration and drilling rights. But
there are other interests too, and two of them - urban development and health
care - combine with oil in another mighty figure in the background of a Bush
administration. If he must thank his father for his name, Bush must thank
Richard Rainwater for his money. Last year, as he prepared to run for
President, Bush liquidated a blind trust he created to hold his assets - many
of them in oil, real estate, health care and other companies owned by
Rainwater, a contributor to Bush's campaigns and with whose money Bush
aquired his windfall stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team. Rainwater is a
billionaire buying into beleaguered companies at discount prices and
reselling when everyone wants in. But he is also involved in companies,
including oil firms, that are heavily regulated with hundreds of millions in
government contracts. One, a hospital chain called Columbia/HCA, is the
subject of a federal investigation into Medicare fraud. Another, Charter
Behavioural Health Systems (in which Bush held investments), is subject to
regulatory scrutiny, while another - Crescent Real Estate, which operates
mental hospitals - has its multi-million-dollar government input under
federal investigation. Rainwater is not himself accused of any misdemeanour,
but in each case, the prospect of Bush's promise to privatise and deregulate
the health system is a tempting one. Rainwater is most famous for investing
the oil wealth of the third point of Bush's business Iron Triangle - the Bass
Brothers, builders of the metropolis Fort Worth. He turned the $50 million
they invested with him in 1970 to $5 billion in 1986, mainly through timely
investing in Texaco oil and Disney.
This is how the wheels go round in Texas: in 1997, Governor Bush supported a
tax reform Bill aimed to cut, among other things, school property taxes. The
reform saved Rainwater's Crescent Real Estate $2.5m. In 1999, Bush rushed
through an emergency tax relief package to help independent oil producers as
prices slumped. According to state records, the biggest beneficiary was the
Pioneer Natural Resources oil company, with a $1m tax break. Filings with the
Security Exchange Commission show Rainwater to own 55m shares in Pioneer. The
scale model for this entwinement of political and commercial interests was
the inclusion of the oil companies in drawing up Texas's clean air
regulations last year. The rules were devised by Bush's office in
collaboration with Marathon Oil and Exxon, and left companies to set their
own standards voluntarily. But while the governor was waiting to sign the new
'self-regulatory' Bill into law, the town of Odessa, Texas, was covered by a
pall of black smoke so thick that drivers had to switch on their lights
during daylight. Odessa, said Dr David Karman of the Texas Natural Resources
Commission, 'was like having an open incinerator in your backyard. Only this
incinerator is burning a very large soup of toxic chemicals'.
In bringing the politics of Texan non-government into national government,
Bush is in perfect harmony with two of his most powerful lieutenants in
Congress: Dick Armey, leader of the House, and Tom Delay, the Republicans'
feared chief whip. Delay, who led the impeachment of President Clinton and
whose office mobilised the baying crowds bussed around Florida last month, is
seen as the coming man and leader of the extreme Right, with which Bush must
deal. Delay has called the Environmental Protection Agency the 'Gestapo' of
government. Armey has likewise attacked what he calls 'government shackles on
enterprise'; both men have sworn absolute loyalty to Bush. And as it happens,
both men, like George W. Bush, come from Texas. Another Iron Triangle.
Copyright
Guardian Newspapers Limited © 2000
