I asked Rep. Linda Smith if she ever used the home phone number given her by an admiring Ross Perot.
“He just called me a few minutes ago,” the Republican from Vancouver, Wash., said as I sat in her Capitol Hill office Thursday.
Revealing.
Any revolution has its collective myth, and Smith, perhaps the truest of the freshmen GOP true believers, personifies and tests that associated with the upstart Republicans.
The myth goes something like this:
A bunch of mostly non-politicians, sick of a polluted system, challenge cocky incumbent Democrats and sweep to a convincing victory. They raise the battle cry of lower taxes, the end of deficits, term limits, and campaign finance reform and are in the vanguard of Gen. Newt Gingrich’s assault on the status quo.
They won’t play by the old rules, goes the myth, and don’t mind on whose toes they step. They will not let down their constituents as they clean up the special interest-inspired cesspool and return the government to “the people.”
The reality tends to be more complicated. A way to discern that is to inspect Smith as she zealously seeks to put the theory of the GOP revolution–or, perhaps better put, GOP retrenchment–into practice.
Smith makes her party’s hierarchy anxious in part because she threatens to spoil its fun, which includes raising scads of money.
With all the chatter about a shift in ideology, one forgets that Washington turns on money, not philosophy. It’s lobbyists looking for tax breaks, journalists craving paid-speaking gigs and, mostly, politicians hustling dollars at virtually every breakfast, luncheon, cocktail hour and dinner so they can buy their way to re-election.
The 73 Republican freshmen, an often unified and potent bloc, talked a good game about money, notably campaign finance reform. But they’ve been smitten by a system they claim to revile. Many freshmen seek money with an ardor that even jaded lobbyists find unseemly.
Federal Election Commission records indicate the 232 House Republicans raised a prodigious $13.3 million from PACs in the first six months of 1995, compared to $8.4 million by 202 Democrats. The freshmen brought in $4.4 million. Meanwhile, the National Republican Congressional Committee took in nearly $19 million in the first six months, four times more than its Democratic counterpart, as the biggest corporate givers turn to the new majority.
If it were up to Smith, an early freshman star, she’d change it all.
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Smith wants to ban political action committees from giving to congressional candidates, cut down on the so-called “soft money” that is funneled to the parties by interest groups and individuals, force candidates to raise most of their money back home, curb their freedom to lend themselves money and limit taxpayer-funded mailings (franking) in election years.
Back home, she spearheaded a state ballot initiative that altered funding of state campaigns and has cut political contributions by one-third.
Smith, 45, was born of modest means in Colorado, married early (she has five grandchildren), never attended college and became a tax consultant, overseeing several H & R Block offices before running for the legislature in 1983. Her link to the funding initiative and one to require citizen approval of tax hikes gained her attention.
An opponent of gay rights and environmental regulations, she pulled a stunner upon belatedly entering a Sept. 20 primary to represent southwest Washington’s 3rd District after the GOP front-runner was tainted and dropped out. Announcing her candidacy just three weeks before the all-party primary, she waged a write-in campaign and, helped greatly by the organizing acumen of the Christian Right, pulled a surprise win in the primary and general election.
Mrs. Smith came to Washington and, decrying the existing system, she gained a starring role at Ross Perot’s summer gathering in Dallas of his United We Stand America.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich was there, too, of course, along with the GOP presidential candidates and a few Democrats. But if he’s a tad queasy in her presence, it’s no surprise.
Smith gave me clippings Thursday that included transcripts of 1994 TV interviews with Gingrich on campaign reform. There was too much money in the system and PACs were bad, he said then. It was a view repeated in his New Hampshire lovefest with President Clinton at which the two men, who at times seem like one another’s evil twin, shook hands and called for a special commission on campaign finance reform.
Smith has held Gingrich’s feet to the fire on finance reform and, as The Washington Post detailed last week, struck a nerve. At a tense meeting Sept. 29 she challenged his sincerity and suggested he could dump the whole notion of a commission and simply pass a law ending PACs, as he once advocated.
Gingrich gave her an ultimatum: She could either be an insider or outsider. She announced she’d choose the latter.
“Last year, he (Gingrich) thought there was too much money in the system,” Smith told me. “Now, he doesn’t,” referring to Gingrich’s recent turnabout in which he compares political spending to the zillions spent by corporate America in marketing products, concluding that not enough money is spent on political campaigns.
Her view explains how a woman with, by some indices, the most conservative voting record of any freshman member of Congress, associates with Perot, Common Cause and the League of Women Voters. It’s why (like Perot) she is respected and mistrusted by GOP leaders.
Perot called to congratulate her for playing a part in the previous day’s landmark vote to alter rules for how lobbyists do business, as well as one on curtailing gifts to members of Congress. Clearly, Smith and other freshmen set a tone that made the long inconceivable a reality.
For sure, Smith, who for a time took PAC money herself, plays the issue several ways.
When I ask if the GOP isn’t replicating the worst practices of the Democrats, merely substituting one group of special interests for another, she repeats a hollow rationale: The freshmen must exploit a slimy system, at least for now, and not “unilaterally disarm” since Democratic challengers are stockpiling funds back home.
As we head to her next appointment, she derides colleagues who “walk around with stacks of checks” from fund-raisers central to a “dirty system” from which voters, especially women, feel alienated. “
As I was about to leave her office, she gave me a wall-size photo of herself, her husband, Vern, and their five grandchildren and these words on the back:
“Pray for Congress–`That we will have the wisdom to know right, and the strength to do that right.’ Linda”
Cokie Watch
There’s no tidier example of androgynous insiders than Robert Beckel.
He’s been a political and corporate consultant of no great renown who has specialized in “grass-roots” lobbying, namely democracy-on-demand, in which corporate dollars purchase thousands of phone calls or telegrams to create the illusion of interest on a subject.
He also, most importantly in this TV-driven culture, is co-host for CNN’s “Crossfire Sunday,” whose audience surely assumes he’s a real live reporter. He ain’t.
But he feeds from the same trough. In a Friday piece in the National Journal, his agent indicated that Beckel has been booked for 50 paid speeches already in the next year, for as much as $7,000 apiece.