As pundits prattle over the money coming in to piggy politicians, get this: Andy Jacobs is giving funds back to his campaign contributors.
It’s a fitting way to punctuate the swan song of a heartland iconoclast.
Jacobs, the longtime Democratic congressman from Indianapolis, hitched a U-Haul trailer to his car last month and bade farewell to the capital.
There was a tinge of nostalgia, but he’d enjoyed a great ride and was delighted to be retiring. He has boys ages 7 and 5, “and that had a lot to do with my quitting.”
“I hope I don’t mess up your story. I really enjoyed things,” Jacobs said Friday, noting that he now faces a choice of being rich or being happy (more of that later).
Back in Indianapolis, he does not enjoy the rapacious fundraising both major political parties are doing and that is highlighted by disputed foreign contributions. Combined spending on the presidential campaign may hit a staggering $800 million.
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“It’s a disturbing quantum leap,” said the Great Pennypincher. “If all these guys (big contributors) keep buying influence, what chance does the public have?”
“It will all get worse and worse, unless we go to public financing (of campaigns) and make it a felony to take a nickel from any private source,” he said, adding the caveat that the “the idiot U.S. Supreme Court” considers donations by individuals and corporations a matter of free speech.
As for the prospect of real change: “For 30 years I’ve been trying to raise pubic consciousness about this. Maybe by the time they cure cancer, they (Congress) will do something.”
Jacobs, 64, a lawyer, former cop and Marine veteran wounded during the Korean War, first ran for Congress in 1962 (“my lack of success cannot be exaggerated”). He tried again, and won, in the 1964 Lyndon Johnson landslide (“I had nothing to do with my success.”).
After being severely gerrymandered, he lost in 1972 but returned and won in 1974, and has remained since. The son of a judge and one-term congressman, Jacobs became one of the most senior Democrats and likely the most frugal.
This is a man who declined congressional pay raises, winding up with a $79,000 salary, rather than his colleagues’ $133,600. In recent campaigns he sent out fundraising letters asking past and prospective donors not to give money. After deciding to retire, he took his meager $13,000 campaign war chest and distributed it evenly among all his donors.
A famous Jacobs tale: In 1974 he declined to get on a plane because the only seat left on the Indianapolis-to-Washington flight was in first class. Even though the government would have picked up the tab, he decided to save $20, waited a day and drove through a snowstorm to take another flight.
The first flight crashed, killing everybody.
So, Jacobs is very much alive. But what about that choice of being happy or being rich?
“Oh, I might do both. I have some teaching offers, and I might do some of that.”
“Then, my nephew has a law office and wants my name on his door as `of counsel.’ I told him it might be better to say, `Of no use.’ “
`Mulligan’ mystery solved
Thank you, readers, on behalf of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin.
This space recently ran 1964 phone conversations, taped in the White House, between President Johnson and Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-Ill.). But the library was unable to figure out a reference to “Tuck Mulligan,” mentioned by Johnson in a conversation as having been “about three or four sheets in the wind.”
The library’s Claudia Anderson reports the confusion is over. Readers indicated Mulligan was an anti-New Deal Missouri congressman who lost to Harry Truman in a 1934 race for the Senate.
Cokie watch
Neither rain nor sleet nor snow, nor being bashed in a PBS documentary, can stop some Washington pundits from their anointed rounds of buckraking. Two weeks back, the PBS “Frontline” series featured “Why America Hates the Press.” It ridiculed high-profile Washington journalists for becoming glib showmen, willing to speak before any group willing to pay them.
ABC’s Cokie Roberts and her husband Steve, a print journalist, were pilloried for their paid speechifying. But sharing center stage with them was “The McLaughlin Group.”
For starters, the documentary portrayed their weekly gabfest as the paragon of capital blather. But it also showed the group taking its well-practiced unruliness on the road, raking in the bucks by spewing hot air before all sorts of special-interest organizations.
They came off as self-obsessed, superficial and, well, just a bit tacky. But it is now clear that the group was not the least bit shamed. They’re back on the road and last week surfaced at the Chicago Historical Society, 1601 N. Clark St., paid for by, and for the customers of, the Citibank Private Bank.
The traveling troop this night was John McLaughlin, the host; Fred Barnes, executive editor of the new conservative weekly, the Weekly Standard; Eleanor Clift, a Newsweek contributing editor; Morton Kondracke, executive editor of a Capitol Hill twice-weekly, Roll Call; and Michael Barone, a staff writer at U.S. News & World Report and co-author of the Alamanc of American Politics.
The group earned its usual take of more than $20,000 from the big bank. McLaughlin rakes in more than half for himself, while the minions whom he brings must suffer with a mere $2,500, plus first-class airfare.
While finding this sort of endeavor unseemly, I must hereby voice chagrin that advertising for the event included a caricature of my colleague and McLaughlin Group semi-regular Clarence Page. It led one to believe he’d be there.
He wasn’t. In fact, he didn’t even know about the event until I told him.
Then, again, getting shafted by your friends is another grand Washington tradition.
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